William RoacheCoronation Street actor William Roache has been cleared of rape and indecent assault charges by a jury.

Mr Roache, 81, of Wilmslow, Cheshire, was found not guilty of two rapes and four indecent assaults after a trial at Preston Crown Court.

Five women had claimed he assaulted them when they were aged 16 or under between 1965 and 1971.

But the testimony of all of them broke down under examination. But Louise Blackwell QC, defending, said the women’s evidence “lacked sense and credibility”.

In court, the woman making the rape claims changed her mind about how old she was at the time.

Another woman initially told police she was warned about Mr Roache by actor Johnny Briggs, who played Mike Baldwin, but when it was discovered he was not in the show at the time she said the warning had come from a different actor.

After the case, Lancashire Constabulary said the allegations had been “thoroughly and professionally investigated by specialist detectives”.

A spokesman said that “all the evidence was subjected to careful scrutiny before a decision was taken to charge, in the belief that there was sufficient evidence to justify a realistic prospect of conviction”.

He added that the force “entirely respect the verdict reached by the jury”.

The case came to court as part of ‘Operation Yewtree’, the police investigation which began with Jimmy Savile and expanded in ‘Savile and others’ and then ‘Others’.  Mr Roache was investigated in the latter category.

Lancashire Constabulary probably thought that five separate women could not possibly all be making it up.  But this is precisely what the jury has found, and each one of the accusers should now be charged with perjury.  They remained anonymous while Mr Roache’s name was dragged through the mire in full public view.  That is an injustice, despite the not guilty verdict.

Equally, the police may have been swayed by Mr Roache’s admitting to broadcaster Piers Morgan that he had slept with ‘more than a hundred’ women and his admitted infidelity to his first wife Anna Cropper.  He has plainly acted like a cad, and has described this behaviour as ‘inadequate,’ but maintained throughout that he had no interest in under-age girls or non-consensual encounters.

Sadly, the verdict casts doubt on all the non-Saville parts of the Yewtree investigation, leading ordinary people to conclude that celebrities may have been targeted for some perverse reason by their accusers.

The prosecution said that, if the actor was telling the truth, he was the victim of a “huge, distorted and perverse witch-hunt”.  Those comments may come back to haunt them and the Yewtree investigators.

A greater sadness is that there are genuine victims of horrific sexual abuse who cannot secure justice because their abusers were too well-connected or evidence has been mysteriously lost.  They have not been well-served by this debacle.

 

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14 COMMENTS

  1. I agree, perjury is probably the best answer to this injustice at the moment. But the law should be changed. At the very least, the names of accusers in such cases should routinely be made public when a man is found to be innocent, unless the judge rules otherwise because of very special circumstances. I nearly wrote “the victim is found to be innocent”, but of course the victim is always the woman.

    Despite the verdict of innocence, this case will go into the statistics as a case where the police failed to obtain a conviction. Campaigners (often women) always see the men who are not found guilty as getting away with it, even if they are found to be innocent. They press for a higher percentage of guilty verdicts: if only (say) 8% of men are charged and found guilty, then 92% are getting away with it. This approach, and the continuing anonymity of false accusers, is scandalous.

    • “The victim is always the woman” . Not so Rox, as the parallel news today along side Roache’s acquital was the imprisonment of Roland Wright who abused 9-13 year old boys at Caldicott School between 1959 and 1970. Some of those boys, now grown and aging men, bravely faced the cameras of Channel 4 news tonight to describe the horrors they went through, and the lasting and damaging effect it had on their lives.

      • OK. but the accused male perpetrator of sex crimes , even if falsely accused, is not seen officially as the victim. The victims seems to remain officially those who accused him, even if they did so falsely. Some people take this for granted, and it is wrong. Grossly unjust to the men concerned.

        That is obviously what I meant.

  2. Well, these women who saw fit to tell lies will have to answer for their consciences come the Judgement Day. And it’s the genuine rape case victims who will suffer if their testimonies are not believed; why should womens rights groups now wonder that rape allegations are not taken seriously, in light of the above?

    Two disturbing issues come out of this: unless I’m mistaken some – if not all – of Jimmy Savile’s victims could have been untruthful; secondly if womens rights campaigners are ‘pressing for a higher percentage of guilty verdicts’ then it could possibly lead to ‘cutting corners’ in investigations and the defendant being wrong convicted. That nobody wants.

    • I agree about Savile. I don’t doubt he did a lot, but probably not all.
      The report above says “Sadly, the verdict casts doubt on all the non-Saville parts of the Yewtree investigation,..”
      That might lead people to assume that all the Savile allegations were proved by Yewtree beyond doubt, but of course they were not.

      • When Jimmy Savile was on ‘Have I got news for you’ he was asked by Ian Hislop, ‘What do you do in that van of yours?’ to which Savile replied, ‘Anyone I can get my hands on.’ There might be band-wagon-jumping with Savile, but he was as guilty as hell (as they say).

        • And yet after this confession nobody thought to complain about him, nobody thought to prosecute him ? The BBC were perfectly happy with this (on what was probably a programme carefully recorded and edited before it went out, as most quiz shows are) ?

  4. In an age when we have despised our judeo-christian roots and thrown out the Ten Commandments and believe the lies of post-modernism it is unsurprising. Education is being dumbed down and it is more important to be in tune with Common Purpose and be a citizen and adhere to the lies and dogmas of the left than to honestly question and investigate matters. Jesus warned in the last days mens hearts would feint with fear. We can see that increasingly coming to pass. Our culture and society is saturated with porn, smut and immorality. People no longer care about truth. Watching Question Time last night was revealing as Tessa Jowell would only sprout her mantra and would not admit that the exposure of people prior to being found guilty was a charter for those with spurious claims and sinister agendas to lie and malign others. How far have we fallen because of our Godlessness and our embrace of all that is peverse and anti-God.

  6. Well, another one has been found not guilty on many charges, and one does begin to wonder what conclusions an actual trial of Jimmy Savile would have come to. If we can believe the verdicts of the courts, a lot of women no longer anywhere near their teens are making a lot of unfounded allegations. It seems to be one of the dangers of being an entertainer of young women, just as it is a professional hazard for young men teaching teenage girls.

    I’m sorry to make this observation, which no doubt would infuriate many feminists, but just how would these feminists engineer trials which would produce more guilty verdicts in these cases ?

  7. The Guardian has published today a well argued suggestion that people should not be prosecuted for sexual offences if the offence was not reported in the first six years after it allegedly happened. This would be in line with the Limitation Act 1980 for civil claims, and with limitations on criminal prosecutions in other countries including Canada. It is suggested that in the case of minors, the period for reporting the crime should be extended to the alleged victim’s 24th birthday (6 years after becoming 18).

    Seems OK to me.