PicoBlog

Mothers have found it frustrating that the Family Courts forbid them from speaking about their situation when they go through litigation in the courts.

They are under the impression that nothing can be done; their voices are silenced, their stories can’t be told. Injustices can’t be revealed or reported.

But they are wrong. It is possible to lift the blanket of secrecy and unleash the silenced voices. It is even possible to have every newspaper in the land splash your story and in the process defame your children’s other parent (and too bad that the children get drawn in). The silencing restrictions need only be lifted for a short time, just long enough to get the press to report on what you want them to know, but not on anything else. In fact, it’s more than likely you will not want them to report on anything else, especially not on the ways in which you have gone about instructing your solicitors and organising the court procedures to your requirements.

If you are not only stinking rich but also famous, if you are indeed a Celebrity, you will no doubt have already applied yourself to considering how best to make use of the media. You will be wanting it to give you publicity but only of the right sort. So you will need to offer both sticks and carrots.

D notices, silencing injunctions, threats to sue: use whatever you can to suppress the press. It might seem difficult but it is in fact a walkover.

The press are lazy; they do all their work in the office, never travelling outside to investigate. They rarely even pick up the phone. Their investigation consists of reading through whatever press releases land on their desks. You need to prepare them for yours. But first you need a clean slate.

This is easily done. It does require money of course, and fame, status and celebrity help too. But basically you need to be ruthless. Before you manipulate the press, you must first silence it. You must be like MI5, you must be like the Ministry of Defence, you must be like the Government. In fact you must be more stringent than any of them. Journalists who watch you, know this. They know how you operate. You do what comes naturally to you – threaten, bully, intimidate, harass. But journalists who watch and assess and consider are rare. Most do what they are told and do not challenge wealth and reputation and fame.

Once you have got the press under your control, you can get them to blast out headlines like these:

HOW CAMPAIGN BY ‘VITRIOLIC’ WIFE COST MCEWAN £180,000  - RICHARD PRICE, DAILY MAIL

WHAT JUDGE SAID OF MCEWAN’S EX-WIFE – TIM JONES AND MICHAEL HARVEY, THE TIMES

MCEWAN’S WIFE ‘WAGED A VITRIOLIC CAMPAIGN’ – TERENCE SHAW, LEGAL CORRESPONDENT DAILY TELEGRAPH

MCEWAN ‘VICTIM OF VENGEFUL CAMPAIGN’ – TERRI JUDD, THE INDEPENDENT

MCEWAN’S FORMER WIFE TWISTED THE TRUTH, SAYS JUDGE – TIM JONES AND MICHAEL HARVEY, THE TIMES

Of course, this will need a masterful use of manipulation and control but you will know all about both of those things since your divorce papers will have cited your ‘unreasonable behaviour’ as the prime cause of the divorce. Coercive control will be second nature to you.

As you see from these examples, it is possible to defame and discredit your former spouse through the newspapers but you will need to prepare well.

There are a few things you will need. For instance, a lot of money is always useful, especially if you are going to the High Court, which obviously you will since, if you have chosen your solicitor carefully, she or he will be married to one of the High Court judges, preferably in the Family Division like you. That way you can keep it all in the family!

Married teams do really well! They come as a package and are worth a lot more than two individual lawyers. It isn’t exactly ‘two for the price of one’ or ‘buy one, get one free’ but there are definite advantages in such an arrangement and you may find yourself invited to meet other judges and influential people in the legal profession while you are wined and dined by your solicitor and her/his husband/wife in the Inns of Court as well as in her/his own home. Advantages, yes, but it costs.

Expense, though, need not be a reason to hold back. Judges will help you manipulate the financial facts and will overlook outrageous lies and go along with your ludicrous claims of impending bankruptcy. You will tell the judge that your career is over, you will never work again and the judge will be happy to repeat your unsubstantiated claims even in his judgement. He will write things like, ‘the golden days are over’ and will go on repeating such nonsense during all the many years that he ‘reserves the case’ to himself. He will, of course, never query or even mention the fact that you are employing a legal team known to be the most expensive in the land with clients that may include, for instance, King Charles, Bernie Ecclestone and Paloma Picasso.

Remember too that the more you pay your legal team the greater the propensity for them to mislay critical documents.  Some top-end solicitors have even been known to lose the actual divorce petitions! I know of one team which lost a divorce petition twice! Phew! How lucky they were that their carelessness didn’t affect their side of the litigation but only their opponents!  

If your purpose in applying to have the provisions of the Children Act lifted is to release some carefully-selected contents of the litigation to the press, you will, of course, need plenty of useful contacts on the press.

If you are worth your salt you will have started to get to know important and useful people early in your career. Like Gatsby, you will be known for throwing large parties. Again, it will cost but it will be well worth it when your address book is bulging with the names of the rich and famous with perhaps a sprinkling of royalty for good measure.

Marriage is of course an entrance to another world and you should treat it as the strategic prize that it is. You must decide; would it be better to marry into royalty, show-biz, naked wealth or the media? If, the media, is it wealth and influence you are after? Should you aim to marry a Murdoch for instance? Or is it political and social life you want to influence? If so, and if you do marry into it, you will of course be able to dictate what is and is not reported about you and will have day and night access to journalists and editors. Your finger will be on the pulse in more ways than one. You will be in a prime position to manipulate. This is the best choice for a mover-and-shaker-coercive-controller.

There is only one limitation: the paper that employs your wife/husband will not be able to report with the full force that all the others do. It will need to pretend to impartiality. This means that it won’t publish anything about your divorce during the whole period when your personal drama is hitting headlines elsewhere. If you examine the headlines and extracts of articles I include here, you will find that one newspaper is missing. Whatever could have happened to the Guardian? How did it miss a sensational story like this, one that features our ‘national novelist’? Could it be that the national novelist had married one of its editors?

You must ask yourself why you want your former wife to be defamed in the press. Why do you want the press to write things like this?

The former wife of Ian McEwan was condemned by a judge for conducting a vitriolic campaign against him the High Court heard yesterday.

Philip Cayford, counsel for the author, read out several comments made by Judge Paul Clark at Oxford County Court during the bitter divorce and custody battle.

The former wife of the novelist Ian McEwan was described in court yesterday as a purveyor of half-truths, twisted information, inaccuracies and false inferences.

The answer is, of course, obvious: your aim is to deflect. The best defence is attack. And you have a lot to defend. You don’t want anyone looking at what you may be hiding.

‘She is obsessed with the past’ – The Times

Mr Cayford said that Judge Paul Clark had noted,  ‘the impression I have formed is that the wife is a woman who may well have given great assistance to other troubled souls in her professional capacity, but at the same time she has considerable problems of her own, not all of which can rightly be ascribed to her husband’ – The Times

The judge had found Mrs. Allen to be a self-centred woman more governed by her emotions than her intellect – The Times

Getting the press to do your dirty work and defame your wife is nothing more than a routine job. It’s easy. Especially if you have done the preparatory work. You will have started with neighbours and friends and spread the rumour that your wife is mad. In time even your children will know the rumour and will even believe it. Nothing strange about that: plenty of men have done it throughout history. Wasn’t TS Eliot one? Before divorce was a realistic option, getting your wife locked up in an asylum was the best way to get rid of her and you could retain all the sympathy. ‘Oh poor him, look at what he has to put up with. And he’s so patient and kind and look how he visits her every month with a bunch of flowers. Mad people can be so exhausting!’

It won’t be so easy, though, if the rumour that your wife is mad is spread among your wife’s friends and neighbours since they will know that it is not true. It could backfire if, say, your wife’s doctor, who might be your own neighbour, gets to hear of it and phones your wife to offer to write a statement for the court to the effect that your wife is the sanest person the doctor knows.

Mr Cayford said that Judge Clark had noted ‘as in 1995 the mother is quite incapable of separating the wood from the trees’ – The Independent

Judge Clark said at the time, ‘I am quite satisfied at having heard and read the mother’s outpourings she is at times more governed by her emotions than her intellect’.

‘She rambles on in great and irrelevant detail’ – The Times

‘She is obsessed with the past’ – The Independent

Miss Allen had conducted a vitriolic campaign against Mr McEwan since 1995 – The Times

The scathing criticism, by a judge at Oxford county court, was revealed as Miss Allen was banned for life from making any allegations about the custody battle for the couple’s sons.

He found that she was obsessed with the past’ – Daily Mail

‘I find her to be self centred, expecting everybody else to accept what she says, and on their (sic) terms’ – The Times

Judge Clark said her life may lack the glamour of a decade ago when she was the wife of a successful novelist and money was no object – The Independent

But the court was told that the judge also found that however bizarre and unconventional her ideas were about some things, there was no question about her intense love for her children. He added, ‘Her life may lack the glamour of a decade ago when she was the wife of a successful novelist and money no object’ – The Times

He described Ms Allen as ‘a purveyor of half truths twisted information inaccuracies and false inferences’ – The Times

The High Court was told how Judge Clark had said, ‘Sadly I am driven to finding that Ms Allen has conducted a vitriolic campaign against Mr McEwan since the hearing in 1995’ – The Times

Of Mrs Allen he said, ‘In one particular regard I have formed an unfavourable view of Ms Allen namely as a credible and accurate witness but this has had little or no bearing on my decisions on what is best for the children’ -  The Times

How, you might wonder, can a judge be persuaded to make such defamatory and misogynistic statements about a woman in his court who has no legal representation and who has undergone six years of intense and aggressive litigation, all of it brought by her ex-husband? Is it possible that the judge might have taken sides? Surely that couldn’t possibly happen in a lawcourt whose system is to pit a mother against a father, a woman whose primary task has been to run the home and bring up the children against a man who has concentrated on his career, on earning money, becoming famous and on cultivating friends in high places?

Perhaps it is not only you who wants your wife silenced. Perhaps the judge wants to shut her up as well. It could be that, when your wife realised that the judge was so biased that justice could not occur, she decided to make a complaint. First she asked other judges in the court if they could take over her case. They all refused; if the judge has reserved the case to himself, then he must keep it, it is his baby and he might have very good reasons for protecting it, and himself, from outside knowledge of what has been going on in his secrecy-bound court.

Further publication of allegations made by the novelist’s former wife and her fiance would be damaging to the children whom the court had a paramount duty to protect, added the judge - The Times

Mr Justice Charles said it was in the overall public interest that he should make a permanent injunction against Mrs Allen and her fiance as there was substantial risk she would continue to repeat the allegations - The Daily Telegraph

The judge may have been fiercely holding onto the case for six years. There may have been no progress in all that time. The children may have been suffering and may still be.

Perhaps, in despair, your wife has complained to the Lord Chancellor. Perhaps, as expected, the Lord Chancellor has done nothing. But the judge knows about it and he is cross. Very very cross in fact. Very cross with your wife whom, everyone in the court says, looks exactly like the judge’s ex-wife who left him and issued divorce proceedings only recently.

Supposing, in a state of fury, the judge invents a ‘judgement’ and fills it with venom directed at ‘the wife’. You could even call the judge ‘vitriolic’ if that word wasn’t already ring-fenced, reserved exclusively for women, wives with a grievance in fact (along with a goodly number of other woman-only words; ‘venomous’ and ‘strident’ come to mind).

The judge calls his diatribe against ‘the wife’ his ‘judgement’ but in fact it is not a judgement but an extra piece of judgemental vanity aimed both to protect the judge himself and to influence the court welfare officer, instructing her as to what to do in regard to the children of the warring couple that has come before him, i.e. to do whatever the husband wants.

The wife will, though, not give up so easily. She has been struggling for the right to bring up her children for years and has been perpetually obstructed by her husband’s actions in the courts. For half of her children’s lifetimes she has been under pressure, unable to breathe freely and give them what she knows they need. She will now write again to the Lord Chancellor:

Your refusal to take up my complaint to you on March 2nd this year regarding corruption in the Oxford county court and court welfare office …. has led to a situation in which Mr McEwan has won a High Court ban which prevents me speaking about, writing or publishing anything regarding any of the court cases in England or France …

Ian McEwan has won from the High Court the right to publish extracts from Judge Clark’s judgement the very judgement that I have already complained about to you and the Home Secretary and the very judge I have complained about… The newspapers, since they can now only hear what Mr McEwan has to say and since he seems to have won permission to publish what he likes from the transcripts, now have such a biased view that they do not even report that I have already complained about this judge and his judgement to you and the Home Secretary.

The wife may even go so far as to send copies of her letter to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, and the Leader of the Opposition, William Hague.

None of them reply.

When your wife gets to hear of the fact that she and her partner have been silenced for the rest of their lives in a court hearing to which they were not invited, she might issue a press release:

Press Release September 12th 1999

Penny Allen welcomes the publication of the truth

Penny Allen is pleased that Ian McEwan has won permission so remarkably easily for extracts from Judge Clark’s judgement to be published in what has, since 1994, been a sub judice case.

She is looking forward to the time when far more pertinent extracts from court documents will be released which she hopes will eventually force a review of the case and thereby offer the children the protection they need and deserve. When she herself put such extracts on the Internet they were removed within hours and she was summoned to the court that has now permitted damaging remarks about her to be made public while ruling that she must not speak about, write or publish including on the Internet anything to do with any of the court hearings etc.

When she received no response from any of the newspapers she wrote to regarding the defamation and insults they had published, Penny wrote to the Press Complaints Commission which replied:

The Commission cannot deal with any matter which is the subject of either pending or current court or other proceedings. We note that permanent injunctions have been granted as a result of action taken by Mr McEwan and I regret that we are unable to help you on this occasion.

Ian McEwan had taken out silencing litigation on the press which, according to one journalist, was ‘more stringent than that of the Government, the Ministry of Defence and MI5’. His litigation extended to numerous bodies that are designed to protect citizens from abuse and defamation, including the police and the General Medical Council as well as the Press Complaints Commission.

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