Plan B Forum

Then Horwell pulled out his trump card: Clifford's penis.

He reeled off the contradictory evidence: it was tiny, two and a half inches erect, according to some; according to another complainant, it was huge. In fact, Horwell argued, it was average, at five and a quarter inches flaccid. This bombshell was introduced with a Cliffordian flourish: the PR man's perfectly ordinary penis had been measured by a medical expert called Dr Coxon.

There were other moments of manic humour. The witness who described Clifford's penis as huge rationalised her apparently contradictory evidence by pointing out that she had a small mouth: "My dentist always said so." At which point the jury had to be temporarily dismissed for giggling. There was the defence witness who constantly referred to him as Sir Max and believed he was the editor of the Daily Mail; when told he didn't have a knighthood, she said she was just being respectful. Clifford himself was sometimes deliberately funny (when talking about his education through Diana Dors sex parties), sometimes unwittingly so ("Why would I need to name-drop when I represented the Beatles?").

With a favourite tabloid scoop (and client files). He later admitted he'd fabricated the allegation about the Chelsea strip. Photograph: Michael Birt/Contour The penis evidence was vital, Horwell argued, because it showed that the complainants had never seen it. Prosecution barrister Rosina Cottage counter-argued that size was in the eye of the beholder – and anyway, it wasn't the size of Clifford's penis that mattered, but what he did with it. This was courtroom drama at its finest: two contrasting QCs at the top of their game – the calm, meticulous Cottage stitching together disturbing patterns of behaviour; the waspish Horwell playing to the gallery. Cottage labelled Clifford a "master in the art of intimidation", who used his celebrity connections to "bully and manipulate" young women, treating his office as his "sexual fiefdom".

Horwell rubbished this. He said he'd hand his wig to any member of the jury who could make sense of one particular scenario, and rejected some allegations as "grubby voyeurism… fifth-rate fiction not even Mills & Boon would countenance". The reasons most of the women had given for not fighting back or going to the police at the time (they were scared, or shocked, or naive) were an insult to women the world over, he said: "Women are not stupid, were not stupid." Cottage's approach, he suggested, had been to "speculate like mad and hope the jury buy it".

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/m ... attenstone