Clifford said: ‘No one will believe you.’ Now I can tell the world who I am... and what he did
Her evidence convinced the judge to give sex abuser 8 years. THE EX-DANCER WHOSE ACCOUNT OF HORROR ATTACK WAS KEY TO PROVING CLIFFORD’S GUILT
WHEN Sharon Elliott stepped into the witness box and stared across the courtroom at the man in the dock who had abused her 30 years ago, she noticed a familiar smirk on the face of Max Clifford.
It was the same expression she had seen once before, just moments after the PR guru and sexual predator had brutally stolen her innocence in a nightclub toilet cubicle, sneering: ‘Don’t bother telling anyone – they won’t believe you.’
For decades, those words would haunt Sharon, transforming a bubbly 18-year-old dancer with dreams of stardom into a depressed young woman who was forced to abandon her plans for the stage and who could never trust a man again.
Cruelly tricking her with the promise of an entrée to Hollywood, Clifford subjected her to a terrifying indecent assault, leaving her near-suicidal. On Friday at Southwark Crown Court, Judge Anthony Leonard QC especially condemned 71-year-old Clifford for telling Sharon she would never be believed, and made it clear as he jailed him for eight years that Clif-
‘He ruined my dreams – I felt so ashamed’
ford’s contempt for his victims and lack of remorse had only increased the sentence.
Yesterday, Sharon, now 48 – alone among Clifford’s confirmed victims – waived her right to anonymity to tell her story. ‘When I heard the judge’s words, I felt vindicated,’ she said in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday.
‘The eight-year sentence is a positive result for us women and when I heard the judge condemn Clifford for what he said to me, I felt I’d got justice. Clifford’s words back then put fear in me – I was a young girl and there was this man of my father’s age telling me that no one would believe me and I thought, “That’s right, no one will”. Clifford destroyed my dreams of stardom and was able to steal 30 years of my life because I felt guilty and ashamed. Now he’s the guilty one and I won’t let him take any more years from me.’
Clifford’s attack on Sharon in 1984 was one of only two offences upon which the jury agreed a unanimous guilty verdict following a six-week trial. But Sharon said coming face-to-face with Clifford in court evoked not hatred, but pity. Her compassion is all the more remarkable as Clifford showed not an ounce of remorse during his trial, contemptuously dismissing his accusers as ‘liars, fantasists and silly little girls’. Often during intensely intimate evidence from witnesses, he would make sceptical expressions or play with his phone. Sharon said she ‘cried all night’ before it was her turn to give evidence. It was her daughter, Imogen, 25, an illustrator, who gave her the courage to go on. ‘I felt he’s a powerful man – am I strong enough?’ she said. ‘I wanted to look him in the eye. I saw him smirking when I gave evidence and trying to trivialise the offence and the horrors that myself and the other women had gone through. It was all part of his attempt to undermine us as witnesses.
‘I wanted to see if there was any remorse, but there wasn’t. It just made it clear to me that he had no feelings at all about any of this.
‘I’ve seen that look before, when he told me after the assault that there was no point in telling anyone because no one would believe me.
‘I don’t get any pleasure to think of Clifford alone in his cell, but this had to happen and it sends a powerful message – it’s telling victims that they must speak up and be heard, and this shouldn’t be ignored or taken light-heartedly. This incident ruined my life because I was at a very impressionable age and it made me feel worthless.’
She also pointed out that she is around the same age as Clifford’s daughter Louise – ‘How would he feel if someone treated her the same way as he behaved towards me?’
When the verdict came through, Sharon admitted she cried with relief and hugged Imogen.
‘I’m happier now than I have been in 30 years. It’s as if a massive cloud has just gone. I can now live my life and not think of the skeleton which was hidden away.
‘I was too scared for years and it blighted my life, but now I’m finally free of that.’
Convent-educated Sharon, whose father, Jamaican-born Sydney Elliott, was a reggae singer, was deter-
‘He was smirking as I gave my evidence’
mined to go to stage school. But when her father suffered a fatal heart attack on stage, she was forced to seek work instead aged 17.
Talented Sharon soon secured a job as a dancer on a cable TV show called Sky Trax, with DJ Pat Sharp, which was filmed at the Xenon nightclub in London’s Piccadilly.
‘I loved dancing and also wanted to act,’ she recalled. ‘So when I was spotted and asked to come into the club for an audition for a new dance touring act, I was so excited. This was potentially a huge break for me.’ The daytime audition went well, and it was while she was packing away her belongings, still in her dance outfit, that she was approached by Clifford, who had been sitting in the corner of the near-deserted club with three men.
‘I had no idea who he was, but he was polite and complimented my dancing and asked if I could act. Of course, I said yes and he mentioned something about a James Bond movie he’d been involved in – I think it was Octopussy.
‘He went off to make a phone call, beckoned me over and handed me the receiver, and then left the room. The person on the other end had a soft American accent. He said he was [Bond producer] Cubby Broccoli and that Max Clifford thought I could be a Bond girl.
‘He asked me if I danced and if I sang. He also asked me for my vital statistics, which was normal so I gave them. He said I seemed perfect but I had to do something else before he agreed to the screen test. He asked if Max Clifford was circumcised and asked me to look.
‘I thought it was a joke. I kind of froze, but he said it again. Then Max Clifford was standing next to me, staring at me. It had either been him on the phone, or he’d arranged for
someone else to do it. Then I realised that I was stuck downstairs inside this club not just with one man, but the other men who were sitting at the table.’
Clifford took her hand and led the terrified teenager into a male toilet cubicle and locked the door, standing with his back to it to prevent her escaping. ‘I was absolutely pet- rified and thought he was going to rape me,’ Sharon said. ‘I was about 7½ stone at the time, and he was a stocky, fairly powerful man.’
Clifford ordered her to perform a sex act on him while he pawed at her leotard and groped her breasts.
‘He was so calm – it was like a walk in the park for him. He warned me that there was no point in telling
How would he feel if someone had treated his daughter the way he behaved to me?
anyone, that no one would believe me. Those words stayed with me for the next 30 years.’
Afterwards, Sharon pushed past him and ran to the nearest Tube station. ‘I cried all the way home, feeling such a fool for getting into that situation,’ she said. ‘I hid and could not face telling my mother. I buried it.’
Sharon did join the dance act, but within months, the attentions of another lecherous man, combined with the traumatic legacy of Clifford’s assault, led her to scrap her plans of stardom.
Instead of following her dream of appearing in a Shakespearean drama, Sharon set off for a kibbutz in Israel, where she tried to blank out her pain in a miasma of marijuana and alcohol. Returning to the UK aged 19, she was diagnosed with clinical depression, which her family assumed sprang from the loss of her father. Sharon later embarked on a series of temporary jobs as a personal assistant in London, never wanting to remain too long in one place.
Aged 23, Sharon became pregnant by a director at an advertising agency where she worked. ‘He was older than me, but he was a nice guy,’ she recalled. ‘I just couldn’t trust any man at that time.
‘I moved in with him and had my daughter, then when she was just six weeks old, I ran out with her and left him. I had no money and nowhere to go, so I went to a women’s refuge, then later lived in a caravan. I was just so lost really, but didn’t know where to turn.
‘I took Imogen away from her father at six weeks, and he’d done nothing wrong. I was always so stressed and depressed and I just wanted to tell people what had happened to me but I felt I couldn’t.
‘I did not realise that I was acting this way because of what I’d been through. I often think about who I would be if that had not happened.’
Fighting back tears, she added: ‘I feel so wretched for all the people I’ve hurt in the last 30 years in relationships I couldn’t sustain. They simply wanted to love me and I wouldn’t let them. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want anonymity, because I don’t know where these people are now, and I’d like them to know I’m sorry.’
Sharon, who now works as a clairvoyant, cannot remember exactly when she first recognised Clifford’s face on television, but believes it may have been at the time of former cabinet minister David Mellor’s affair in 1992 with Antonia de Sancha – the PR man represented the actress.
However, it was not until Clifford appeared on TV two years ago to discuss the Jimmy Savile scandal that Sharon plucked up the courage to tell friends what had happened to her. They urged her to go to the police, but she still didn’t feel strong enough. It was only when the PR man was arrested that she contacted Scotland Yard officers.
‘When I was telling them about the Cubby Broccoli trick, I noticed the detectives exchanged glances, but they wouldn’t tell me why. It was only after the trial that they were able to tell me that Clifford used the same trick with other women.’
Then Sharon faced another tough task – revealing her plight to daughter Imogen, who, like Clifford’s daughter Louise, suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. ‘I was so worried that she would say that something like that had happened to her – the bottom of my world would have fallen out,’ said Sharon. ‘Instead she said, “Your dark days make sense now.” And when I was talking to her about my depression she said, “I used to think it was me, Mummy.”’
Weeping, Sharon added: ‘That was such an awful thing to hear, to think that a little girl thought it was her fault. I should be her rock, but at times she’s been mine.’