From the blog.
I can see why case management was difficult but if these words ascribed to the judge are accurate then it’s a problem.
“A year ago I was instructed by District Judge Kenneth Grant to pretend my male assailant was a woman…
It’s been a year since I stood trial for the grievous offence of getting my face in the way of the fist of a nasty, violent thug called Tara Wolf. This blog is about what happened afterwards.
There is one reason that trial made headlines and is still talked about to this day. That was District Judge Kenneth Grant’s bias in favour of the defendant – the real one, I mean, not me – reflected most obviously in his decision that I should defer to the wish of this six foot plus, 26-year-old, deluded male and pretend he is a woman. This meant that, while having to relive the assault and give my account of it while watching a recording of it on a screen in front of the court, I was required to refer to him as ‘she’.
If there is one regret I have about my own conduct during the trial, it is that I tried to comply with this demand, even though it felt, as one journalist put it, as if the State was “complicit in giving the attacker one final stab at the victim”.
I resolve, if I ever find myself in that situation again, to vociferously resist any such demand – regardless of whether I’m in the witness stand or in the dock. Given the dystopian times we live in, with not only District Judge Kenneth Grant but also the police and the Crown Prosecution Service behaving like the trans lobby’s mercenaries, I don’t rule out the possibility of ending up in court charged with some trumped up garbage like Miranda Yardley did. There is literally nothing some of these people will not do to try to force people to bow to their will. There are no depths to which they will not sink.
Lying under oath
This thoughtless and unreasonable expectation of Grant that I should “lie under oath” – as so many people have put it – was far from being the worst part for me.
After having listened to four defence witnesses – Ananya Jaidev, Laurel Uziell, Devawn Wilkinson and Kat Higgins – all of whom did, in fact, lie under oath, the worst part of the trial was hearing the judge say that they were sincere, even though most of their testimony had been comprehensively demolished by the prosecution with the aid of the videos. Even though Grant himself said there was no evidence that I had the defendant in a headlock, as three out of the four defence witnesses claimed. Grant knew that they had lied – so how in the name of reason could he claim that they were “sincere”?
As I said in my detailed blog of the trial, I had told the absolute truth and – unlike the defence witnesses – no part of my testimony had been undermined by evidence. Yet when it came to that part of the defence witnesses’ narrative for which there was no evidence either way, the judge chose to believe their testimony over mine. Thus the judge’s statement that I’d continued filming even though I’d been asked to stop was reported in the newspapers and taken as fact by people with an axe to grind on behalf of what I have come to see as a vicious, evil pseudo cult that, for the sake of humanity, must be defeated. And that pseudo cult even has members in the House of Lords!
And while I’ve no doubt such people will take this statement as evidence of my ‘hatred’ of and ‘bigotry’ towards trans people, regardless of what else I say, I will still reiterate that the pseudo cult I am referring to are those who try to bully and intimidate those of us standing up to them, those who promote transgender ideology – which is misogynistic and homophobic – and violence, whether they are themselves transgender or not. I am NOT including those exceedingly brave trans people who challenge that ideology and are supportive of feminists who do so, one example of many being Leanne Mills (see screenshot, right).
I won’t go into detail about the effect this experience has had on my health except to say that the personal cost to me has been very great indeed. I still wonder about the thinking of Jaidev, Ulziell, Wilkinson and Higgins and about the lengths they were prepared to go to in defence of someone who’d been violent to a woman probably older than their mothers, a woman who’d done nothing to him, to them or to anyone else.
I’d like to ask them if they would have done the same if their own mother or grandmother had been the one attacked?
I’d like to ask the same question of Tara Wolf’s advisor, Andy Meinke, after the part he played in putting together Wolf’s defence, and after protecting the identities of the other two violent, male assailants. (See screenshot right of his response to Tara Wolf’s post on Facebook.)
I’d like to ask Defence Counsel Jodie Anderson, then of Garden Court Chambers, who publicly boasts of being the first in her – let’s say ‘disadvantaged’ – family to get an education, how she lives with herself defending a violent, hateful thug by attacking his victim? In fairness, that’s a question I’d like to ask a lot of lawyers whose defence of bad people involves trying to destroy good people.
Edited to add: For the benefit of those like the commenters below who think Anderson might be a secret sympathiser with me really – the tweet on the right suggests otherwise.
Most of all, I’d like to ask District Judge Kenneth Grant, why he chose to believe those four proven liars that an older woman went round provoking and abusing people less than half her age when not one of them could produce any evidence of my having done so?
I’d like to ask him why he completely disregarded the evidence of premeditation i.e. the Facebook post Wolf had made asking where the meeting we were attending was going to be held because he wanted to go and “fuck some terfs up”.
And, of course, I’d like to ask him why he thought I owed the man who punched me in the face any courtesy at all, let alone the courtesy of pretending he was a woman like me!
Judicial Conduct Investigations Office
Within ten days of the trial being over, two complaints were submitted to the JCIO about the judge. Apart from fulfilling a request to check it for accuracy, I had nothing to do with the one organised by members of the CATT Facebook group, which was signed by over 600 protesters.
The other complaint was from me personally. Both complaints focused on the judge’s demand that I use female pronouns for my male assailant but mine also referred to a couple of other things, including the repeated use of the word ‘TERF’ by Counsel for the Defence, Jodie Anderson, even though I’d explained it was a derogatory label.
Here is an extract from my complaint:
Not only was I being asked to go along with what I can only see as a falsehood while I was under oath, but I was being asked to suspend my critical faculties out of deference to someone who had violently assaulted me.
I did succeed in using ‘the defendant’ a couple of times. However, using a noun instead of a pronoun is a very unnatural way to speak. It is even more difficult to do so under the pressure of giving evidence in court and particularly while being cross-examined by a hostile barrister.
It was at the time during the proceedings when I had to relive the assault and watch videos of Wolf and his associates assaulting me on a large screen that I slipped back into using the ‘he’ pronoun. This was when the judge rudely* interrupted my testimony with the question, “What is the problem?” He said it in a manner betraying his impatience and a total lack of sensitivity to the situation I was in. He did not wait for an answer to my question, however. Instead, he repeated that the defendant wished to be addressed using ‘she’ pronouns and that the court had agreed “as a matter of courtesy” and suggested that perhaps I “might like to do the same”.
The effect of this reprimand was to make it very hard for me to focus on giving my evidence as I wondered why my assailant was to be treated with courtesy while I wasn’t to be afforded the courtesy of recounting what happened to me in my own words, in a way that seemed natural to me and certainly did not involve any derogatory language or falsehoods.
*I want to point that, although an impatient interruption of anyone by anyone else in that manner could reasonably be regarded as ‘rude’, it wasn’t the rudeness that bothered me. I included the word ‘rudely’ deliberately because, believe or not, I could see no other grounds on which I could complain about being asked to lie in court. Clear bias on the part of a judge is not considered a legitimate cause for complaint.
Having realised just how steeply the odds were stacked against me, I wasn’t surprised that both complaints were thrown out. Here’s an extract from the response I received:
While you clearly felt that it was unreasonable of the judge to pull you up for using the term “he” instead of “she”, as independent office holders, judges are entitled to manage hearings as they consider appropriate. This includes taking a firm approach with parties if they consider it is appropriate to do so. The same applies to the judge’s decision to allow the defendant’s counsel to use the term “TERF” and to take into consideration your tweet – these are issues of judicial case management and decision making. “