Sleepless nights, cold sweats, hands trembling with fear of the prison door clanging shut. The thought of life behind bars and lifelong ostracism thereafter. The stress of waiting for the jury to deliver their verdict, knowing you are innocent but pessimistically expecting the worst.
Rape is a terrible crime and child rapists the lowest of the low. Monsters such as Jimmy Savile are rightly reviled but in my book those who falsely accuse innocent people of sexual abuse should be too. Even though acquitted, Le Vell will have been mentally scarred for life.
It is easy to invent such allegations; often difficult to disprove them, especially if they go back decades and it's just one person's word against another's. I know. It happened to me and my wife Christine.
It also happened to my friend Eddy Shah, acquitted of under-age sex charges only two months ago with his accuser proved to be a multiple and malicious liar. His life was put on hold for a year, his golf hotel ruined when customers shunned it following bad publicity over the charges and his legal costs eventually reached £800,000.
At least with "celebs" eventual acquittal gets headlines too but spare a thought for the unknowns. Their charges will have been front-page news locally but acquittal just a brief paragraph on an inside page.
Very few women are accused of rape.
But, devastatingly, Christine was accused too. We were both arrested, our house and car searched and computers seized. Our names, complete with all the gory details of the false allegations, were plastered over every newspaper and the story dominated TV and radio news for days on end. Our accuser Nadine Milroy-Sloan was just a gold-digger whom we had never met and never heard of. But unlike us she was entitled to anonymity. It was a criminal offence to identify her, even though she had a history of making false allegations against others. Her name did subsequently become known but only because she sold her story to the News of the World for £50,000, brokered by Max Clifford.
We were lucky. We had a cast-iron alibi and our accuser got a three-year prison sentence for attempting to pervert the course of justice. However this is unusual. In most cases, as with Michael Le Vell and Eddy Shah, innocent men are dragged through the mud while their accusers remain anonymous. The lies of false accusers put their victims at risk of years in prison and a lifetime on the sex offenders' register.
Why, uniquely, should such people be entitled to anonymity, perhaps to prey on some other innocent victim? We should never forget that every time a case collapses because of false accusations, it discredits the legal process and makes it harder to bring real sex offenders to justice.
We all want every rapist convicted but no legal system is perfect and innocent people are bound to be prosecuted
Also, since we are all innocent unless proven guilty, why should the accused person be named and shamed before conviction? So other possible victims will come forward? Maybe. In our case the mammoth publicity did partly help us as it elicited an independent witness who was able to corroborate our alibi.
But, usually, both parties are known to each other and there is no possibility of other victims of sexual misconduct appearing. In such cases where is the public interest in naming the accused until guilt is proved? Publishing court reports of lurid allegations on a daily basis can add immeasurably to the trauma. Even when someone is acquitted there will always be those who say "no smoke without fire".
Each case should be viewed on its merits by the judge and, if there is no public interest in identifying the accused, they should be entitled to anonymity too. Sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
Looking at the wider picture many women, perhaps under the influence of drink, have sex with men and regret it the next day. We all know about predatory bimbos hoping for a fast buck from accusing some wooden-top footballer of going too far. Improbably, one even tried to set me up once, wanting to meet up at a hotel supposedly so I could give her some legal advice. Fortunately, eagle-eyed Christine spotted the scam in time.
There are plenty of unscrupulous types, motivated by greed, hatred or revenge prepared to wreck someone's life, knowing that just making an allegation sets in motion a legal Leviathan very difficult to stop. They know that if they succeed they can claim compensation or sell their story. If they fail they are not likely to suffer because they have a right to remain anonymous.
We all want every rapist convicted but no legal system is perfect and innocent people are bound to be prosecuted. The test for the prosecutor is a realistic prospect of conviction and the test for the jury is whether the case is proved beyond all reasonable doubt having heard all the witnesses and weighed all the evidence. Having a case to answer is not the same as incontrovertible proof.
Since Savile the CPS seems to have lowered the bar for naming (and then not always prosecuting) those who are well-known.
The climate has changed and, rightly, more genuine victims now feel able to come forward. However celebrities should not be singled out for more draconian action just because of their fame.
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