Transcript
Rachel Johnson (0:05)
Tortoise.
Paul Caruana Galizia (0:11)
Hi, I'm Paul Caruana Galizia from Tortoise. Before we begin, I just need to warn you this is a hard listen at times. This episode and the whole series contains graphic descriptions of sexual and of allegations of sexual abuse. The four episodes are designed to be listened to in their entirety, because this is a story of conflicting accounts. Eight months ago, a young woman got in touch with the broadcaster Rachel Johnson.
Rachel Johnson (0:48)
It all starts with a message on Instagram. Welcome to my podcast, Rachel Johnson's Difficult Women. I present a show on LBC and a podcast called Difficult Women, and I get a ton of messages. This one seems no different. It's from a young New Zealander called Scarlet. We're using her first name only to protect her identity. She wishes me a lovely day and says she's got a question. It's friendly, breezy even. No hint there of the bombshell email that arrives a week later.
Paul Caruana Galizia (1:27)
The email includes allegations of serious sexual assaults carried out by a famous man, a man who was 61 when Scarlett was 22 and worked as his child's nanny. In that first email, Scarlett doesn't name the author who she alleges sexually assaulted her within hours of their first meeting and, she says, continued to assault me. Over the coming month.
Rachel Johnson (1:57)
I arranged to talk to Scarlet and what emerges is a more complex picture. Her allegations are of abuse within a consensual sexual relationship. She tells me she did not consent to everything this author did, nor every time he did it. But in her texts and video messages to him during their brief relationship and afterwards, she declared not just her consent, but her gratitude, appreciation, affection and even love. In other words, Scarlett's email opens a chapter of investigation into the greyest of grey areas when it comes to our sex lives. The area where the scope for genuine misinterpretation, but also for the possibility of serious abuse, where it can take time even for someone to make sense of what happened. While the police, if they're called upon, often look in vain for quick and clear evidence from the start, in large part because that's what they think a jury needs for a verdict. Any one of us can be on a jury. So it's also about our understanding of consent within a sexual relationship. People still expect sexual assault to happen between strangers, when in fact, the vast majority of assault victims are or were in relationships with their assailants. It's still often assumed that by being in a relationship, you provide ongoing consent for sex. It's an assumption that used to be codified until 1992. UK law said there could be no rape between husband and wife, as by the contract of marriage, a wife submitted herself irrevocably to sex at all times. Other jurisdictions have also removed the marital rape exemption. But across countries, people still cling to the assumption that that simply being in a relationship provides ongoing sexual consent. The law says that consent is for each and every act, whether you're in a relationship or not. But when prosecutors bring cases of sexual assault to court, they come up against that assumption in its different forms, to people, to jurors. The behaviour of sexual assault victims conflicts with the behaviour they expect from a real victim. For them to scream, to forcefully resist, to immediately make a police report to avoid their assailant. But in fact, in most cases, there's no screaming or physical resistance. Police reports are delayed or never happen. And victims continue to have contact with their assailants. Often they continue to have sex with them. It's why Scarlett's allegations are so difficult to tell and so complicated. And why, I'd say, so important. She and the man in question look back on it in ways that sometimes overlap. They agree about details, dates, places and times of what happened between them, but not always. And when it comes to the really important questions, what was the sex really like? Was it okay? Were they both clear at the time that it was okay? They couldn't be further apart. She says it was abuse from the very beginning. In his account, the sex was loving and consensual and didn't involve full intercourse. Faced with two diametrically opposed accounts, it's inevitable that this can't be just Scarlett's story. It has to include as much as possible of the man's version of events as well. Not just out of fairness, important though that is, but so that Paul and I and you have a chance of making sense of the relationship. Scarlett had a relationship, in this case with the author Neil Gaiman. A man who's never faced allegations of sexual misconduct before. A man who's on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.