A woman who charged her father with a detailed list of incidents of sexual assault, rape, and incest lost her case in a dramatic fashion when the father’s attorney found just a few too many similarities between the woman’s testimony and passages in the popular shock novel “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
In a blog post flagged by the UK Independent, the father’s lawyer said something had been nagging at her during her client’s trial. While the man’s daughter described the things her father supposedly made her do to and with him in excruciating detail, her rhetoric just seemed strangely above her years and level of education.
Throughout the trial, though, all the father could say was, “I did not do it,” which might be seen as a weak defense in the face of the overwhelming details the girl told the court.
But British barrister Cathy McCulloch’s co-worker on the case took note when the girl told the court that her favorite book was “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a schlocky novel by EL James made into a movie that performed fairly well at the box office last year.
The defense team bought a copy of the book and began to compare its steamy passages to the testimony the “victim” had already given in court. The lawyers, the blog post said, found “too many striking similarities between the [police interview of the complainant] and the book to be a coincidence.”
At last the defense team had its chance to cross examine the “victim” and so began a point-by-point comparison of the girl’s testimony to passages in the book. Eventually the girl broke down and admitted right then and there that she was lying about the whole thing.
The lawyer described the dramatic end to the case:
On the morning of Day 3, I started my cross-examination gently to put the complainant at ease. She agreed her father was strict, and that she was really annoyed with him for “ruining her life”. I then went straight to my final question – that she was so angry with her father that she had made this all up. She wavered. I raised the striking similarities between her interview and the book. She suddenly broke and said I was absolutely right. She had made the whole thing up because she was angry with her father and wanted to teach him a lesson. I asked her whether she had got all the ideas from 50 Shades of Grey. She confirmed this book, and others – which she named. After seven minutes we were finished.
With that the judge declared the trial over and the maligned father innocent of the crimes leveled against him.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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