@NiceGerbil
I don't know nearly as much about this as any of you.
But in general this case has been exploited politically all over the place. Dodgy handling etc.
All those women. Not guilty.
I know what I think.
And now it's all being dragged up again.
If you think that the women were wronged, then you're mistaken I'm afraid. This is one of the few cases I can think of where a man truly was framed for sexual assault. This was not a
He said, She said case where the only witnesses to events were the alleged victim and the alleged perpetrator. This was a case where
She said, and from a handful to a hundred other people were there and say what? That did not happen.
The worst accusation could have resulted in a prison sentence for Salmond. It was alleged he attempted to rape a woman after a dinner with him and another guest in Bute House, his official residence, with staff and security present. It was alleged that the victim had to fight him off so hard, she ended up with an injury to her arm.
Salmonds defence wasn't that he had mistakenly assumed she wanted it, or whatever else men usually say in this situation. It was that the attack could not have happened, because the woman had not been in Bute House. Her friend stated on the witness stand that said woman had contacted her before the dinner, because she had injured her arm earlier that day and could not now attend the dinner. Would the friend be so kind and attend in her stead? The friend said yes and attended the dinner in place of the alleged victim.
All of the records from that day (Bute House security entries and the kitchen records which note all dinner guests) confirmed that the alleged victim was not present but that the friend was there. Staff and security confirmed the presence of the friend and the absence of the alleged victim.
The public knows next to nothing about this, because the BBC day-by-day documentary about the Salmond trial left out days 8 to 10. Those are the days when Salmond presented his defence and when witnesses for the defence disproved the claims made by the prosecution. None of the mainstream media reported on the details of Salmond's defence. That is if they even bothered reporting the defence case at all. Mainstream media portrayed Salmond as guilty from the day the allegations were first made public and having refused to report the defence case allows them to do so to this day.
Rape Crisis Scotland played an insidious, damaging role in the whole affair and also continues to do so now. It has now been named in a court case brought by another independent journalist targeted by the Scottish Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service for reporting Salmond's defence case (like Murray).
For us who were compelled to self-exclude from Rape Crisis Scotland services because it adamantly refuses to accept that female victims of male violence who ask for a female-only therapeutic environment are neither hateful nor bigoted nor prejudiced, misguided or transphobic this highly politicised public advocacy for the alleged victims in this case is hard to compute. Its management refused to listen to us when we told them of the harm their blanket trans inclusion policy and condemnation of our request for a female-only service do to traumatised survivors. It told us we had no legal right to even ask for a female-only service. That the human right of male transgender people to exercise and enjoy their full employment rights by working in Rape Crisis Scotland superseded our need for a female-only service. They refused all common sense suggestions made by us to reconcile their wish to include males on the basis of a verbal statement of identity with our need for a female-only service. We left that meeting knowing that they thought us not worth the tiniest effort to help. They even denied our existence publicly afterwards.
But to damage a former head of state they violated all rules that apply to those supporting victims during in sexual assault court cases. They went all out for these alleged victims by engaging in dubious behaviour at best. Because some women are worth it. And some are not.