Barbara Kay: A sadly necessary handbook for men falsely accused of sexual assault

Article here. Excerpt:

'Liam Allan, a 22-year old London, England-area criminology student, spent two years “in a terrible form of limbo” when he was charged with 12 counts of rape, based on allegations by a woman (unnamed) with whom he had had a consensual sexual relationship.

Had Allan been convicted, he’d have spent years behind bars and been permanently inscribed as a sex offender. In what seemed a he said-she said case, his prospects were dicey. As it happened, the complainant was sitting on a cache of about 50,000 recorded messages (Allan had lost his phone with copies), which the police had examined, but not disclosed to the prosecution or the defence.

Following two days of testimony, during which the phone calls were referenced, the prosecutor refused to continue until the defence had received and reviewed the messages. They were illuminating, as for example: “It wasn’t against my will or anything,” and “You know it’s always nice to be sexually assaulted without breaking the law.” Taken together, the woman revealed herself as a sex addict obsessed with “rough sex and being raped.” The case was dismissed at the request of the prosecutor, who admirably fulfilled his primary mandate — that is, to ensure a fair trial, not to convict.

Clearly the police knew those records rendered the charges unsustainable. Why were they withheld for so long? There are any number of bad reasons, including laziness, incompetence and bias, but no good ones. (You can see a detailed review of this case and what it says about systemic flaws in the U.K. criminal justice system at BarristerBlogger.com.)

This scenario could easily have happened here. Electronic messaging history is not automatically requested by the police when a complainant files a charge, as we saw in the Jian Ghomeshi case where, fortunately, Ghomeshi had his own archived cache. Yet, irritated by his acquittal, feminist legal minds are promoting complainant-friendly tweaks to the Criminal Code, like Bill C-51 (about which I have written before), now under Senate review, which could seriously weaken defence counsel’s hand at trial.'