No Defence
The following opinion piece from the Sunday Times was written by Dominic Lawson, brother of Nigella Lawson, yet the family connection in no way diminishes the force of what Dominic Lawson has to say - a fair trial is one thing, but what this case highlights is the ability of people to say what they like in court without a shred of evidence to back up their claims.
Even the nasty Mr Saatchi, whose mysteriously leaked email started this particular ball rolling, was forced to admit in court that he had no evidence to support the allegation of regular drug taking in his own home.
Bonkers or what?
Even the nasty Mr Saatchi, whose mysteriously leaked email started this particular ball rolling, was forced to admit in court that he had no evidence to support the allegation of regular drug taking in his own home.
Bonkers or what?
My sister was found guilty – and she was given no defence
By Dominic Lawson
For the past month my sister, Nigella Lawson, has been on trial. She must have been, because people would come up to her in the street and say: “I hope you get off.” What was her alleged crime? None, as it happens: Nigella was merely a prosecution witness in the trial of two assistants accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from the company account of her then husband, Charles Saatchi. On Friday, after a day and half’s consideration, and on a majority verdict, sufficient doubt existed for the jury to acquit Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo.
My sister’s name, however, has not been cleared. On the contrary, in return for her doing her civic duty and agreeing to act as a witness for the Crown, it has been trashed unmercifully. The Grillo sisters’ defence was that Nigella had authorised their massive spree on haute-couture outfits and stays in five-star hotels in Paris and New York because the two knew she had “a drug habit” she feared her husband would discover — and she wanted to buy their silence. Charming. What readers may not know is that this was never part of their original defence (they refused all comment when first interviewed by the police). It was added many months later, close to the beginning of the trial — and then mysteriously leaked onto the internet.
The judge, Robin Johnson, had originally ruled this late addition to the defence as inadmissible. On the eve of the trial, after submission of a wild email written by Saatchi about Nigella’s alleged drug-taking (subsequently recanted under oath), Johnson reversed his decision. This guaranteed that his courtroom would become a wonderfully entertaining circus for the media.
My dear colleagues in the press could now, under privilege, report in front-page headlines every claim put by the Grillos’ lawyers about Nigella, however scurrilous — and relegate the prosecution case to a brief paragraph at the bottom of a page deep inside (if that). I don’t especially want to give examples, as this would merely repeat the farrago, but let one — from The Sun — give a flavour: “Nigella ‘like druggie on a council estate’.”
It is unreasonable, especially given the straitened circumstances of the industry, to expect newspapers to do anything other than choose the most sensational headlines. If I were editor of The Sun, I imagine I would have done something similar, and not given a second’s thought to legal balance, nor to the feelings of the witness — nor indeed to those of her two children, against whom deeply unpleasant accusations were also made by the defendants.
News reports are one thing. Opinion is quite another. I have been amazed by the tendentious columns about my sister that have been published during the trial, without any complaint by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Given that the defence’s revised plea was based on my sister’s “bad character”, any column that reinforced those claims should surely have been regarded as prejudicial to the prosecution case.
Again, I prefer to give only one example: Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. She wrote a column during the trial with an argument apparently designed to explain why Saatchi throttled Nigella in a public place, based on the assumption that the allegations of habitual drug-taking by my sister were true. In a conclusion simultaneously trite and vicious, Pearson described as “unappetising and rather desperate” the fact that Nigella had at the outset of the trial tweeted a hotcake recipe, adding: “Nigella cannot bake her way out of this.” Naturally I understand that for newspaper columnists, desperate to meet yet another deadline, human tragedy provides the ideal opportunity for a piece of hastily improvised moralising; but that self-righteousness depends (if the sensitive reader is not to feel nauseated) on some sort of relation to the truth.
As my sister observed after the case: “During the trial not one witness claimed to see me take drugs and not one of my three assistants was asked about these claims by the defence, despite being cross-examined at length. I did my civic duty, only to be maliciously vilified without the right to respond.” I was of course aware during the trial — and especially when I accompanied Nigella during her two days of evidence — just how surprised she was by the complete lack of protection afforded to a witness.
Her solitary encounter with the Crown was when, just before she gave evidence, the prosecuting counsel came into the witness room to say: “I hope you are happy with everything.” Nigella’s response — “‘Happy’ is not the word I would choose” — struck me, then and now, as an understatement. She had received no advice from the CPS at any stage, not the slightest support. She was not allowed to submit a statement from her GP of many years saying that she was not and never had been a habitual drug user. Like all witnesses, she was not allowed to have any legal advice about her evidence during the trial, whereas the defendants’ lawyers are allowed to consult their clients at any stage — as I observed on several occasions when I was in the courtroom.
It was also noticeable that the two defendants’ lawyers each spent hour after hour questioning my sister in minute detail over reams of credit card statements; they had not done the same thing to Saatchi, on whose company account these transactions had actually been made. The reason occurred to me only when each lawyer, very late on in their cross-examinations, began asking Nigella about her alleged use of drugs. They were employing the technique police interrogators use on hardened criminals — wear them down with hours of trivial and even pointless questions, so that when the big question comes up, they are too exhausted to think straight.
Of course, it is right that criminal defence lawyers do their utmost to get an acquittal for their clients. Yet in much more horrible cases than this one, such as rape trials where the only prosecution witness is also the victim, we know how appallingly brutal the experience can be for the woman on the stand.
Worse still, recall how the surviving sister of Milly Dowler said that the most painful aspect of the trial of her sibling’s killer, the monstrous Levi Bellfield, was the way the defence lawyer cross-examined their father and mother, dragging them in open court through every aspect of their private and sexual lives. Naturally, there was never a question of the Dowlers not taking the stand in the trial of their 13-year-old daughter’s killer. Yet there are countless more cases in which it might be rather harder to persuade people — even injured parties — to act as prosecution witness.
The courtroom is, perhaps necessarily, an intimidating place. Yet after observing what has happened to my sister, the unchecked destructive licence given to the defence, and the equal and opposite lack of protection afforded by the CPS even as press columnists began to traduce their witness, I can only give this advice to anyone in a similar position and with a public reputation worth a damn: you’d be mad to do your civic duty.
My sister’s name, however, has not been cleared. On the contrary, in return for her doing her civic duty and agreeing to act as a witness for the Crown, it has been trashed unmercifully. The Grillo sisters’ defence was that Nigella had authorised their massive spree on haute-couture outfits and stays in five-star hotels in Paris and New York because the two knew she had “a drug habit” she feared her husband would discover — and she wanted to buy their silence. Charming. What readers may not know is that this was never part of their original defence (they refused all comment when first interviewed by the police). It was added many months later, close to the beginning of the trial — and then mysteriously leaked onto the internet.
The judge, Robin Johnson, had originally ruled this late addition to the defence as inadmissible. On the eve of the trial, after submission of a wild email written by Saatchi about Nigella’s alleged drug-taking (subsequently recanted under oath), Johnson reversed his decision. This guaranteed that his courtroom would become a wonderfully entertaining circus for the media.
My dear colleagues in the press could now, under privilege, report in front-page headlines every claim put by the Grillos’ lawyers about Nigella, however scurrilous — and relegate the prosecution case to a brief paragraph at the bottom of a page deep inside (if that). I don’t especially want to give examples, as this would merely repeat the farrago, but let one — from The Sun — give a flavour: “Nigella ‘like druggie on a council estate’.”
It is unreasonable, especially given the straitened circumstances of the industry, to expect newspapers to do anything other than choose the most sensational headlines. If I were editor of The Sun, I imagine I would have done something similar, and not given a second’s thought to legal balance, nor to the feelings of the witness — nor indeed to those of her two children, against whom deeply unpleasant accusations were also made by the defendants.
News reports are one thing. Opinion is quite another. I have been amazed by the tendentious columns about my sister that have been published during the trial, without any complaint by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Given that the defence’s revised plea was based on my sister’s “bad character”, any column that reinforced those claims should surely have been regarded as prejudicial to the prosecution case.
Again, I prefer to give only one example: Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. She wrote a column during the trial with an argument apparently designed to explain why Saatchi throttled Nigella in a public place, based on the assumption that the allegations of habitual drug-taking by my sister were true. In a conclusion simultaneously trite and vicious, Pearson described as “unappetising and rather desperate” the fact that Nigella had at the outset of the trial tweeted a hotcake recipe, adding: “Nigella cannot bake her way out of this.” Naturally I understand that for newspaper columnists, desperate to meet yet another deadline, human tragedy provides the ideal opportunity for a piece of hastily improvised moralising; but that self-righteousness depends (if the sensitive reader is not to feel nauseated) on some sort of relation to the truth.
As my sister observed after the case: “During the trial not one witness claimed to see me take drugs and not one of my three assistants was asked about these claims by the defence, despite being cross-examined at length. I did my civic duty, only to be maliciously vilified without the right to respond.” I was of course aware during the trial — and especially when I accompanied Nigella during her two days of evidence — just how surprised she was by the complete lack of protection afforded to a witness.
Her solitary encounter with the Crown was when, just before she gave evidence, the prosecuting counsel came into the witness room to say: “I hope you are happy with everything.” Nigella’s response — “‘Happy’ is not the word I would choose” — struck me, then and now, as an understatement. She had received no advice from the CPS at any stage, not the slightest support. She was not allowed to submit a statement from her GP of many years saying that she was not and never had been a habitual drug user. Like all witnesses, she was not allowed to have any legal advice about her evidence during the trial, whereas the defendants’ lawyers are allowed to consult their clients at any stage — as I observed on several occasions when I was in the courtroom.
It was also noticeable that the two defendants’ lawyers each spent hour after hour questioning my sister in minute detail over reams of credit card statements; they had not done the same thing to Saatchi, on whose company account these transactions had actually been made. The reason occurred to me only when each lawyer, very late on in their cross-examinations, began asking Nigella about her alleged use of drugs. They were employing the technique police interrogators use on hardened criminals — wear them down with hours of trivial and even pointless questions, so that when the big question comes up, they are too exhausted to think straight.
Of course, it is right that criminal defence lawyers do their utmost to get an acquittal for their clients. Yet in much more horrible cases than this one, such as rape trials where the only prosecution witness is also the victim, we know how appallingly brutal the experience can be for the woman on the stand.
Worse still, recall how the surviving sister of Milly Dowler said that the most painful aspect of the trial of her sibling’s killer, the monstrous Levi Bellfield, was the way the defence lawyer cross-examined their father and mother, dragging them in open court through every aspect of their private and sexual lives. Naturally, there was never a question of the Dowlers not taking the stand in the trial of their 13-year-old daughter’s killer. Yet there are countless more cases in which it might be rather harder to persuade people — even injured parties — to act as prosecution witness.
The courtroom is, perhaps necessarily, an intimidating place. Yet after observing what has happened to my sister, the unchecked destructive licence given to the defence, and the equal and opposite lack of protection afforded by the CPS even as press columnists began to traduce their witness, I can only give this advice to anyone in a similar position and with a public reputation worth a damn: you’d be mad to do your civic duty.
