Judge him on who he was, not who he is, Roache jury told
CORONATION Street star William Roache should be judged as the sex- obsessed heart-throb he once was and not the caring, gentle elderly man he has been presented as in court, his trial was told yesterday.
The 81-year-old, who has played Ken Barlow since the ITV soap started in 1960, may be ‘a lovely chap’ for whom co- stars had only good words, the prosecution told the jury.
But they had to ‘judge a man from a different time’ when deciding whether he committed sex offences against five girls during his heyday, when his fame and good looks made him feel ‘irresistible’, the court heard.
In her closing speech at Preston Crown Court, prosecutor Anne Whyte, QC, said: ‘By 1965 his instant stardom and the adulation he received daily from women massaged his sexual ego and he thought he was pretty irresistible. Women and his fans made him feel that way.
‘In the witness box he took great pains to present himself as a gentle and caring person of unlimited sensitivity, and his colleagues came along to say the same thing.
‘But we have to judge William Roache as he was in the 1960s when he was a young man with looks, fame and appetite.’ The prosecution claim he twice raped a schoolgirl at properties he owned in Lancashire.
He is also accused of indecently assaulting four other teenagers inside a dressing room or toilets at Granada Studios in Manchester, where Coronation Street was filmed, or in his car.
Referring to the alleged offences, Miss Whyte suggested Roache’s star status as a young actor meant it had probably not been difficult for him ‘to persuade himself that he was so attractive he was not really doing something so wrong’.
In addition, his self- confessed infidelity to first wife Anne Cropper during this period illustrated how had become ‘a sexual risk taker’. She said he had considered his fame ‘put him out of reach’ of anyone he targeted complaining, allowing him to act with impunity.
‘He simply thought that because of the times in which he operated that they would not report it and he was right,’ she added.
Two of the alleged victims are sisters, but otherwise they do not know one another, the jury has been told.
‘Someone is lying,’ Miss Whyte told them yesterday. ‘He either did it or he did not. He is lying or literally all of them are.’
If he was telling the truth, he was the victim of a ‘huge, distorted and perverse witch hunt’. She continued: ‘Who, of all the witnesses, is most used to rehearsing what he has to say and sticking to his script?’ Was it one of the women making the allegations, she asked, ‘Or is it the actor William Roache, a man who has spent his entire life learning lines and delivering them for public consumption?’
Telling the jury to disregard the evidence of other celebrity witnesses, such as Anne Kirkbride who plays Ken’s wife Deirdre, she urged them to keep their emotions out of their deliberations.
‘You may well have natural sympathy for Mr Roache, who is an elderly gentleman facing matters which happened many moons ago,’ she said. ‘But the criminal justice system is about courage and we ask you to approach your task with the same courage as these complainants.’
Roache, from Wilmslow, Cheshire, denies two counts of rape and four counts of indecent assault against five girls aged 16 and under from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.
He has been found not guilty of a further count of indecent assault against one of the girls on the direction of the judge.
The trial continues, with defence counsel Louise Blackwell, QC, giving her closing speech today.