December 19, 1994: On the Isle of Lewis, schoolteacher Gillian Small claims to have been assaulted and raped. In January 1996, she appears at Stornoway Sheriff Court accused of making false statements and wasting police time. This article was published in the Press and Journal (ABERDEEN EDITION), January 23, 1996, page 2.
I was puzzled that I could find no follow up for this report. Gillian Small sans her middle name is quite a common monicker, but the only other reference I could find definitely for her was in the Scottish press earlier in 1994 when she graduated from university. However, in May 2020, I managed to contact her victim through Facebook. I assumed he was a local man, and was surprised he was actually born in Ealing, a few miles from where I grew up.
A side note, in the 1980s, Ealing became notorious for what became known as the Ealing vicarage rape. In March 1986, a gang of miscreants broke into the vicarage, brutalising the vicar, and David Kerr who was the boyfriend of his daughter. Both men suffered fractured skulls. Jill Saward was taken upstairs and raped in three orifices.
The real outrage came the following year when they stood trial. The ringleader – who did not take part in the rape – was given a fourteen year sentence, but one of the other two was given a five year sentence for aggravated burglary and a five year sentence for rape. The third man received three years for rape, five years for burglary and assault. The judge’s comments compounded the outrage further. When he retired in 1993, he apologised to Jill Saward.
She went on to become an anti-rape campaigner, but in 1997 she suggested men accused of date rape should be tried for a lesser offence. Obviously that didn’t go down too well with the sisterhood, but clearly not all rapes are equal. Especially those which are only relabelled rape in retrospect.
Jill Saward died in January 2017 aged only 51.
Now, back to our imaginary rape. The victim’s comments – edited for length but not for grammar! – are in green.
“On the day of the trial, the defendant had a breakdown in the dock and the trial was postponed. I was just about to give evidence. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was diagnosed and no alternative date fixed. The Procurator Fiscal (female incidentally) that pushed hard for the prosecution left the islands to take up a position on the mainland and I don’t know what happened after that. I think her successor took the view pursuing the case was not in the public interest given the diagnosis.”
What were the circumstances? Did you have actually have sex with her and she withdrew her consent retroactively or was it made up out of the whole cloth?
“I’m afraid I don’t know the root cause of the PTSD. The alleged incident happened the night before I was picked up by the police at 7.00am so the reporting was pretty instant. I wasn’t there at all let alone did she retrospectively withdraw consent. I have no idea why she cooked the whole thing up other than I turned her down once and she had it in for me. I think she had a very chequered past. She then invented prior incidents for which I had cast iron alibis as, again, I wasn’t there. After I was questioned, she alleged further harassment because she’d seen me around town but by then I was keeping a diary and on one occasion, I’d even been in the company, socially, of a serving policeman. Luckily I was never arrested but ‘helped police with their enquiries’. In many ways I was ‘lucky’ because the police made their enquiries and soon realised she was making the whole thing up.”
He added:
“I’ve never been able to work out her motivation or how she thought she would make it all stack up. Unless, of course as you say, she’d started to believe her delusions. I remember the Senior Investigating Officer ringing me quite a few times to ask where I’d been at a certain time because another allegation had been made. Each time they put it to her I couldn’t have been there, she apparently came up with another time and date.”
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