Craig McLachlan under siege

- Not guilty but still under attack by the feminist mob.

Over this month the Melbourne Comedy Festival will feature three women performing sketches celebrating “small moments in life that make us laugh.” These supposedly funny skits include a send up of a 2020 court case where one of Australia’s best-known entertainers, Craig McLachlan, was found not guilty of 13 charges of indecent assault and assault.

It’s hardly comedy gold. Particularly when one of the “funny” women was the star accuser — whose claims were shredded in court.

You would have thought this woman would be hanging her head in shame. But no. She’s out there claiming the court got it wrong.

That’s despite the fact that the magistrate awarded costs against the police. With the exception of cases which are withdrawn, costs are very rarely awarded against the police in criminal prosecutions. For a court to do so, it must have considered that it was an unmeritorious prosecution; in other words, charges should never have been laid in the first place. Victorian police ultimately paid out half a million dollars which is the highest payout ever against the police in Victoria!

This is confirmation that the allegations made by this witness and her fellow complainants didn’t stand up. All 13 charges were dismissed, and the police were forced to write Craig a fat $500,000 apology cheque.

But she’s still demanding public attention, flogging what should be a very dead horse. Fourteen times over the next three weeks she’ll be on the comedy circuit venting her indignation that some people think she’s the villain of the story.

One of the crazy twists in this whole bizarre story is I can’t name this actress, nor any of the other complainants, despite the fact they happily “outed” themselves in the media – appearing in newspaper stories long before going to the police - and have capitalised on their status as sex abuse victims ever since.

Look at this article which launched the whole attack on Craig, written by journalist Kate McClymont, who seems determined to end her career by claiming the scalps of a succession of high profile men named as sex abusers.

Craig’s accusers are featured prominently, named and pictured in the front-page newspaper story and for the last eight years they have continued to parade themselves in public. But even after the charges were thrown out in court, journalists are not permitted to name them because they are still somehow deemed “sex assault victims”. How’s that for conclusive proof that the law is an ass?

Somehow our media invariably fails to mention the vital fact that these accusations first surfaced just after the actresses discovered they had missed out on parts in the 2018 Rocky Horror show, where Craig was once again announced in the starring role.

Naturally, these failed victims have a mighty band of followers still keen to support them. “It never fails to astound me that multiple women can outline their experiences of harassment and abuse by one man, and there will be those who say it didn’t happen….I stand with every one of the brave women who came forward and with the women who haven’t come forward. I believe you!” rants activist Sherele Moody on her Red Heart victim support Facebook page.

Moody is mighty indignant that a podcast has been made exposing the truth about Craig’s court case. Not that she sees it that way: “This podcast is not about clarity or truth – it’s about power and control over the women he harmed, and it’s about maintaining power and control over the stories of survivors.”

Clearly, the many thousands who have been listening to the podcast don’t agree. Not Guilty – The Craig McLachlan case has been No. 3 in top trending Apple podcasts in recent weeks, with Vanessa and Craig flooded with positive feedback.

Please help circulate this powerful podcast series which exposes how easy it is for unjustified allegations to destroy men’s lives – all details here.

The podcast has been a labour of love from Craig’s partner, Vanessa Scammell, who’s been by his side through the whole 8-year ordeal since he was first accused. Vanessa scrambled to produce this amazingly detailed analysis of the court case, in between the demands of her own career, working as a conductor in ballet, musical theatre, concert repertoire and opera productions.

Many of you will have heard the talk Vanessa gave at our Restoring the Presumption of Innocence conference two years ago, where she aimed to set the record straight about the court case, challenging the distorted publicity from most of our media.

Since then, Craig McLachlan has discovered the hard way that in today’s Australia, a not “not guilty” verdict means very little in our feminist-led court of public opinion.

I recently sat down with Craig and Vanessa to talk about what’s happened to them in the last two years. Our chat had its laughs, but it laid bare something far darker: the raw, terrifying power of the feminist mob to turn a man into an unemployable villain — even after a not-guilty verdict and a costs award. They’re still trying to rewrite the court result to keep him blacklisted. It’s chilling stuff.

I hope you will watch our video for the full story but here in brief are some key developments:

Late last year Craig was due to be back on stage in a comedy called Cluedo, appearing alongside some other well-known actors. All was going well and then an actress called Queenie Van Der Sandt took it upon herself to wreak havoc.

She took to social media to declare she was “shocked and disheartened” that Craig had landed a major role. Naturally, the online mob roared in, bullied the rest of the cast for daring to share a stage with him, and made life so toxic that the producer — displaying all the backbone of a wet paper towel —caved and booted Craig out.

These so-called powerful men who run showbiz in Australia don’t have spines — they have white flags. They once fawned over the Gold Logie star actor but now they cower, terrified they’ll be next on the mob’s menu.

So, Craig was forced to step aside from Cluedo, but the feminist outrage brigade has also had a go at bullying regional theatres which have been hosting his two-man show – Six String Stories, featuring Craig on guitar, singing, telling funny stories. It’s a great evening and is proving very popular.

The exciting news is Craig will also be starring in a daring new cabaret show called “Schadenfreude” in Melbourne later this year. It promises to be funny, dark, and entertaining. Full details here.

But I also have an appeal to you, good readers. If you are connected with a theatre or venue with a supportive community which would be willing to stand up for Craig by hosting his show, please contact me. Years ago, I managed to get Cassie Jaye’s movie, The Red Pill, shown around the country, despite fierce opposition from the cancel cult. Surely, we can do this again.

Now to explain more about what’s fuelling the ongoing attacks on Craig, we have to look at the role of the presiding judicial officer in the case, Magistrate Belinda Wallington.

The woman has quite a reputation as the magistrate who first ordered the late Cardinal George Pell to stand trial and then famously appeared in an ABC photograph with Louise Milligan, author of the notorious book, Cardinal, which very effectively poisoned public opinion before the Pell case went before a jury. The unanimous High Court decision dismissing the Pell allegations speaks volumes about the judgement of both women.

Her behaviour in Craig’s case is equally questionable. Having dismissed all the charges against Craig and awarded costs against the police, Wallington then weighed in with some unwarranted asides, describing the four complainants as “brave and honest” and Craig as an “egotistical and self-entitled man”.

Worse still, she threw in a comment about recent changes to sexual consent laws in Victoria, claiming if those changes had been in place at the time of the charges “it is possible that the result would have been different.”

Naturally the complainants seized upon Wallington’s extra-judicial swipes and went to the media claiming the case had been dismissed “on a technicality”.

Craig embarked on defamation action against the leading complainant and key media companies over their reporting in the case but ultimately pulled out after learning it was not permissible to refer to the not-guilty verdict in the defamation trial.

The ongoing debacle led Vanessa to make the podcast series, dissecting the evidence, showing that the behaviour of the complainants falls far short of Wallington’s praise and exposing her consent comment as thoroughly misleading.

Take a look at some examples of the real behaviour of these “brave and honest women,” many of which took place in front of sell-out audiences, all rivetted on Craig’s every move:

• The legendary thigh-tickling caper. One accusation involved Craig reaching up to tickle the complainant up to her inner thigh (while she was perched on an elevated platform). Problem was the physical setup made it comically implausible (he could barely get past her ankle). A further allegation that Craig touched this complainant’s vagina during the show was emphatically denied by the woman herself.

• The mid-song passionate smooch. It was alleged that Craig suddenly paused during his big number to passionately tongue-kiss one of the women onstage — even though the scene was choreographed to the split-second with music and lighting cues, giving him roughly zero room to improvise any erotic detours.

• Hug with extras. A late addition to the endlessly revised list of allegations involved a complainant asking Craig for a hug when an alleged surprise stiffy made an appearance. There was zero evidence supporting this nor the suggestion that Craig waltzed around the stage with no underwear under his flimsy boxer shorts.

• The face-grab fiasco. Witnesses swore blind that Craig grabbed one accuser by the jaw mid-scene and angrily hurled her face aside like a discarded prop. The actual complainant? She shrugged and said the scripted gentle face-touch was just “a little firmer than usual.”

• Much ado about absolutely bugger all. The bulk of the allegations were flatly denied by Craig, riddled with contradictions, or quietly undermined by complainants whose stories kept evolving. Throw in the fact that these women were full-throated participants in the hyper-sexualised, fishnet-and-corset madhouse that is Rocky Horror and the claim that they hadn’t given implied consent starts to look patently absurd.

As for Wallington’s comment about new sexual consent laws. There has been a change in Victorian law requiring that the accused person not only has to genuinely believe he had consent but that a reasonable person in the same circumstance would reach the same conclusion.

In only two of the 13 charges was consent law even mentioned as being applicable. One example where consent was an issue involved Craig sitting on a complainant’s lap. Evidence showed lap-sitting was commonplace in the bawdy backstage culture of the Rocky production. In fact, the same complainant had also straddled Craig’s thigh, joking about leaving “snail trails.”

Here the charges were dismissed because the magistrate accepted that Craig genuinely believed she consented. And, given the circumstances, it is a fair bet that any reasonable person in his position would have believed the same. So, even under Victoria’s new consent laws, the result would have been no different.

Wallington’s unwarranted editorial comments were entirely unnecessary to the decision. They were unnecessary comments that she ought to have known would be weaponised to undermine the very verdict she had delivered. In one breath she cleared him; she awarded him costs; and in the next she handed his critics the perfect excuse to misleadingly claim that his acquittal was the result of a mere technicality. The damage has been profound and lasting.

Yet the truth is finally breaking through. Vanessa Scammell’s compelling podcast Not Guilty is reaching people the world over who have watched #MeToo cases explode with devastating publicity but no proper media scrutiny when they disintegrate in court.

Craig McLachlan is determined to move forward. With exciting projects ahead, he is ready to reclaim the stage that was stolen from him. Spread the word. Help bring one of Australia’s finest entertainers back to where he belongs.

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