EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
I was so careful to make sure our sex felt special for her . . . but she’s not who I blame for my hell
FOREMOST among the values instilled in Liam Allan by his mother was compassion. The 22-year-old undergraduate was encouraged to offer succour to those in need, just as he was taught to treat women with respect. But in truth, says his mother, chivalry and courtesy came naturally to him.
So when he became romantically involved with a troubled teenager – the young woman who would later accuse him of six counts of rape – he couldn’t have been more supportive.
One thing that concerned the girl was entering into a sexual relationship. ‘I was her first so I wanted to do everything I could to make her feel comfortable,’ says Liam, in an interview with The Mail on Sunday. ‘You want to make sure that it’s important and special, and every fear and worry is gone before you do it.
‘I didn’t want her to regret it because nobody ever wants anyone to regret their first time.’
Growing up without a father figure in a predominantly female household gave Liam a ‘feminine perspective’. He says: ‘Most people I get on with and consider close friends are women, so for me it was about respect. That was the most important thing.’
While other young men in his position might try to pressure a girl into bed, Liam was trying to do the right thing.
‘It was typical of him,’ says his mother Lorraine, a 46-year-old bank worker. ‘We also had conversations about it. I knew about the first time and what was happening. Liam is very open and told me everything. I consider him my best friend.’
Liam met the young woman at a social gathering, having been introduced by mutual friends.
At all times, Liam says, their sexual relationship was consensual. Nothing happened ever to suggest it caused her distress. Quite the opposite, he insists – they found it mutually fulfilling.
Liam says: ‘After the first time, from that moment on, it was just happiness. It’s the most intimate you can be with someone, so once you get past that barrier of doing it, there was reassurance. She felt
Most people I consider close friends are women
It’s a terrible form of limbo – I didn’t sleep for two years
comfortable and special and it actually did mean something.’
In truth, he has always known she was mentally fragile. ‘I knew she had had problems and I couldn’t just turn my back,’ says Liam.
‘If I had to sacrifice my time to look after her then I would. There were issues I didn’t sometimes know how to help with but I would never have tried to palm it off on someone else.’
Still a teenager, Liam was left ‘drained’. After starting a criminology and criminal psychology course at Greenwich University, he decided to end the relationship. The girl was upset but not, he says, beyond the normal parameters of a break-up.
He says: ‘It was a fresh start, a fascinating subject, and I quickly acquired a great group of friends.’
But in January last year, three months after his course began, he was arrested in front of his mother after returning home from playing football.
Officers had sat in a police car waiting, watching until he had arrived at his mother’s house.
‘My mind was a whirl. When I was given some idea of what I was being accused of I was just left feeling staggered,’ he says.
The young woman, who has anonymity for life, had gone to police claiming she had been a virgin who didn’t like being intimate with men. She claimed Liam raped her six times between September 2014 and August 2015, holding her arms back to prevent her struggling and on one occasion tying her to a bedpost and putting a pillow on her face.
During his interview with police Liam co-operated fully, hopeful that everything would be resolved swiftly. But the notion that he would be troubled for only a few hours soon evaporated.
In all, his ordeal was to last nearly two years.
It is to his credit that Liam expends little venom on his accuser. She could have ruined his life, he concedes, and he has ‘no sympathy’ for her, but beyond that he prefers to direct his anger at the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Even then, he declines to point a finger at any individual in particular.
According to Liam the approach to investigating rape and sexual offences needs to be overhauled, as much for the benefit of women whose claims are genuine as the men who are falsely accused.
Perhaps his accuser was motivated by vengeance; he doesn’t know for sure. ‘I think it started with a little white lie she told to a friend and her boyfriend at the time,’ he says.
‘But it completely spiralled out of control and it became a story she had to stick to. She completely lost control of what happened.
‘I would say that the two people she had told this lie to added fuel to the fire to the point where she couldn’t go back on it.’
For more than a year, Liam waited for news but each time he spoke to the officer in charge there was no update. ‘It was a terrible form of limbo,’ he says. ‘For two years I haven’t slept properly. But I kept going.
‘The support from friends was fantastic, no one believed for one minute that I was guilty.
‘No one treated me differently, no one gave me funny looks at university.
‘I just had to carry on – even writing essays about rape as part of my degree.’
For his mother, the strain was almost intolerable. ‘He’s such a sensitive, good-looking boy that I just knew he wouldn’t be able to cope with prison,’ says Lorraine.
‘He would have been sexually assaulted and he would have been returned to me a different person; broken. I couldn’t come to terms with that. I couldn’t contemplate it.’
Her fears intensified when he was charged in March with six rapes and one sexual assault. Believing he might be remanded in custody, mother and son said their goodbyes. ‘It was heartbreaking,’ Lorraine recalls.
Liam adds: ‘My life was completely upended. There were points where I felt completely alone because of what I was going through but you have to act strong for your family.
‘I didn’t tell my mum that I was feeling awful. It’s harder in some respects for friends and family to watch and have to go through it.’
In July, his legal team requested copies of text messages between Liam and his accuser, certain they would support his version of events. But they were told a month later that there were ‘no relevant downloads’.
And so the case headed for trial. Liam was told that his accuser wouldn’t be in court but would give evidence via video link.
In the event, to Liam’s shock, she appeared at Croydon Crown Court from behind a screen.
‘Because of what I’d been told there was never a point where I thought I had to mentally prepare myself to be in the same room. So there was no time to
prepare,’ he says. ‘We had two-and-a-half years of no contact and then suddenly we were in the same room again and every emotion suddenly came to the surface. There was anger and pure confusion. My whole body was shaking. You have so many questions you would love to ask.
‘ “What are you doing? What’s the game? Where’s the end for you? Why did this start?”
‘That all comes to the surface and at the same time you have 12 jurors watching every bit of body language: every smile, tear, and every action and judging whether it’s right or wrong.’
The woman gave evidence for an hour-and-a-half before the case began to unravel and then spectacularly collapsed.
The police had failed to disclose to the defence a series of text messages from his accuser detailing her secret fantasies about being raped and choked during sex.
First though, his legal team led by barrister Julia Smart had to find them among a disk containing more than 40,000 messages. ‘Julia stayed up nearly all night working on it and was able to present some of the incriminating messages in court next day,’ says Liam. ‘She was fantastic.’
After another trawl revealed yet more damning evidence the judge called a two-week adjournment, during which the Crown Prosecution Service finally caved in.
Liam heard the news from his solicitor, Simone Meerabux.
‘Simone rang me on December 7,’ he recalls. ‘I was bracing myself for bad news because up until then it had all been bad news. She had told me that the CPS had decided to drop the whole case and for a second I was speechless and then I just started screaming the whole house down. And then everyone started coming round to the house to congratulate and hug me.’
Liam is now back at university after the trial, his life no longer on hold, though still without an apology from the police and CPS.
Still the decent young man he always was, he declares: ‘I am hoping to use my experience to help change system failures for the benefit of both victims and falsely accused people together.’