The judge who dares tell the truth about drink and casual sex
She is the judge who enraged the sisterhood by urging girls to stay sober. Now read her blistering views on the reckless culture of promiscuity – and why her daughter is so proud
JUDGE Lindsey Kushner QC expected to spend the first few days of her retirement pottering in her garden. That was before her heartfelt warning to women over drunkenness and rape detonated, not the minor tremor she anticipated, but ‘huge reverberations’. And so last week, instead of planting dahlias, the 65-year-old mother of two grown-up children found herself defending her advice in a breakfast TV studio, where she briefly shared the sofa with the rapper Tinie Tempah, who was promoting his new album.
‘And before you ask,’ she laughs, ‘I have heard of Tinie Tempah.’
Indeed, unlike the judges of popular cliche, Judge Kushner seems very much in step with the modern world. She has acquired, largely through her 43-year career – in which she presided over countless rape cases and defended men accused of rape as well as families torn apart by false allegations of child abuse – a sharp understanding of human nature.
All this informed the controversial warning she issued at Manchester Crown Court last month.
Jailing rapist Ricardo RodriguesGomes, whose victim was drunk, she said: ‘Girls are perfectly entitled to drink themselves into the ground, but should be aware people who are potential defendants to rape gravitate towards girls who have been drinking. It should not be like that but it does happen and we see it time and time again.’
Born of maternal concern, her words were calibrated to ensure there ‘was little room for being taken out of context’. While many welcomed the ‘sensible’ advice, others accused her of ‘victim blaming’.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Judge Kushner says she has no regrets. Far from it.
Expanding on her theme, she risks inflaming the sisterhood further still by saying: ‘If you are drunk, you are more likely to say “yes”, aren’t you?
‘Parents need to bring up their boys to respect girls’
This is why I was saying men gravitate towards drunk women. You may say “yes” when, under other circumstances – if you were sober – you’d think, “Not bloody likely!”
‘Then you might not be able to put up any resistance or be able to remember what happened. So evidentially it’s not very good.’
She also has some frank advice for young men. She laments the decline of chivalry and speaks of the increasing tendency of men, possibly fuelled by internet pornography, to ‘glorify’ sexual encounters, often recording them on mobile phones.
Beseeching young men to ‘get their act together’, Judge Kushner says: ‘They need re-educating about girls and sex. Some seem to glorify not necessarily rape but promiscuity, and I think it’s horrendous.
‘It would be nice if men had the sense to say, “Look, she’s legless, leave her.” Because in the olden days, men generally felt that if a girl was drunk you didn’t try it on with her; you left her alone. That chivalry is disappearing.
‘Look, I don’t have all the answers but someone has got to do something. Parents need to bring up their boys to respect girls. Things are done in schools but it seems to go over a lot of boys’ heads. The best thing would be if they were instructed by their mates on how to behave.’
Robed and bewigged, she may well have cut a redoubtable figure. Outside of court, though, Judge Kushner is bonhomous and self-deprecating. And above all else, forthright. It is tempting to cast her as everyone’s favourite aunt. Well, not quite everyone’s.
Among those who joined in the shrill protest following comments last month was Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who said the judge ‘leaned in favour of the victim-blaming culture that allowed sexual predators to offend with assumed impunity in days gone by’.
Then, in an intervention which rather undermined this criticism, up popped Rodrigues-Gomes’s victim, Megan Clark, who waived her anonymity to praise Judge Kushner’s ‘good advice’.
During the case the court heard that Megan, then 18, had drunk a ‘significant amount’ of lager and vodka and inhaled a ‘popper’ party drug at a Manchester club before RodriguesGomes raped her beside a canal.
‘It was disappointing to hear the DPP talk about victim blaming,’ says
Judge Kushner, rolling her eyes. ‘But what I am delighted about is that I have opened up discussion. There has been a backlash but there have been twists and turns and the pendulum has swung both ways.’
One of her supporters is her 35year-old daughter Tamara, who explains today why she thought her mother was ‘brave’ to speak out.
Judge Kushner is only too well aware that ‘she grew up in a different time’, though she did come of age in the late 1960s when the permissive society was causing alarm.
Like her friends, she wore a miniskirt, which she made herself from ‘half a yard of material’. She describes herself at this time as ‘quite a good girl’. In fact, she was head girl at Manchester High School for Girls.
‘Nobody swung near me in the 1960s,’ she says. ‘Before university I didn’t go drinking, I didn’t go clubbing and my parents knew where I was going and with whom.
‘Even at university in Liverpool – though I mixed with law students who were rugby players and heavy drinkers – I never drank to excess myself. I don’t like to lose control. I’m bad enough when I am stone cold sober! Also I have a great fear of making a fool of myself.
‘I didn’t get drunk until I was 55, and that was by accident.
‘In my day – sounding like a granny – if you saw a girl drunk, then it was deemed very undignified. Nowadays that’s not the case – because if a man can get drunk why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to as well without being pilloried?
‘I would prefer it if no one drank to excess but since they do then a woman is entitled to get as blotto as a man. That’s only fair. And women should be able to wear what they want within the realms of decency.
‘Men like their girlfriends to dress sexily, it’s a reflection on them. Fine. Well, it’s not fine – it’s quite shallow, really. But I’m sure some men think that if a girl dresses like this then she is up for it. If a girl wants to look spectacular and sexy then she should be able to do so without a man saying it means she is signing up for the whole lot.’
At the start of her career in the early 1970s she was one of only two female barristers in Manchester but, protected by everyone in her chambers, she endured surprisingly little sexism.
She was ‘good with people and enjoyed people’ and consequently was given difficult clients. ‘I always tried to imagine how I would feel if I came from their background or had their upbringing. A typical mother I dealt with in a care case had been emotionally or physically abused.’
As the years passed and she became a judge she began to discern common themes in rape cases, chief among them, alcohol.
She describes a case, now sadly typical of a modern trend, in which a 21-year-old man celebrating his birthday was accused of raping a girl he met in a nightclub.
‘She was bright and very attractive,’ says Judge Kushner. ‘She was drunk but able to give a good account of what happened. She agreed to go back to the flat with him, having discussed it with her pals, and in they went to a bedroom.
‘So they’re doing what they’re doing when in comes another lad, stark naked, and he joins in. There was a couple in each of three rooms and each of the two settees and they were all having sex. The birthday boy was cleared of rape but, again, it’s a generational thing.
‘I just can’t get round the fact that none of them seemed to want any privacy, that it all seemed normal to them. And there was a lot of boasting about what happened afterwards on WhatsApp; all this self-aggrandisement. It was horrible. And I have to say that in my day you didn’t go off and sleep with someone you’d met an hour before. Back then, it wasn’t that long since you didn’t even kiss on your first date.’
She adds: ‘I never had this talk with my daughter Tamara because it didn’t seem so bad when she was a teenager. I wouldn’t let her go to nightclubs when she was 15 because I was worried about fights rather than sex.
‘It’s changed so much since then even. Now I’d be having a different kind of talk with her. Now she tells me that if you go out with a man and he buys you a meal, he thinks he is entitled to have sex with you.’
Tamara, a freelance writer, says: ‘It’s true, there is more pressure. And I also believe that a rape culture exists now. I do think Mum was right to say what she did because she was giving preventative advice and was specific about the threat. Nowadays there is a tendency not to warn women because of the fear of a backlash.’
Contemplating retirement, Judge Kushner said she still feels ‘invincible’. By way of explanation, she says she recently tackled three youths in Manchester who flung a food wrapper on the ground. In a booming voice she ordered them to pick it up. They meekly acquiesced.
‘And another time I was driving and didn’t let a car in because I hadn’t seen it. I saw the passenger mouth the words, “F ****** bitch”.
‘I felt unjustly accused and got out at the next lights and told her, “I just want you to know that the f ****** bitch didn’t see that you wanted to come in until it was too late.” The passenger said, “I’m so sorry.”
‘My son and daughter keep warning me that I’m going to get into serious trouble one day. But what can you do?’
‘A woman is entitled to get as blotto as a man’ ‘I think Mum was right to say what she did’