So now this has happened:
And even in tweet 1/10, Andy Wightman has told a flat-out lie.
Because as anyone can see for themselves by simply reading it, this whole matter has sprung from a Wings tweet on Friday in which we talked about allegations which were leaked “to Davie Clegg of the Daily Record”.
That unambiguously, inescapably, means these ones:
Can you spot the two words in that headline that prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Andy Wightman is lying, folks?
Give yourself some Alert Reader Points if you said “TO COPS”. Because you don’t report allegations of “workplace sexual harassment” to cops, because it isn’t a crime.
As we noted in our first piece on this subject on Sunday, sexual harassment is a civil wrong under the Equality Act 2010, not a criminal offence. If you turn up at a police station to complain about it, you’ll be gently ushered out and very politely directed to the nearest employment-solicitor’s office.
So when we tweeted about the allegations leaked to the Record, we were talking – and could ONLY have been talking – about the ones of sexual ASSAULT with which Alex Salmond was eventually charged, and of which he was cleared.
And of which therefore there most definitely IS “evidence that the allegations were false”, and pretty darn compelling evidence at that. Police Scotland conducted a vast investigation, interviewing hundreds of people, had one of Scotland’s most senior and capable KCs present their case to a High Court jury at great length over a two-week trial, and the jury said “Nah, don’t believe you”.
In the interests of fairness, let’s look at the rest of Wightman’s thread.
In these four tweets Wightman proves he’s lying, because he repeatedly refers to the criminal charges of sexual assault -the thing we tweeted about – NOT to the non-criminal matter of “workplace sexual harassment” that he appears to be pretending he thought we tweeted about.
He goes on to vaguely cast aspersions on the jury’s verdicts, unmistakeably implying that they don’t amount to a “real” acquittal and that they don’t prove the allegations were false. But in legal terms that’s exactly what they DO do.
Everyone in a UK criminal trial is innocent until proven guilty, and if the jury don’t find them guilty that means they stay innocent, are innocent and have always been innocent. The jury has found that there is no stain on the accused’s innocence, and that is unquestionably “evidence” that the accusations against them were false.
By saying that there is NO such evidence, Wightman can ONLY be questioning their findings. He has discounted their findings as non-existent. He didn’t say there was “only technical implied evidence that the allegations were false”, he said there was NONE. But the jury’s findings ARE evidence, and Alex Salmond IS innocent.
So this is another lie:
Our tweet did not reference “the leaked report”. We’ve never SEEN the leaked report and don’t know what was in it, other than the small snippets that were published in Clegg’s subsequent book, which included such heinous scandals as asking someone to “give me a twirl”, and which we saw for the first time a few minutes ago (when someone sent us scans from the book).
We talked explicitly and clearly about the allegations leaked to the Daily Record. Bizarrely, Wightman then admits that. He notes the distinction between the thing we DIDN’T talk about and the thing we DID. We said nothing at all about these apparent allegations of “workplace sexual harassment”, because on Friday when we wrote the tweet we didn’t have a clue what they were.
But Wightman’s final tweet essentially asserts that the “harassment” did definitely happen, and accuses Wings of doing something we never did. We said the CRIMINAL ALLEGATIONS were false, because that’s what the jury decided they were. We made no comment whatsoever about these mysterious other allegations that, inexplicably, have never been followed up after the crooked investigation into them collapsed.
Yet we’ve been repeatedly smeared by Andy Wightman as “minimising” and “belittling” workplace sexual harassment, even as he smears Alex Salmond by implying that he’s still under suspicion of sexual misconduct, while refusing to clarify what he means and thereby denying Salmond any chance to refute the smear.
(Something he’s been doing since 2021, personally asserting Salmond’s guilt despite having no discernible legitimate basis on which to do so. After all, as he himself notes, no valid investigation has been conducted into these claims and Wightman has no right to state these things as facts.)
(The findings were struck down because the investigation was unlawful, unfair and biased, but that doesn’t seem to have affected Wightman’s confidence in them. Or at least his willingness to posture piously about it.)
And of course, he STILL hasn’t answered our questions.
Wightman keeps digging himself further because he’s unwilling to either back up his claims, or admit that he simply wildly misunderstood our original tweet and is now too arrogant and lacking in honesty to back down to someone he doesn’t like.
But as long as he keeps lying, we’ll keep asking.
