@Unsure33 you misunderstand how prejudice works in court.
There is no active case yet, so no trial to prejudice. A case is only active after arrest so that is when the papers must stick to the points they are allowed to report under the Magistrates’ Court Act 1980. There can be no prejudice before this time. During jury selection all jurors will be asked if they know the defendant. They will be continually reminded to base their verdicts on the evidence before them and not on media reports. No trial has ever collapsed because of reporting before a charge.
There may never be a trial. Many of the allegations do not meet the threshold for prosecution and there may be little remaining evidence. The women may not have the stomach for a trial. Who knows? But that doesn’t mean their allegations don’t have merit and should not be reported in the media.
There is no ‘trial by media’. These journalists are simply doing their job. There are allegations of all kind made every day (Boris Johnson’s curtains, Matt Hancock giving contracts to his mates) and nobody’s saying these potentially illegal acts shouldn’t be reported because of ‘trial by media’. We only seem to reserve that phrase for poor men accused of sex crimes..
Clarke has been convicted of no offences and has not had any ‘punishment’ that a court would hand out. If the allegations are not true and he sues for libel (which I’m sure he will if 20 women have concocted similar stories that are baseless) then he will simply re-enter the profession with a large defamation payout. Many other men have shown themselves not to be guilty, in and out of court, and resumed their entertainment careers without a stain on their character (I can think of two in Coronation Street and one Christian pop singer for a kick off).
Women have lost trust in the court system, and rightly so. I’ve sat through three rape trials in the past two months. The evidence has been compelling and I am 100 per cent sure that all three were guilty. But could it be proven beyond all reasonable doubt? No. And it rarely can where the issue at play is one of consent / non consent in a rape where physical violence is not used to force someone to have sex. So we had one hung jury and two not guilty verdicts, despite the fact that most members of the jury likely thought them guilty (it only takes one or two jurors to take a fixed stance on a not guilty verdict)
That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen and that those women won’t live with the trauma for the rest of their lives.