How Cliff was smeared by a serial rapist, a blackmailer and even a dodgy clergyman...
The real crime, as this dossier reveals, is that police ever took them seriously
‘Police were terrified NOT to
investigate’ ‘Malicious false accusers must be prosecuted’
BACK in 1981, Cliff Richard filmed a video for his song Wired For Sound in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes. In it, the then 41-year-old singer appeared on roller skates and dressed top-to-toe in leather. You can still watch the video on YouTube, where it has been viewed almost half a million times.
One can only presume it was this internet archive that inspired a man Cliff calls the ‘roller skate guy’ to make one of the more absurd of the accusations of sexual abuse that the singer has had to endure in the past two years.
Only last week was the 75-year-old star completely exonerated.
It was in February 2015 that ‘roller skate guy’ alleged to police that, as a 21-year-old, he had twice been sexually assaulted by Cliff Richard in a clothes shop in Milton Keynes. He claimed the singer had been wearing roller skates during both of the attacks.
‘Apparently, I roller-skated into a shop, then roller-skated out,’ an incredulous Cliff told the Mail this week in an exclusive interview about his ordeal. ‘Two hours later I returned — still on roller skates — and groped him again. ‘Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? ‘Surely, if it were true, he would only have had to push me in the chest and I would have fallen over?’
The evidence of the video certainly suggests that Cliff was not an accomplished skater in 1981. Yet that is but one question mark over this fantastical account of an illegal sexual assault carried out by one of music’s biggest names, despite the fact he was being filmed.
‘Roller skate guy’ was not the first to make sexual allegations against Cliff Richard.
Over several febrile months in 2014-15, no fewer than nine individuals came forward to say they had been molested by Cliff in the distant past. In one case, we understand, the past was very distant: a supposed incident in Coventry 58 years ago! We know now that none of their allegations stands up to serious examination. But one police force with an already bankrupt reputation was ready to listen. In fact, it was prepared to allow the singer to be, as he puts it, ‘hung out like live bait’ to attract even more spurious claims.
‘South Yorkshire Police were going to pick up anything that was put on their desk and put it to Cliff,’ someone close to the case told us this week.
‘They were terrified not to investigate anything. It was quite astonishing some of the matters they were prepared to entertain.’
The force called it ‘Operation Kaddie’ and the ‘investigation’ lasted almost two years before files were sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. It took the CPS no more than a month to throw out the four cases that the police deemed were strong enough to progress.
So how could these false accusers be allowed to waste so much police time and money — and destroy a prominent individual’s reputation in the process?
Today, the Mail can tell the story of how Cliff was smeared by an assortment of fantasists, rapists, obsessed fans, blackmailers, attention seekers and even a dodgy ‘minister’.
Yet, as self-proclaimed ‘victims’, all will have their identities protected for ever under the current law.
For that reason, we cannot name the accusers or give such details about them that might breach their anonymity. To do otherwise would invite prosecution. In one particular case, such ‘protection’ is galling in the extreme, as we shall see.
To understand Cliff’s ordeal, we must view it through the prism of the hysteria that followed the exposure of Jimmy Savile as a prolific paedophile. In October 2012, Operation Yewtree was launched by the Metropolitan Police to investigate Savile’s crimes.
That inquiry soon encompassed alleged paedophile offences by a number of other prominent individuals. Some, like PR agent Max Clifford and pop star Gary Glitter, were convicted and jailed.
Others, like DJ Paul Gambaccini, would be accused, investigated, found to be innocent and eventually exonerated, though not before suffering much stress and reputational damage.
One thing was clear: beset by the furore over a failure to do anything about Savile during his lifetime, police were determined to pursue any allegation against a celebrity, however historic or flimsy. And the motivations of the accusers were not always pure. Justice began to suffer as a result. The first allegation against Cliff was made in April 2014. It concerned a claim of sexual assault against a youth at a rally in Sheffield for the American Christian evangelist Billy Graham in 1983.
As Cliff told the Mail this week, even the alleged year was wrong. In fact, the Billy Graham rally did not take place in Sheffield until two years later.
But the alleged location was the reason that South Yorkshire Police became involved in the singer’s life. It was to prove a bitter experience.
In August 2014, following the false historic Sheffield allegation, South Yorkshire Police officers — in conjunction with members of the local Thames Valley Force — raided Cliff’s home in Berkshire.
Waiting outside the gates was a BBC News camera team. The Corporation had been tipped off by police sources and so was able to provide exclusive live coverage of the search of the singer’s property. It would be beamed around the world. Cliff watched it, horrified, from Portugal, where he was on holiday.
This carefully choreographed event was the catalyst for the accusations which followed.
One of the new accusers was a man we shall call Mr A.
If ‘roller skate guy’ made the most bizarre false allegation, then the most outrageous were surely made by Mr A, a serial violent sex offender and rapist who is a continued danger to the public.
Again, Mr A’s identity, while known to the Mail, is protected by the Sexual Offences Act, behind which he can waste police time and make baseless but deeply damaging accusations against the innocent.
While in custody, Mr A took note as Labour’s Tom Watson, who is now the British party’s deputy leader, made a string of sensational allegations of VIP child abuse using the privilege afforded to MPs in the House of Commons. Many of Mr Watson’s now discredited claims concerned alleged events at Elm Guest House in south-west London in the 1980s.
Cliff was among a number of celebrities to be falsely linked on the internet with abuse at the small hotel, which was a popular haunt of gay men.
A handwritten list of famous names — politicians, pop stars, spies and senior clergymen — was hawked about by conspiracy theorists as proof of an establishment paedophile plot.
Aside from the MP Cyril Smith, who was revealed after his death to be a prolific attacker of young boys, there was little proof that any of those named had actually been there.
But Mr A constructed a story in which, as a boy, he was molested by Cliff at, yes, Elm Guest House, in 1982. The ‘ordeal’ was what had turned him into a sexual predator, he claimed.
He told the Sun newspaper that he had been interviewed around 30 times by South Yorkshire and Metropolitan Police officers about the Cliff Richard allegations. But he was only able to offer vague details about what he alleged took place.
The same is true of another accuser who, after seeing the BBC coverage of the police raid on Cliff’s home, approached one of the singer’s aides in an attempt to commit blackmail.
He said he would make sexual accusations against Cliff unless he was paid off.
With savage irony, he was arrested and questioned about the blackmail by one police force, but then interviewed about his abuse claims by the South Yorkshire force, which initially took them seriously.
It turned out that the man had mental health issues.
Yet despite the nature of these accusers, the weight of allegations, however flimsy, was accruing. Among them were those made by the man Cliff called ‘roller skate guy’. This week, the singer revealed to the Mail that the man had become a ‘religious minister’ since the alleged assault.
Little wonder that Cliff is now
calling for a change in the law so that malicious liars would not be protected by anonymity if they are proved to have told untruths.
‘Yes, if they are of a certain age, if they are under-age, then of course they should have anonymity,’ he says. ‘There’s no problem with that. But … why would you want to protect a 50-year-old who is maliciously maligning my name?’
In April, Lowell Goddard, Chair of the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse set up by the British government last year, issued a statement in which she addressed this issue.
She said: ‘I am committed to ensuring that we hear all relevant testimony, including from victims and survivors, as well as from those affected by false allegations of abuse.
‘The Inquiry intends to explore the balance which must be struck between encouraging the reporting of child sexual abuse and protecting the rights of the accused.’ We shall see what happens. Another high-profile figure who suffered a similar fate to Cliff is BBC Radio 2 presenter Paul Gambaccini, 67 — a close friend of the singer — who was cleared of false historic sex allegations after spending a year on police bail.
His ordeal started in October 2013, when police arrested him at his home in the early hours following allegations made by two men whom Gambaccini had no recollection of ever meeting.
In his first public comments since Cliff was cleared, Gambaccini told us this week: ‘Cliff Richard is one of the greatest Englishmen of the 20th century. His persecution has been one of the greatest scandals of the 21st. Everyone who loves Cliff Richard should support his call for law reform so that the police can never conduct a witch-hunt again. First and foremost is anonymity [for the suspect] before charge. ‘However, there is a second point. ‘If they had learned anything from my case, it should have been to do “due diligence” on the accuser before sending large numbers of police officers into someone’s home.
‘Clearly South Yorkshire Police were not doing “due diligence” on Cliff’s accusers. In the light of this case, my case and that of others, it is now obvious that malicious false accusers must either be prosecuted or offered medical treatment.’
Even now, we understand, Cliff has not been formally told which of the allegations laid against him were sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.
Critics within the police of the inquiries conducted against the singer say that after the Savile scandal, detectives became ‘fascinated with celebrity’.
‘It is not the case that they are eager to believe [accusers],’ said one senior detective. ‘It is that they just don’t want to disbelieve them.
‘There can be no greater example of this than the claim, taken seriously by police, that Cliff abused a boy while wearing a pair of roller skates.’