Dear All
It is nearly the end of the first week of
the Alex Salmond trial, and what a week it has been in terms of evidence put
before the Court. Salmond fighting against 14 sex charges involving ten women
is maintaining his innocence. The women who testified so far have given their
harrowing accounts of what they alleged happened. One interesting revelation
which came out in evidence was that women told not to work alone at Bute House
with Alex Salmond. The reason for this told to the jury was after an alleged
late night sexual assault
One official known as Woman G told how she
felt “trapped” after Mr Salmond insisted she go back with him to Bute House
after a dinner at a restaurant in Edinburgh in April 2014.
She said he had got her to sit next to him
on a sofa, made inappropriate remarks, put his arm around her and “leaned in”
for a kiss.
Salmond’s QC, former Labour MSP Gordon
Jackson after her revelations suggested to her the matter may have been
inappropriate, but had not been viewed as being very serious. Her reply to
Jackson’s comment was
“It was serious enough for us to change our
staffing practices.”
Asked by Alex Prentice QC, for the
prosecution, what had changed, she said:
“The specific change was that women were
not to be alone with Mr Salmond in Bute House.”
She said there was also to be no civil
service support for Mr Salmond after a certain time in the evening – 7pm or 9pm
– unless there was specific government business to attend to.
If this evidence was true, there would be a
record, a paper trail to follow and most importantly people at the other end of
the trail to question, such as Alex Salmond’s Chief of Staff, Geoff Aberdein.
Here is an interesting article written in
2019 about Holyrood’s Salmond probe for reference.
Woman G told the court she felt like a
“play thing” for Salmond after an earlier incident when he had smacked her on
the bottom as they left a restaurant in Glasgow after a dinner in 2012.
She said:
“Mr Salmond ushered people out ahead of him
and I was standing back. He gestured for me to go ahead of him and as he did
that he smacked my buttocks.”
In recent footage of the trial we see Alex
Salmond gesturing to the two women with him to go in front of him as he walks
into the Court building.
Alex Prentice for the Crown asked how she
reacted.
“I was shocked. It had not happened to me
before. We were in a public place and I remember feeling like I had to make
sure I didn’t react visibly. I didn’t want to look embarrassed, so I carried on
leaving the restaurant. It felt demeaning and it made me feel I was a play
thing to him.”
After the 2014 dinner in Edinburgh, she
said she had papers for Mr Salmond which he could have taken himself, but he
wanted her to go back to Bute House with him.
Inside, she had left the papers on the
table in the second-floor sitting room and asked if she could leave.
She said:
“He said I wasn’t to leave. He beckoned to
me to sit next to him on the sofa.”
Mr Salmond had gone to the drinks cabinet
and poured two glasses of limoncello.
She added:
“He wanted me to drink some shots with him.
I told him I wasn’t going to be drinking, I didn’t like limoncello.”
She said Mr Salmond told her to call him
Alex and put his feet up on the coffee table.
“I began to feel slightly intimidated and
trapped,” she said.
She said he had made inappropriate comments
such as “what I would do to you if I were 26”.
She said:
“I thought it meant that he would try to
have sex with me, to have sexual relations with me. He had his arm around me
and at that point I started to feel panic and he leaned in to kiss me.”
Mr Prentice asked if she had agreed to any
of this or any signal which invited it. She said:
“No, I had been trying to leave and had
been saying it in many different ways.”
She had tried to make up an excuse about a
guest needing to get into her flat and made her ringtone go off so it sounded
as if they were trying to contact her. She said she had sat with “my legs
closed tightly and my arms closed around me”.
Prentice asked:
“Were you frightened?” She said: “Yes, I
was frightened. It was at that moment I knew if I didn’t get out that something
serious might happen, so I just stood up and said ‘I have to go’ or ‘Can I go
now?’ I just grabbed my coat and walked to the door.”
Asked about Mr Salmond’s reaction, she
said:
“He was frustrated and almost defeated and
said something along the lines of ‘fine, go’.”
She said she messaged a colleague saying
she wouldn’t do her shift the next day because Alex Salmond had “been out of
order” or “inappropriate” and she stayed off work for a few days. She said she
was “extremely embarrassed” and “confused” and “hated him for what he had just
done”.
Cross-examining, Gordon Jackson said Mr
Salmond’s behaviour had been “thought of as nothing at the time”, but years
later had become a “criminal thing”. Woman G
rejected a suggestion by Mr Jackson that when Mr Salmond put his arm around her
on the sofa he was attempting to comfort her because
she seemed upset.
“No, not at all,” she said.
She said she had viewed it as “a move with
romantic intentions”.
Mr Jackson also suggested to Woman G that
when Mr Salmond allegedly smacked her bottom he was being “playful – even if
you didn’t take it that way”.
She replied:
“I think it was extremely inappropriate.”
The trial is said to have been slotted to
run 4 weeks, but apparently this trial is moving quickly and could end a week
earlier. Like many people, I am wonder
when Moira Salmond, the wife of the accused will make an appearance to come
down and standby her husband. I suppose this will be painful for her given Alex
Salmond’s special defence that several women had consensual sex acts with him.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow
University
2 comments:
Going "Oh but they consented and I reasonably believed that" does not sound credible at all, in fact it seems like a pretty weak defence to me.
It seems to me those that believe themselves powerful think those under them are to be used how they feel
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