SALMOND IN THE DOCK
▪ Ex-First Minister’s ‘apology for behaviour’ to woman he’s accused of sexually assaulting ▪ Scottish Government official tells trial women were warned ‘not to work alone’ with him
‘As I crossed the room, he said: “Get on the bed”’ ‘I was finding it extremely difficult to talk about’
Salmond later apologised and told her that he’d been drinking more because of stress
ALEX Salmond apologised to a female civil servant in his Holyrood office after a drunken sexual assault, a court heard yesterday.
The woman, known as Ms F, said the former First Minister told her to ‘get on the bed’ while she was working with him at Bute House in Edinburgh.
She spoke of her ‘rising panic’ and ‘disgust’ as he lay on top of her, running his hands under her skirt, over her thighs, bottom and breasts.
The civil servant claimed Salmond repeatedly murmured ‘You are irresistible’ during the ‘surreal’ alleged attack in December 2013.
Salmond, 65, is on trial at the High Court in Edinburgh over 14 alleged sexual offences including attempted rape. He denies all charges.
Ms F said she had been in the secondfloor private sitting room where Salmond had an adjoining study.
She said that she had papers for his attention, and after knocking on the door was invited in by the First Minister, who said it was cold and suggested going up to the bedroom.
Ms F said she and Salmond sat at the table to do paperwork, and he had a bottle of a spirit called Maotai, which may have been a gift from China.
She said: ‘After a while he wanted us to drink. He had two small glasses out, and he filled them and said a toast for the first drink.
‘He continued to drink quite steadily. I was planning to wet my lips, I never liked drinking with the First Minister.
‘He kept trying to top my glass up, there was a lot of over-spilling.’
The conversation was ‘jovial’, then Ms F said: ‘At some point, the First Minister asked me to take my boots off.’ The court heard she was wearing knee boots.
She said: ‘I took my boots off. I almost always take my shoes or boots off in carpeted rooms, and he was familiar with that.’
But Ms F said she felt ‘uncomfortable’ on this occasion, ‘partly because they were knee boots and it did feel like removing an article of clothing’.
She said: ‘It was a request from the First Minister. I complied.’
Ms F said the ‘conversation had ceased to be making much progress’, and she was trying to ‘wind it up’.
She said it was about 11pm and she had had a ‘little’ of the Chinese liqueur, but Salmond had had ‘rather more’, and the bottle was ‘empty or very nearly empty’.
Ms F said she told him that she was going now. She added: ‘As I crossed the room, he said “Get on the bed”. I felt quite panicked.’
The woman told the court she worked in a ‘culture where you do whatever the First Minister asks of you’.
She sat on the side of the bed with a ‘sense of rising panic’, and said Salmond’s tone of voice had been ‘firm but not aggressive’.
Ms F told the court: ‘I don’t recall exactly what happened for the next few seconds.
‘I was lying with my feet still on the ground but otherwise lying along the centre of the bed.
‘The First Minister was lying on top of me, he had his hands under the skirt and ran them over my thighs and my bottom, also rubbing his hands over the bodice of my dress and over my breasts.’
Ms F said Salmond was ‘kissing [her] around [her] face and my dress quite sloppily... in the way of someone who had been drinking heavily.’
She added: ‘He was repeatedly murmuring a phrase that was something like: “You are irresistible.”’
Ms F said she had given him no signal that she wanted the attention and that Salmond had ‘pulled up the skirt of the dress’.
It was prevented from being pulled further by her belt.
She said she felt a ‘mix of panic and disgust’, adding: ‘I knew that I had to stop this, to get away, but how on earth do you actually achieve that?’
Ms F said: ‘It seemed very clear that he was not going to stop.’ She feared a ‘progression’ and that Salmond would go on to remove her tights and underwear.
Ms F said she knew she had to stop it, but it was ‘difficult to do that in the parameters of accepted behaviour’.
She said she was able to get up from the bed and told Salmond she would be leaving unless there was anything else he needed.
Ms F told the court she left Bute House at around 11pm and she did not tell the security guard what had happened, adding: ‘It did not seem to fall into the parameters of their role.’
She said part of her job was ‘protecting’ the First Minister and their reputation, and the idea of reporting him ‘would just have been absolutely alien’.
Asked by advocate depute Alex Prentice, QC, what was going through her mind, Ms F said she felt ‘crushed’ and a feeling of ‘looming horror’ when she recognised that this incident was so serious she would have to mention it to someone.
She then went down to the office and sent a text or an email to another civil servant. Ms F said: ‘I was very upset. It was something that you could not rewind. I had to do something about it.’
Ms F said she believed she had met her colleague at Pizza Express on North Bridge, Edinburgh, but did not give him the ‘full details’ of what had happened.
She said: ‘I was finding it extremely difficult to talk about,
to get the words out. I must have told him enough… He said it could be a crime.’
Ms F told the court she did not feel ‘very composed’ and agreed that she needed to speak to her line manager, which she did the next day.
She said: ‘I was finding it really quite difficult to have to put into words but at the same time I wanted to make sure that I conveyed to him that something more serious than the lower-level behaviour we always took as a baseline had happened.’
There was then a meeting with Geoff Aberdein, Salmond’s chief of staff, and Ms F said as a result Mr Aberdein ‘was going to speak to the First Minister’.
Asked if there was an apology, Ms F said that ‘some days after’ she met Salmond in his office at the Scottish parliament.
It had been agreed that she would go to the office of the First Minister with no one else present.
She said: ‘The First Minister told me that he was sorry for what happened, that it had been unacceptable.’ He said he had been drinking more than usual ‘due to stress’.
Ms F added: ‘He said he respected me, that he wanted to keep working together, and he apologised.’
She said: ‘I accepted the apology and confirmed that we would keep working together.’ The court was then shown an email to a colleague, sent at 12.36am on December 5, 2013, in which Ms F said she was ‘shattered’ and would be coming in late that morning.
She said she was ‘just leaving Bute [sic] now’.
Ms F told the colleague that the bottle of Chinese spirit was ‘all gone’ and ‘there may be one or two headaches in the morning’.
Under cross-examination by Gordon Jackson, QC, representing Salmond, Ms F was asked if the ex-First Minister was ‘quite a tactile sort of man’. She said: ‘Certainly in relation to women, yes.’
Mr Jackson put it to the witness that there was a ‘bit of cuddling’ and a ‘sleepy cuddle’. She said: ‘That did not happen. I refute any suggestion that I cuddled the First Minister.’
He asked Ms F if she had apologised to Salmond, and she said: ‘I did not have anything to apologise for.’ Mr Jackson said there was ‘no argument’ it was an ‘unacceptable situation’, adding: ‘The question is not whether it is acceptable or appropriate – we are not here to deal with things that are inappropriate and unacceptable.’
Ms F told Mr Jackson she was ‘not looking for a criminal justice outcome’.
She said that at the time her job was ‘protecting the First Minister’.
Ms F said: ‘This was in the runup to the referendum on independence. Everything we did which was outward-facing had potential ramifications which went well beyond personal experience.’
She told the court that what had happened to her was an ‘extreme example’ but added ‘it was not an isolated incident’.
Under further questioning by Mr Prentice, Ms F said that she did not consent to what Salmond had done, adding: ‘It all just felt so surreal.’
Ms F also told the court about an earlier incident in the drawing room of Bute House, in November 2013. She was, she said, preparing to leave at around 7pm when Salmond kissed her on the mouth.
Asked if she had invited this, she replied: ‘Absolutely not.’ She said: ‘The First Minister was not someone you would lightly express displeasure to.’
The evidence Ms F gave related to charges of sexual assault and a separate alleged sexual assault with intent to rape.
Salmond has entered ‘special defences’ for some of the charges, claiming the alleged victims had consented, while he has also submitted an alibi plea for one charge.
The trial continues.