As the editor of a newspaper, I was once a defendant in a libel trial which was brought by a police officer who sued - as you might - for the allegation that he had sexually abused teenage boys. There were other defendants: another broadsheet newspaper, a TV station, a magazine - who had all implied or alleged the same thing. The alleged abuse had taken place at a children's home in north Wales between 15 and 20 years before. We needed witnesses who would substantiate the allegations in court. It would be wrong to describe what happened next as a "trawl". Our witnesses had already been interviewed by journalists; we knew who they were. But persuading adult men to stand up in a witness box in the royal courts of justice and swear to the accuracy of their claims of the most intimate violation, and then to suffer (there is no other word) cross-examination and all so that a few smart bits of the media could win a civil case - well, there are easier tasks.
Most of them lived unsettled lives far away in council estates on the edges of small Welsh and north Midlands towns. They were poor. At least one of them drank too much. Drugs were mentioned. What was in such a public ordeal for them? Not money, of course. What, then? They were told that, if the jury found in their favour, an old injustice against them - acts that had perhaps ruined their lives - might begin to be corrected; and promised a decent flat in London during the course of the trial. One of them asked our lawyers about the possibilty, during one of their idle weekends, of a family trip to EuroDisney in France. I don't know if it happened, neither do I want to.
In the meantime, the defendants had conferences at the chambers of the late George Carman, the distinguished and generously rewarded QC who would act for us. I began to worry about the quality of our evidence, but repressed my thoughts because everyone else seemed so gung-ho (Is Ian Hislop ever not?). To withdraw now would seem cowardly, but at one conference, I managed to ask Carman his views about settling out of court. He enjoyed the question and lit one of his Marlboro Lights. If I liked, he said, we could consider the "commercial question": what settling out of court might cost as opposed to what losing the case might cost. But beyond that there was the '"moral question" - a phrase I never expected to hear in a barrister's room - which was that by settling now, we would give the impression to our witnesses, those men our lawyers had persuaded and taken depositions from, that we did not sufficently believe them. That could be traumatic. He mentioned something that had happened in a previous case. We would have to face the "real possibility", he said, that one of these insufficiently- believed men might kill himself as a result.
I never raised the question again. Who wants death on their conscience? The case came to court. Carman did his feline best. One of the witnesses was obviously drunk ("Umm," said Carman in non-feline mode in the court urinals, "what the fuck do we do now?"). We lost, very expensively. The jury decided that the police officer had not abused the boys and awarded him hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages as well as his costs.
And then, many months later, came what may be too mildly termed an irony: one of the witnesses who had appeared for us killed himself. Whether this was because a jury disbelieved him and/or because of the many other unhappy aspects of his life is, at least to me, unknown. Settling out of court might have saved him, or it might not. All this happened several years ago, but I was prompted to remember it while reading about the Jonathan King case last week. You speculate about the motivation or honesty or (the clincher) believability of witnesses at your peril; see above.
Still, it can be said that, in contrast to our witnesses in a civil case, those that appeared for the case against King have the possibility of financial compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, as well as earning money from the tabloid press. Fair enough; perhaps King, by seducing them and abusing them in the 198Os, when they were aged 14 and 15, really did harm or even "ruin" their lives. A few thousand now is the least they deserve, and at any rate what they claim he did to them is illegal.
But whatever happened to circumspect behaviour? These boys weren't in care in a children's home, but under-aged independent spirits. I think of myself as an unwordly 11-year-old watching The Cruel Sea from the empty front stall of the Dunfermline Palace Kinema. A man (yes, in a mackintosh!) sits next to me and says this is a jolly good film and puts a hand on my knee. I move several rows back. Then I do the same at The Dam Busters and Above Us the Waves, though I was not a pretty boy and homosexuality was not even a rumour to me, in that time and place.
Of the five men who testified against King, four visited his home again and again to be assaulted. Might it not be, your honour, that they enjoyed at least some aspect of their time with him? For this, and only this (other cases against him collapsed, though his conviction allowed the police to speak of dozens of other assaults), King got seven years in prison.
In 1895, Oscar Wilde got two. After King's trial, Roy Greenslade, who writes on the media for the Guardian, said that King might be "a modern-day Oscar Wilde". Greenslade hired King to write a pop column (Bizarre) for the Sun in 1986 and the two became friends. Together with Simon Bates and Sir Tim Rice, he testified to King's character in a writen sttatement to the court. His Wildean analogy is not as ludicrous as it might seem, though all that the characters of the playwright and King share is a great gift for self-publicity (Wilde having some interesting self to publicise). The Wilde trial - what he went to prison for - gets too easily lost in the green carnations, the mad Marquis of Queensberry's note ("To Oscar Wilde posing somdomite" [sic]), the awful Lord Alfred Douglas, and modern, self-satisfied reproaches to Victorian hypocrisy. The evidence led at his trial was not about any of these things. It came from boys who said they had been sodomised and chambermaids at the Savoy hotel who had spotted faecal stains on the sheets. The jury found him guilty and the judge said it was the worst case he had ever tried. "That you, Wilde, have been at the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is... impossible to doubt," he said, though he did not disgracefully add, as the judge in King's case is quoted as saying, "It may well be that your time in prison will not be easy."
The boys who gave evidence were not a good class of boy - they are referred to in Richard Ellmann's excellent Wilde biography as male prostitutes and blackmailers rather than "victims" - and none of them was under 17 when (if?) the sodomy occurred. Also, their rewards seem to have come from the Marquess of Queensberry, who retained them at a fiver a week, rather than from newspapers. There is little doubt, however, that Wilde also had sex with younger boys and of a better class, including a 16-year-old boarding school boy, Philip Danney, who slept with Wilde and his consort, Lord Alfred, on different nights of the same weekend in Goring.
Another age, of course. Danning's father, like other fathers, was anxious not to bring shame to his own son through the public prosecution of Wilde and Douglas. But if we think Wilde was a victim of wider extra-legal forces in society (homophobia), can't we extend a similar argument to King (paedophiliaphobia)? What certainly seems to me impossible is that you can think one man deserved to go to prison while the other, who these days has a little statue just off Trafalgar Square, did not. If Belmarsh is the best place for King - "Don't bend over in the shower," says a message to King's website - then Reading was a fitting home for Wilde.
And if the last case against King had collapsed like the others? I doubt - a dangerous doubt it may be - that anyone would have killed himself.
