Guilty Until Proven Innocent by Jon Robins

Author:Jon Robins [Jon Robins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903908
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

The DJ drew a parallel between the American lynch mob and what he repeatedly called the ‘witch-hunt’. ‘I lived through this, just as I lived through McCarthyism. This is why I recognise this not as a unique event but as a recurring event in history, like the witch trials in Salem.’

Gambaccini attacked what he called the ‘fundamental misconception’, shared by the police and CPS, that if an accuser came forward they must be telling truth, simply because it took courage to come forward. ‘Problem: it takes equal courage for fantasists and distressed individuals to come forward as it does for a genuine victim,’ he said. Gambaccini reckoned that Secondary might never have been interviewed by the police.

The DJ described himself as one of a generation of gay men ‘traumatised’ by Scotland Yard’s ‘pretty police’ campaign, where good-looking officers acted as agents provocateurs to entrap gay men in public toilets. That said, he stressed his belief that 90 per cent of police ‘joined the force undoubtedly to do good and not to take on the Orwellian zealotry of their leaders’.

According to Gambaccini, the Met was paying for its officers to jet around the world to interview witnesses who might assist their case against him, while failing to chase up easy leads that might have proved his innocence. Unbeknownst to his accuser, Gambaccini was a virgin when the abuse was supposed to have happened. The DJ told the police the identity of the man to whom he lost his virginity. The police never contacted the man. ‘It would’ve taken ten seconds to have tracked him down. The guy is an RAF veteran,’ Gambaccini said. ‘They spent eighteen months on the fraud and they wouldn’t bother to spend ten seconds on the real guy.’

Gambaccini’s book breaks new ground for the typically self-aggrandising celebrity bio genre. It is an unflinching account of a successful man – popular and venerated by his peers – who overnight finds himself ostracised and cut off from society.

‘My name is Kafka, Franz Kafka,’ is how his book begins. He wrote about how much it meant for him to receive an invitation into someone’s house in those dark days: ‘It is a personal commitment in the face of the opposition of the state.’

Towards the end of our interview, Gambaccini recalled a police officer using his toilet who, pointing at a photograph, later asked: ‘Who are these boys?’ They were his godsons. ‘Throughout this witch-hunt there has been this ludicrous tendency to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia – a point made by Harvey Proctor,’ Gambaccini told me. ‘They are interested in results, not justice, and public relations rather than truth. If it helps their PR to paint elderly gay people as paedophiles, they will – even if it is intellectually preposterous and morally repugnant.’

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