Tormented teenager who finally had her revenge on Clifford
Pictured for the first time, middle-class girl who exposed predatory PR man – 35 years after he abused her at 15
MAX CLIFFORD was playing his favourite role — the big shot with a hotline to the stars — when 15-year-old Cathy Johnson met him at his office in New Bond Street.
The teenager had been introduced to him a few weeks earlier while on holiday in Spain with her parents and had made the appointment after Clifford had suggested they meet to discuss ‘opportunities’. His opening line was typical Clifford bluster: he could make her Britain’s answer to Jodie foster.
Clifford waved away Cathy’s doubtful ‘But I can’t act’ with a dismissive: ‘Anyone can act.’ He then cut to the chase. ‘Take your top off,’ he said brusquely. When Cathy hesitated, he said she was being ridiculous and childish.
This is how things worked in the film business, he announced. Your body had to be looked over, assessed. Cathy reluctantly took her top off, then Clifford persuaded her to take her bra off and made a derogatory remark about her breasts, before concluding: ‘But that’s fine.’
The schoolgirl left the office crimson-faced and mortified. The 1977 meeting was the start of four months of sexual abuse at Clifford’s hands, which ended only after the traumatised youngster threatened to commit suicide. for more than 30 years, consumed by shame and self-loathing, Cathy kept the abuse to herself. But the trauma never left her and eventually she went for counselling before writing a powerful letter to Clifford asking if he was proud of being a child abuser.
Then, when she heard him pontificating about child abuse on TV in late 2012, she knew she had to finally report him to the police. The revelation that allegations had been made against Clifford prompted a total of 23 women to come forward, though the trial involved charges relating to only seven of them.
Although she spoke briefly last week, this is the first time Cathy has talked in detail about the abuse. We have changed her name, but she has bravely agreed to release a selection of photographs of her as a young woman.
Yesterday, she sat in the public gallery of Southwark Crown Court with her sister and watched as Clifford was jailed for eight years for eight counts of indecent assault.
It was the first time she had seen him in more than 35 years. during the trial, she gave evidence from behind a screen because she could not face looking at her attacker.
But Clifford’s conviction — and Cathy’s overwhelming relief that the jury believed her account of events over her attacker’s — emboldened her.
She says when ‘pathetic-looking’ Clifford shuffled into the courtroom looking a broken man, she felt a surge of power.
‘I felt very much in control because I knew the truth, and now everybody in the courtroom knew the truth, too.
‘When he came into the court he bizarrely looked me straight in the eye and said: “Good morning.” It was an unreal moment.
‘I am disappointed that ultimately Mr Clifford could not bring himself to apologise to his victims and continued to shake his head and show contempt for the court.
‘I never wanted to hope for such a long sentence, but it was the right one. It is a fair sentence for what he did.’
Now 51, Cathy is married with two teenage children and holds a senior position in the NHS. She lives with her family in a large house in southern england. She is very comfortably off, the epitome of respectability. The idea that she and his other victims are bimbo ‘ compensation chasers’, as Clifford suggested, would be laughable were it not so insulting.
Cathy met Clifford in the summer of 1977, on holiday with her parents at a Pontinental hotel in Torremolinos. She was 15, an unworldly girl, a virgin, the daughter of a sales director and his wife, a civil servant, with an older sister. The family lived in a comfortable house in SouthWest London.
‘He got talking to my parents around the pool one day,’ recalls Cathy. ‘ He said he was there accompanying a singer.
‘I was 15 and he was in his 30s, so to me he was a middle-aged man. My parents spoke to him a couple of times. He suggested we contact him when we went back to the UK to discuss work opportunities, maybe some modelling.’
By the time she returned home Cathy had forgotten all about Max Clifford. But then a couple of weeks later she took a call from a man calling himself Terry Miller (the prosecution said this was Clifford).
‘He said he was a showbiz agent who’d seen my name on a list of people Max Clifford had made and did I realise how important he was.’
AFTER a conversation with her mother about Clifford, she made an appointment to see him. ‘I was very nervous. I was a very unconfident girl and didn’t think I was pretty.
‘He was sitting behind a large desk — I felt intimidated. When he told me to take my top and bra off I felt really helpless. I did it because he made me feel childish and ridiculous. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened — I was too ashamed.
‘But I thought, that’s it, it’s over. I believed what he said about it being a normal part of the process.’
A week later, Clifford phoned the house to suggest taking Cathy out to discuss film opportunities. He turned up at the family home in his yellow Jaguar and was invited in for drinks by her parents.
‘My parents liked him, he seemed very respectable,’ says Cathy.
Clifford took her to a pub — he was in the process of fixing up meetings with industry people for her, he told her — and then drove down a dark street and stopped the car. There he told her to perform a sex act on him.
‘I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘When I resisted he said I had to trust him, he had to get inside my mind. Until that point I’d had one kiss in my life, with a boy on a school trip. After Clifford was finished with me that night, I felt dirty and horrible.
‘I was terrified my parents would find out. They were strict and I feared they would throw me out. I was totally out of my depth. Clifford told me I mustn’t say anything about what we were doing to anyone.’
for the next four months, Cathy saw Clifford every couple of weeks.
‘Once he took me to the Playboy Club in Park Lane. And once to a Chinese restaurant in South-West London,’ she says. ‘He did all the talking, name-dropping all the time. He had a wife and daughter but he didn’t talk about them. Then he’d drive somewhere, down a dark street, or to a car park, and abuse me.
‘He was very controlling. Sometimes I would try to argue myself out of the situation, but I just felt unable to defend myself. The man frightened me. I felt sick with fear. I had no one to turn to, and could see no way out of it.’
After Cathy told Clifford she admired Julie Christie, he tried an extraordinary new ploy. He said he had spoken to the actress about her and she had said he should take Cathy’s virginity so she would ‘fall in love with him’. ‘I think that was his plan, certainly,’ she says.
One afternoon during the October half-term, Clifford picked her up, took her to a lingerie shop and instructed her to buy a black Wonderbra. ‘He said we were going to practise acting,’ she says.
‘Then he drove me to a house somewhere in the London area and let himself in. A young man in his 20s appeared and said hello, then went into the kitchen.
‘Clifford told me to go into the bathroom and put the bra on. When I came out he said, pointing to the man in the kitchen: “I want you to seduce him to see if you’re a good actress.” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. I went to the man and put my hand on his shoulder.
‘Then I froze. I whispered to the man: “He’s making me do this.” He didn’t reply, but the impression I had was that he was embarrassed.
‘I got dressed and we left. Clifford took me home. He said nothing about what had taken place.’
Later, Clifford inflicted further anguish by telling Cathy a photographer had taken compromising pictures of them at a car park.
‘He was flippant, laughing. He said the photos were so close up you could see my freckles. I was horrified. He said the photographer had copies but he was trying to get them. I was beside myself. It was all that occupied my head space.
‘every morning I woke with this sick feeling that this picture might appear in the newspaper and my parents would see it.
‘I began to contemplate suicide. There is a bridge over a main road near where we lived, where people had committed suicide, and I started to think that’s what I would do.
‘It was a control thing, I think. Maybe he got a kick out of it, sexual gratification. He enjoyed having
power over someone who was vulnerable. I told him I wanted to kill myself and he said I was being ridiculous and stupid.’
And this is when Clifford’s visits to Cathy’s house stopped.
‘When I realised that was it, he wasn’t coming back, I felt reborn,’ she says. ‘I thought: “I haven’t passed the acting test or whatever the test was — and thank God for that.” But I felt dirty and defiled, devalued, spoiled. It affected my self- esteem. I’d deceived my parents. I was a liar and a cheat. I felt hugely culpable and complicit.’
Why does Cathy think Clifford stopped it? ‘He realised it was dangerous. You know, I’d actually convinced myself he stopped it because there was some emotion, he cared.
‘It was only when I had counselling that the counsellor told me he stopped it because he was afraid he was going to get found out.’
The abuse continued to haunt her. In a way, it defined her, though outwardly no one would have known.
‘I did have boyfriends, I had a good job, but the abuse was always there. These had been my first sexual experiences,’ she says. ‘As time went on Clifford became more highprofile and I’d come across him on the TV playing the family man, with this veneer of respectability, and that made me really angry.’
In the early Nineties, Cathy married her husband, an engineer. She told him she had been abused as a child, but not who by. In 1998, she finally found the courage to confide in a friend. Then three years ago, she had counselling.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to say his name at first,’ she says. ‘I said he was someone high-profile.
‘The counselling made me realise that as a child myself I was not equipped to deal with child grooming. It wasn’t my fault.’
THIS was when Cathy sent the anonymous letter to Clifford that was read out in court. ‘I wanted him to know what I’d suffered,’ she says. ‘I actually thought about confronting him in person but I was still afraid of him so a friend suggested a letter.
‘Writing it was cathartic but I was so afraid that I drove a long distance to post it so there would be no way for him to trace me.’
She wrote: ‘I wondered if you remembered, as I do, the child sexual abuse you engaged in? You took pleasure in degrading me . . . abusing me . . . and returning me to my home with a story so my parents didn’t become suspicious . . . so they would be fooled their daughter was in safe hands and not those of a paedophile.
‘You made my life a living hell. I had no one to turn to. You were very clever. An A+ in grooming children. How proud you must be.’
Far from being ashamed of the letter, the jury heard that Clifford kept it by his bed — as if it were some depraved trophy.
In 2012, Cathy’s mother died (her father had died several years earlier). ‘After I had counselling, I thought about telling my mother, but it would just have caused her pain,’ says Cathy.
‘She would have felt responsible. People say in these historical abuse cases: “Why did the victims wait so long to go to the police?” For me, it was because of my parents. I simply could not do it while they were alive. After my mother died, I began to think about reporting him.’
She may not have gone through with it had Clifford not, in response to the Jimmy Savile scandal, began popping up on TV to have his twopenny’s worth. During these appearances, he said young girls were prone to throwing themselves at celebrities and argued that the investigating of historical abuse claims should not turn into a ‘celebrity witch hunt’. Well he would, wouldn’t he? In October 2012, Cathy went to her local police station and made a short statement before later having a statement taken by two female officers from the Metropolitan Police. Within weeks, Clifford was arrested. At this point Cathy took the difficult step of telling her husband and children, who were wholeheartedly supportive.
Despite the growing weight of the claims against Clifford, Cathy still had to endure watching him engagage in what he does best — his own PR, defending himself on TV. ‘ He said it was all lies,’ she says. ‘That was wrong. He should not have been given a platform to potentially influence a jury.
‘The police were brilliant. But your name is read out in court for all to hear. I attended court for two days and during that week I lost half a stone.
‘During the six-and-a-half hours questioning I had a bucket beside me in case I was sick. I had to take sleeping pills to sleep.
‘Obviously, I was worried he might be acquitted. Had he been, it would have been difficult to come to terms with, but my conscience would have been clear. After today, though, I can try to draw a line under it.’
The fee for this article is being donated to a charity for victims of sexual abuse.