Silencing Women
Why the Law fails Women and how to fight back by Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida - Endeavour
It’s been a while since a seminal text entered the canon of feminist must-reads.
The burst of feminist writing between the 1950s and 80s gave us inspiration and energy, taking us back to earlier writers and thrusting us on to make new discoveries.
When that energy died down and we got on with our lives, giving birth, bringing up children, working, studying and all the rest, it was easy to get lulled into the notion that the struggle was over. Our men seemed happy enough - they were no longer embarrassed to be seen pushing a pushchair and some were even helping with the washing up. Our children were playing and fighting and generally being children and our dogs and cats were contentedly being dogs and cats.
We turned a blind eye to the looming threat to our way of life.
Brought up to believe in the Freudian concept of penis envy, we had dismissed womb envy as no more than a fanciful joke. There had been a few prophets of doom, and I, in my small way, had been one of them.
I had written a couple of articles trying to warn of the fathers’ rights groups that were learning to tone down their aggressive language and exhibitionist antics and replace them with full-scale intrusions into the higher echelons of law-making where, in smart suits and polished shoes, they hobnobbed with the judiciary and thereby posed huge threats to the only ‘rights’ women had ever had – the right to bring up their children. Of course that ‘right’ was no right at all, more of a duty, and mothers had no rights in law in relation to their children. All the same, it was something to cling to. We loved our children and, like mothers of all kinds, were designed to protect them.
We had muddled happily along, the revolutionary fervour of the sixties deflated into the serious studious seventies and passions had died down and been channelled into purposeful work and action.
By the new century feminism seemed to be over. I took my precious collection of feminist literature and even my personally signed vinyl of Audre Lourde and Adrienne Rich reading their poetry and made the trip to the charity shop.
Now, I see on line that my generous gift is worth a small fortune. Some of the same books I gave away now sell for £500 or more.
And so they should; they were treasure.
‘Silenced Women’ by Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida shows how far we have come and how far we haven’t come, how enormously far there is yet to go if, indeed, we have ‘world enough and time.’
I had been told about this book but had found it impossible to get hold of – its name seemed to have changed and its publisher was untraceable, several libraries and bookshops had not been able to track it down and I had given up until a friend found it for me and I read it in one sitting.
It needs and deserves to be read several times and to be consulted as a text book, a reference book. (The authors point out that not so long ago legal firms never took on women lawyers. Instead, many of these highly qualified but unemployable women became academics thereby gaining a thorough knowledge of the law which they could put to use in their writings and researches.)
At first I read ‘Silencing Women’ as if it belonged in the last wave of feminism, following on from Greer, Millet, Rich and all the many others. But it doesn’t: that wave finished several decades ago. This is something new and it belongs with the ideas, concerns and circumstances of today.
These days we can write and read about sexual harassment in the work place while simultaneously watching women in Iran being beaten for not wearing their hijab ‘correctly’, women in Syria being beaten to death for upsetting family ‘honour’ and women in Afghanistan being viciously beaten for the original sin of being women.
And we can see incredibly brave women dancing in the streets, hair flowing free, calling for Life, Woman, Freedom - at least we could see them until they mysteriously disappeared from our screens a few weeks ago. Where have they gone?
Even if there is nothing we can do about the sadistic treatment women are receiving all round the world, we can at least know that it is happening and can measure and compare the levels of sadism and marvel at the inventiveness of the masculine mind with its refined sense of humour– in Morocco, for instance, an allegation of rape has to be accompanied by evidence from four male eye witnesses! What a hoot!
It has been a tactic of those who seek to oppress women to keep them apart by keeping them ignorant.
Jimmy Saville, protected by his fame and notoriety, was also protected by the police who knew that numerous women and children, some of them disabled, had complained of his sexual abuse. But nonetheless they allowed any woman brave enough to come forward with her complaints to believe she was the only victim of Saville. Not surprisingly, a lone woman up against a powerful devious and manipulative man with enormous wealth and influence is likely to yield to pressure (coming from all directions including from the police and the BBC) and drop her allegations.
It took the MeToo movement to make a difference. It enabled everyone to see that sexual harassment is commonplace and nearly all of us have been on the receiving end of it.
Keina Yoshida and Jennifer Robinson are Australian but practice in London at the fashionable Doughty Street Chambers. They take an interest in and write about a large range of international cases (Jen has represented Julian Assange) but their main focus in this book is on high profile American ones: Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Johnny Depp, and on the methods used by such men to silence and intimidate women. (Jen also became indispensable to Amber Heard.)
In my search for this book I found that it had been published twice and by different publishers. The cloak and dagger effect is increased when you flip through it and find sections and even whole pages blacked out. There is a lot at stake for men with reputations to protect and ‘Silenced Women’ is at the sharp end of litigation and threats of it.
The blacked-out bits make the book look messy but effective nonetheless. The reader is pulled up short wondering what else has been deleted, why and by whom. Even without this ugly reminder of the madness and cruelty of personal litigation based on pride, vanity and paranoia, the reader finds she has her own queries.
Why for instance is there no mention of Monica Lewinsky? She is entirely absent from the index. Is the litigation imposed on her by the Clinton team still in operation? Are we not allowed to mention it? Or mention that we are not allowed to mention it? Or mention that we are not allowed to mention that we are not allowed to mention it? Or…
NDAs - non-disclosure agreements - are now ubiquitous. Any man who has not slapped a few on his young female employees is obviously not an alpha male and can only be considered a failure.
This mad and desperately unfair situation where a man can not only abuse women with impunity but can then make it impossible for them to complain and be heard has been summarised as ‘his right to privacy and reputation versus her right to free speech’.
In other words, a woman’s fundamental human right is pitted against a man’s ‘right’ to tell lies, to libel, slander and defame her and subject her to months if not years of litigation with its accompanying high levels of anxiety, stress and expense. And of course, the man’s right to free speech remains sacred and untouched.
Some men kill the women who leave or threaten to leave them; other men defame them; still others pursue them through the courts. Behind all these methods of silencing women is the obsession to prevent her having a life without him.
Like a dog peeing around his territory, a litigious male can continue to lay claim to a woman and, through his intrusion, see off any competition. My own ex included my new partner in his silencing litigation on me! And no one batted an eyelid. Judges seem to see it as perfectly normal that an ex-husband should defame and attack the new man in his ex-wife’s life.
Jen and Keina (who refer to themselves by their first names in the book) quote the psychiatrist, Judith Lewis: ‘if secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, then he tries to make sure no-one listens. These attacks happen in public, in the media, on social media and in the courtroom. Sadly they work - in the court of public opinion and in the courts of law.’
Many men had been named as perpetrators of sexual harassment during the MeToo movement but as soon as the first fervour died down, the tables were turned and many issued defamation cases against their female accusers. ‘The best defence is attack’ is famously the policy of weak men and defamation is the first port of call for men desperate to protect their reputations.
When I left my husband and set up home in a rented house nearby, I heard from a friend that my new neighbours were gossiping about me. Was Penny mad, they had asked my friend. This was the slander that was spreading around town. My friend, who was also my client, put them straight in no uncertain terms and I got on with my life and my work.
When my doctor became aware of the slander being spread thick and fast, she phoned me offering to write a statement for the divorce court. I was, she said, the sanest person she knew and she would strongly contest any suggestion that I was mad.
What was going on? There was no way to find out. Everything was whispered mumblings and I still didn’t understand the purpose of the defamation that was so blatantly taking place. Then it became obvious: the issues that I had to bring up in my divorce case in which I was suing for divorce based on my husband’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’ needed to be banged on the head before they saw the light of day. And the best way to do that was to discredit me to the point that no-one would listen to me or believe me. Such corny tactics! ‘If he cannot silence her absolutely, then he tries to make sure no-one listens.’
On coming reeling out of a court hearing where issues relating to my children were being heard, a document was thrust into my hands by my ex-husband’s solicitors. (One of the standard tricks in litigation is to pass your opponent important documents to sign while she is still in shock from your latest act of devastation.)
I had had a bit of experience of documents drawn up at home by my husband and set before me to be signed while I was in the middle of domestic stuff. I would be preparing the dinner, supervising homework, feeding the cat and taking the occasional call from my sometimes desperate clients when a sheet of A4 paper would suddenly appear, I would be handed a pen, and told to sign on a dotted line which had been thoughtfully provided by my husband. (Anyone who has been through coercive control will understand. It’s like having a two year old pestering you non-stop and all you want is a break! So against your better judgment, you give in.) Without any consultation or advice, I signed over to my husband over a hundred thousand pounds and agreed to have my name taken off all the joint accounts.
The document I was required to sign as I was leaving the law court had also been drawn up on a sheet of A4 and once again my ex had been thoughtful enough to add a dotted line for my signature. He hadn’t, of course, pencilled in my signature! Of course not! I was a free agent! On marriage I had not agreed to obey my husband. This was the twentieth century and we were modern people. Surely it wasn’t possible that I would be forced to obey him on divorce!
The piece of paper was headed, ‘Agreement’, and it ordered me to agree not to let anyone know about ‘the secrets of the marriage’. With one party forcing on the other his own paranoia, it had more in common with coercive control than with any kind of agreement.
Since they weren’t my secrets and since an entity like a marriage can’t have secrets, I could only assume that my ex was requiring me in law to keep quiet about his secrets. I had known that there were certain things he was ashamed of and didn’t want people to know about but I hadn’t realised they could assume the legal status of secrets and be protected by the law, threatening me with prison should I disclose anything, either consciously or not, that he didn’t want anyone to know about. My ex had been reading and writing about spies and secrecy for some time but I hadn’t realised he had been drawing up his own personal Official Secrets Act not only for me and my partner to sign but for the whole British press to adhere to – or so journalists would tell me over the coming years.
For several months I asked my ex to let me know what the secrets were but he never did.
Instead he went to the High Court and got his own personal ‘agreement’ turned into a Silencing Injunction (three in fact) issued by the court and threatening me with prison if I did not obey. But still he did not let anyone know what his secrets were. Unlike most injunctions which are issued, I am told, for about a year, my injunctions seem to be eternal. I am not even sure that my death will cause them to end. The injunctions on the man whom Ian McEwan thought of as my partner all those years ago seem, too, to be eternal.
It was reassuring, though, to know that Ian McEwan had no selfish purpose in issuing his silencing litigation at such vast expense. Nice to know that his only concern was for others and the silencing injunctions were issued ‘in the interests of the children and of the general public’. But, just as no-one told me when the injunctions on me would end and when I would be a free woman again, so no-one let the children and the general public know that they were being protected from hearing things that Ian McEwan thought they shouldn’t. How long would the general public be protected? How long is a child a child? How long will the general public be deemed too innocent and fragile to hear of the secrets of its ‘national novelist’? And to learn that it has already been protected for twenty five years from even knowing that it is being protected?
Not only were the silencing injunctions reinforced to ensure no chink of light could get through the padded cell but more and more items were added to the list of things I was not permitted to talk about. I was not, for instance, allowed to talk about my children or to let anyone know what they wanted and what they had said they wanted
*
‘If secrecy fails the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, then he tries to make sure no-one listens.’ Judith Lewis says.
It was a bit corny to use the old chestnut that your wife was mad but my ex seemed prepared to stoop to anything, even to publish lies and defamation in the Times newspaper.
It was one of my clients who showed me an article in The Times sending me up and accusing me of ‘flamboyant spiritualism’. She was a journalist herself and was shocked by the misuse of the responsibilities of her profession. She advised me to write a letter of complaint. Maybe I could be accused of spirituality (though probably not of ‘spiritualism’) but no-one could accuse me of flamboyance. I never advertised my work, didn’t give talks, just quietly saw my clients, individually or in little groups, in my back room. My work depended on discretion and I rarely spoke about it. (I learned that locally I was known as ‘the therapists’ therapist’ and that was good enough for me).
I followed the advice of my journalist client and wrote to the Times. But instead of publishing my letter, the Times used it as an opportunity to defame me still further with yet more mockery in its pages. It was all too obvious to me from whence such mischief originated.
And then I was issued with a court summons. By complaining about defamation in the press, I had disobeyed the terms of one my ex-husband’s injunctions.
The only witness to my misdemeanour was Ian McEwan’s Boy Town friend, the Times journalist, Timothy Garton Ash. (For more on Boy Town see my Substack piece: Martin Amis, Boy Town and Me). The exercise cost me over £1500 in legal fees and costs.
But the Times did not give up.
*
I moved to France, not only to try to escape the slander, libel and defamation that continued to threaten my work, my reputation and even my friendships but to find somewhere I could afford to live (I shall be writing about Money in a further post).
My application to have the children had been blocked for years and now that I was no longer a resident of the UK, I had to apply under the Hague Convention to have custody of the children I had conceived, gestated, given birth to, suckled, nourished, clothed and brought up as best I could and frequently on my own.
I wrote my ‘defence’, pushing through the many obstacles deliberately thrown in my way, and took it to the court. The court refused to look at it and I realised that the same tactics that had been employed against me in England were now being used in France.
With no chance of being heard in the correct forum and manner after having spent days and nights writing a full ‘defence’, I put it (perhaps illegally) on the Internet and let the press know where to find it. (I had been sending press releases for months recording the endless obstructions to my case and what looked very like corruption in the Family Court.)
I bought my elder son a ticket, drove him to the port and put him on a ferry back to England with his sister and nephew so he could go on safari with his father, as planned. Then I bought a couple of bicycles and left with my younger son for a holiday in the Breton countryside, letting the press know what I had done.
My son never got to go on safari since his father cancelled the holiday in order to devote himself to directing the press - the first bit of direction being to get the press to report that my son had escaped his mother’s clutches and had ‘made his own way back’ to his father’s house.
Under further false pretences, the Times sent a journalist to interview me.
The journalist was pleasant enough and we chatted over our grand cremes in a square next to the hotel where my younger son and I were staying. The journalist expressed surprise: he told me that he had been told in London that I was not only mad but ‘had a drinks problem’ and was ‘a drug addict’.
His brief from the Times was to angle the piece to support this view.
*
The Times went on reporting my story but never mentioned the involvement of any of their journalists in my divorce. Garton Ash went on writing about my custody case not only for the Times but for many other papers, never confessing that he had written two witness statements in support both of his friend’s bid for custody and of his litigation to silence me.
He gave no explanation for his intrusive role in my case other than that Ian McEwan was far too anxious/perturbed/dignified to speak.
These were early days for the Net and the British Government was still struggling to get removed from the Net information it considered a military threat. Ian McEwan, though, got my defence removed before anyone had a chance to see it and my home was entered by a French intelligence officer who swiftly and expertly set to work on my computer which ever after carried a wobbly message on its screen saying, DISABLED BY A JUMPER.
At the same time, Ian McEwan got all the ports and airports put on high alert watching for me. In England, my daughters’ houses were searched, my sisters were subjected to interrogations, my friends were visited by police, my new-born granddaughter was woken screaming from her sleep when officers from the Met searched under her cot for me and my teenage son.
On of my clients in the south of France was taken to her local police station for questioning,
(You may wonder how it was that Ian McEwan managed to get the British and French authorities working with such vigour on his behalf. I hope to explain more in a further post. Unless, of course, further litigation prevents me. There is a lot of explaining to be done!)
Ian McEwan had taken court actions to silence me and my partner. He had seen to it that the children had not been able to speak freely to the only person qualified to listen to them for the court - the welfare officer - and had ensured that their two older sisters had not been given any chance to speak to anyone involved in the court proceedings.
He had covered himself by ensuring that I could not even complain to the press when I was misrepresented and misquoted.
Having silenced the entire family, he was in a position to tell the whole story himself and to invent whatever he wanted and suppress whatever he didn’t want told.
The field was wide open for him. A prize-winning story-teller by profession and with a great many friends in journalism and publishing, he could now elaborate the story of his mad wife stealing the children and running away.
But stories need narrators and he couldn’t do that job himself. He was the author, not the narrator, and there is a significant difference.
Instead of talking, Ian McEwan, the omniscient Booker-winning author, would ‘maintain a dignified silence’ and appoint in his place a narrator - an obsequious sycophant prepared unquestioningly to carry out the bidding of his superior in order to feel important, to make money and to further his own career in journalism.
The perfect Greek chorus was right there, desperate for a role in someone else’s drama. Timothy Garton Ash, his fingers in a great many pies already, twice a court witness on behalf of Ian McEwan and with numerous contacts on the press, would be assigned the role of ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing the words of his puppet-master.
This would give his puppet-master not only the chance to rise above the messy business of' ‘the general public’ while ‘maintaining a dignified silence’ but would free him up to put all his attention onto other more important things, like preparing and initiating numerous other bullying legal actions against his ex-wife designed not only to silence her and take away her children but to ruin her financially and destroy her reputation and her work.
Ian McEwan had put it perfectly when I had told him I was divorcing him.
‘I’m going to make you look such an arsehole,’ he had said and got on the phone to the most expensive solicitor he knew of.
*
Ian McEwan went on maintaining a dignified silence while directing his Boy Town pal, Timothy Garton Ash, as to what to say and who to say it to, planning the minutiae of their scheme while dining on foie gras in the five-star hotel that the press were occupying in my local town as they waited for juicy developments in my life and the lives of my children.
The late great Jon Pilger had taken on Garton Ash with a few easy taps of his keyboard and a good many worthy citizens, delighted to see Timothy Garton Ash receive his long-awaited come-uppance, had responded. Tom Fry, on the Comment Factory, spoke for many others when he wrote:
Garton Ash with his smug little eyes and his double barrelled surname is a pompous foie gras munching pseudo intellectual hot airbag with an incredibly punchable face to boot.
When researching and writing his book on the Stasi, Garton Ash had, according to the Times Supplement, employed many journalistic tools and had charmed and blagued his way into interviews with past informers like any good tabloid hack.
Garton Ash had tried to blague his way into my life and into my relationship with my children, both in England, where he turned up on my doorstep one evening in a threatening manner, and in France where, having entered my house without permission, he had to be asked to leave by gendarmes.
With Garton Ash in charge of the press publicity and acting as the Alistair Campbell to Ian McEwan’s Tony Blair, the press was under control.
This is the kind of thing it published while I was cycling in the countryside with my son:
McEwan who won the Booker prize for Amsterdam was accompanied by his friend Timothy Garton Ash, the writer and historian. Mr Garton Ash said, 'Ian is absolutely tormented by the thought of what his son is going through.
'This whole matter has been thoroughly investigated by the courts in Britain and now in France. The boys have said what they want and the courts have decided what is best for them and that is to be with their father in Oxford.
'He is a wonderful father and she has now put herself outside the law and that cannot be in the interests of anyone'.
The press made no mention of the fact that I had been cheated out of the right to give my defence to the court, no mention of the fact that it itself was under extremely oppressive litigation from Ian McEwan, and, of course, didn’t mention Garton Ash’s heavy involvement in my divorce.
It didn’t mention that none of my four children had been heard by anyone in a position of authority and it made no reference to my complaints about irregularities in the court, saying instead,
She issued a press release stating that she had written to Jack Straw the Home Secretary asking for a review of the custody case.
As the press well knew, through my press releases, it was not the custody case that I wanted reviewed; it was the complaints that I had been making for six months regarding corruption in the English courts which, it now appeared, had spread to the French ones.
Ms Allen was due to face the French judge at midday yesterday but earlier left her 15th century farmhouse taking her son with her.
In a defiant statement last week she warned, 'I shall not be retuning the children to Mr McEwan as required by the court and am asking for a full inquiry into the case'. Gendarmes told her on Tuesday they would call at her house to collect her son yesterday afternoon if the judge ordered it.
Mr McEwan's friend of 17 years, Oxford historian and writer, Timothy Garton Ash, said, 'Ian is tormented by the thought of what his son was going through. It is an appalling burden to inflict on a small child. It is a very good home and Ian is a marvellous father'.
The only paper to have taken the case seriously enough to have sent a journalist to interview me was the Mail on Sunday whose journalist, Sarah Oliver, had interviewed me twice, once in England and once in my new home in France. She was the only one to have bothered to look into the facts and I had agreed to do another interview with her in the Breton town of St Brieuc.
Part of the bond that held Timothy Garton Ash and Ian McEwan together was their mutual interest in spies and spying. They were in their element now that subterfuge ruled the day and they secretly arranged to substitute the Mail on Sunday with the Times and I found myself unwittingly being interviewed not by Sarah Oliver but by a journalist from the paper which had been mocking and misrepresenting me for months and was still intent on doing so.
Like lambs to slaughter my son and I were led to the Times journalist lounging in the sun outside a cafe and, innocent of his devious intent, I chatted with him for a while before he said that he was very surprised to find that I wasn’t mad. He had been told ‘in London’ that I ‘was mad, had a drinks problem’ and was ‘a drug addict’. His brief was to angle his piece to reflect this outrageous defamation.
His attempt, though, to defame me on behalf of my ex-husband and the Times newspaper came out as half-hearted:
For a woman in such desperate circumstances Penny Allen was remarkably calm, he wrote. She walked across the square and introduced herself at her side the 13 year old boy who has become the pivot of her five year struggle with her former husband the novelist Ian McEwan.
Mrs Allen 51 has pursued her custody fight against the author with an intensity bordering on the obsessive and her extraordinary decision to go on the run with her son from the authorities in two countries was apparently nothing more than the next logical step.
..Yesterday she added to her transgressions by putting on the Internet confidential documents relating to the battle at Oxford county court in March which she lost so comprehensively. Now 24 hours after going on the run and with only the media left to try to influence, she wanted to explain her logic.
'I am protecting this child. I am not turning myself in because I have committed no crime,' she said defiantly.
'I don't want this to continue but I have no choice. I do not want to see my son returned to his father. We desperately need to get help to get some sanity in this situation. My son needs some normality in his life,' she declared without any sign of recognising the possible irony of her words.
The unreality of the whole situation crowded in closer when Mrs Allen talked of how she hoped to resolve the situation.
She was pinning her hopes on the intervention of the Home Secretary in her case. Yesterday morning she had sent a fax to him via a friend asking him to look again into her allegations about how the county court in Oxford came to grant her ex-husband sole residence custody last March.
It is by all accounts a forlorn hope. Following earlier letters the Home Office has already said it has no jurisdiction over the court, which is the territory of the Lord Chancellor. There are no indications that the Lord Chancellor feels he can or should intervene.
My actions, explanations and hopes did indeed look hopeless, pathetic and mad. And it appeared that I had gone about things the wrong way round.
But in fact I hadn't. I had known full well that the Home Office was not the department to turn to first which was why I had complained to the Lord Chancellor back in the March.
When the Lord Chancellor had refused to intervene and when Judge Clark's corruption continued, I then wrote to the Home Secretary. When the Home Office did not acknowledge my letter, I wrote again.
But the Times was not interested in what was in fact a gritty story of the inadequacies of the British system of justice and the lack of authorities prepared and willing to examine complaints. It preferred to censor the fact that I had made a complaint to the Lord Chancellor and to concentrate on ridiculing me, instead, by allotting to me petty complaints and trivial motives:
Mrs Allen's explanation is that the courts have been corrupted and that Mr McEwan will always win because he can spend hundreds of pounds a day on lawyers. That is why she has taken the law into her own hands.
The novelist's wife, having given her side of the story, Michael Harvey could turn with relief to the sanity of the other side of the story.
This was easier to do since for the past week he had been convening in the same exclusive hotel as his friend and colleague, Tim Garton Ash, and his new friend, Ian McEwan, where they were all three engaged in discussing how best to handle and report on this intriguing and lucrative situation.
As she speaks 30 miles away in Guingamp Mr McEwan is waiting anxiously for news… Mr McEwan's legal team has met the local prosecutor and the next move is for the authorities to issue a formal warrant for Mrs. Allen's arrest.
She already faces two years in jail for failing to give up the child. Her boyfriend has been questioned by police investigating a possible aiding and abetting charge.
And Michael Harvey took up Ian McEwan’s hints about how he intended to punish his ex-wife and child for their transgressions, turning this perverse plan into yet another defamatory and possibly libellous attack on me along the same old theme put out by Ian McEwan in Oxford and London and now in my new home in France, that I was insane.
Back in Saint Brieuc, in a moment of clarity Mrs Allen conceded that her actions had given her former husband even more grounds for making sure she had nothing to do with their two sons in future.
'The longer I stay in hiding the worse it is going to get. The situation is so crazy'.
With that it is time for the mother and son to go.
Michael Harvey's final sentence was odd to say the least. Slap bang in the middle of his article he had written, The French police were aware where The Times interview was conducted, and yet he had let this dangerously mad woman walk away without informing the police of where she was taking the vulnerable wanted ‘small’ child about whom Ian McEwan was so anxious, fraught, perturbed and absolutely tormented.
There was only one explanation. Ian McEwan knew exactly where I was; as did his close friend, Timothy Garton Ash, as, of course, did his close friend's colleague, Michael Harvey.
The gendarmes, too, knew exactly where my son and I were. But they had their orders. The Times needed their scooped story; it was worth a lot of money, not a penny of which would go to me.
The gendarmes would not be arresting me until my ex-husband gave the go-ahead. First he wanted to milk the situation; he wanted me humiliated, slandered, defamed and libelled; he wanted me to look, in his own words, ‘an arsehole’, he wanted it to look as if I had genuinely absconded and was in hiding; he wanted me to appear to be mad, a danger to my son and to have broken the law; he wanted me to be found at the moment that best suited him; and then he wanted to make it look as if I had not been charged with any offence due to his compassionate pleading.
The Daily Telegraph reported under the front page heading, McEwan reunited with his son, the information that McEwan's friend, Timothy Garton Ash, the writer and historian, said, 'Ian is immensely relieved and happy that his son is safe and can come back home and be in school again.'
Other papers followed their cue, writing such things as,
McEwan was unavailable for comment yesterday but his friend the historian Timothy Garton Ash, denied all Mr Tremain's allegations and said the 'deeply unpleasant' situation was entirely the result of choices made by Miss Allen.
Although I had been arrested, papers falsely said, no charges would be brought against Miss Allen - at Mr McEwan's insistence.
The Telegraph’s, front page directed its readers to 'Darkest story' page 8 where my partner, Steve Tremain, already defamed, mocked and silenced by Ian McEwan, was briefly quoted:
He said, Penny isn't mad; she has done this for a reason. We have extensive evidence which has never been revealed in England because of the gagging order imposed at the time of the divorce, that proves why the boy should remain here.
McEwan knows that we have this evidence and that we will use it in France.
But the court witness, Timothy Garton Ash, (despite being sworn to silence like everyone else in the sub judice Children Act court proceedings) knew better about everything to do with my children, my ex-husband, my partner, me and the entire court process than I did and knew, too, that Oxford was the centre of the known universe:
McEwan was unavailable for comment yesterday but his friend the historian Timothy Garton Ash, denied all Mr Tremain's allegations and said the 'deeply unpleasant' situation was entirely the result of choices made by Miss Allen.
'This is all happening because of her increasingly erratic and in the end criminal choices,' he said condemning 'the appalling irresponsibility' of Miss Allen and Mr Tremain.
'The case has been exhaustively examined by the courts and there have been extensive interviews with the boy.
'The findings were absolutely unambiguous. They were that he should go back to school in Oxford and not be transferred to some village school in a country whose language he does not speak.’
Susannah Herbert, the Telegraph reporter, went on to reveal that she had not only trespassed on my land and in my barns but had also attempted to rumour-monger in my local village (which was still deeply affected by its Wartime occupation when it had developed its strict code of discretion and silence) where the bar owner had attempted to put the gossiping journalist in her place.
Back in Bulat Pestivien the nearest hamlet to Keravel, the local bar owner said Miss Allen was 'extremely pleasant. She used to come pretty regularly going to the grocer to do her shopping just like everybody else,' she said. 'We keep ourselves to ourselves around here. We don't go interfering in the lives of others'.
Every paper had something to say about my custody case.
Every paper except one.
Where on earth was the Guardian? Why did it make no mention of the story that had been dominating the headlines and occupying a great deal of space in every other paper for some time?
Had the Guardian not seen the other papers?
Did it not think that cases of custody, kidnapping and child abduction were worth reporting?
Or was it simply too perturbed and absolutely tormented to record what was going on?
Had it perhaps received instructions from a higher authority?
Surely Timothy Garton Ash, a mere journalist, self-important though he was, could not have taken on the role of puppeteer. Had he got above himself and decided to take on the supreme role of omniscient author?
Of course not. Garton Ash was still a mere journalist, a lackey. The puppeteer throughout this whole sorry business was none other than that year’s Booker prize winner (for Amsterdam).
Could the higher authority dictating the terms have been Ian McEwan? Ian McEwan had (secretly, in America) married Annalena McAfee, an editor on the Guardian. Was that why one of the major organs of our democracy was keeping quiet? Was it ‘maintaining a dignified silence’ in solidarity with the husband of one of its journalists?
Surely not. Ian McEwan was renowned for his support of institutions that backed freedom of expression. Didn’t he have some kind of connection to Hacked Off? And another to Pen? Hadn’t he had something to say about the Leveson Enquiry? Didn’t he make rousing statements at the Edinburgh Festival like,
Let's hear it for openness and free expression!
Well, yes he did. And so did his Boy Town pal, Timothy Garton Ash. Or so it seemed.
But very little was as it seemed in this murky business. And when, for a brief moment, it looked as if the Leveson Enquiry might actually have some teeth and might recommend much-needed accountability from the press, our two intrepid warriors changed their tunes.
The libel laws, they declared, were ‘enough.’ All you had to do if you were defamed in the press was raise a few hundred thousand pounds and take the press to court!
In England I had been defamed, mocked, persecuted, stripped of my money, my home and my children. I had been in France no more than a few weeks during which time my ex-husband and his entourage of hack newsmen and obedient policemen had surrounded my home and rampaged through my village spreading rumour and gossip and blackening my reputation before I had even started to establish my presence.
In coming to France I had hoped to escape the slander, lies and libel that were suffocating me in England but already, the village shopkeeper was talking of me as if I no longer existed.
It was of course out of the question that I could hold onto my children and equally unthinkable that anyone would look into the corruption that had been taking place for a good many years in the English courts and was now spreading to the French ones.
My ex-husband had pursued me round Brittany, with his right hand man and his entourage of newspaper hacks. My older son having ‘made his own way back’ to his father’s house had not been permitted to travel back to his mother in Brittany but had been left alone while his father stood at my gates with a bevy of policemen, retreating to grandest hotel in the neighbourhood for comfort and sustenance and further strategic consultation with the journalists also staying there. While his son, the one about whom he was not absolutely tormented hung out in the big empty house wondering what was happening to his brother and his mother.
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My younger son and I were picked up by four young French policemen who drove us to the police station in my nearest town. They laughed at the idea that anyone could overrule what a thirteen year old and told my son he would have the chance to speak to a judge. My son wrote a statement at the police station which was ignored and he was never given the chance to speak to anyone in authority.
Timothy Garton Ash (now adding ‘chaperone’ to his many roles in his friend’s custody case), was there at the police station with Ian McEwan and they whisked my son away, crossing the Channel with special dispensation since my son didn’t have his passport.
I had my own conversations with the police. They told me it wouldn’t have mattered what I did, I could not have influenced the outcome of my custody battle, since ‘money had changed hands’.
This silenced woman gave up fighting and, while trying to maintain a relationship with her children from across the Channel, put her efforts into renovating a derelict village, creating a little farm and recording in great detail the devastation that she and her children had been put through in the Family Courts hoping that one day in the future the laws that silenced women and enabled pushy entitled men to get whatever they wanted by whatever means might be relaxed and she might be able to publish the truth.
But I am only a mother, what am I to know?
The last word must go, of course, to Timothy Garton Ash, the Times journalist.
Mr McEwan's close friend, Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford historian, said, 'This is wonderful news. Ian is obviously elated and happy that his son can now come back to a safe home and start his new school as planned. We would ask everyone to respect the child's feeling and that Ian be given time with his child. Ian always said that charges should not be pressed against the child's mother because that would cause further distress. His first concern has always been his son' - The Times
Thank you, what a nice response. I am aware that there are a great many mothers and children going through the same and a lot worse. The corruption and injustice is what hurts the most.
I thought this piece was going to be a review of an important book but, beyond that, what a sad and disturbing read. So shameful that you have been put through such torture. It must have taken incredible strength to push on through the pain to achieve what you have. I presume it does something for you to externalise it in writing and it is certainly better that at least some in the world know about it. I hope that, at some stage, there is power on your side.