The judgement in the case of a support worker constructively dismissed by Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre in 2022 is one of the most excoriating we’ve ever read.
Mridul Wadhwa, a man with whom Wings readers have been familiar for some years, was found by the tribunal judge to have been “the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place” as Roz Adams, a conscientious, caring and highly professional woman with a long history in the sector, was systematically and methodically hounded out of her job for holding, privately and sensitively, the belief that biological sex is real.
That belief placed her at odds with Wadhwa and the rest of the management team at the centre in a way that, when you see it written down in cold black and white, is almost impossible to believe.
Wadhwa, who has no qualifications of any kind in counselling, was hired in May 2021, when the Chief Operating Officer of the centre was unhinged Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman, subordinate to Rape Crisis Scotland CEO Sandy Brindley, who for many years has served as a paid mouthpiece and attack dog for Nicola Sturgeon.
Adams had only been working at ERCC for a couple of months when Wadhwa took over, but almost immediately found herself targeted over her views with a sustained campaign of intolerable multi-level harassment and discrimination, described by the judge as “somewhat reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka”, until she was left with no choice but to resign.
(“PCP” stands for “provision, criteria or practice”.)
Wadhwa was too cowardly to even appear before the tribunal to defend his actions, and the judge had no doubt that the reason for this was that they were indefensible.
These are the barest bones of the case. We picked out some more of the highlights of the judgement on our Twitter account last night, and we recommend that you give them a read there.
(Perhaps the single most repulsive aspect is that Wadhwa actively forbade ERCC staff from referring any woman who wanted a female-only service – and therefore could not put her trust in ERCC – to Beira’s Place, the Edinburgh centre set up by JK Rowling for that specific purpose. He had no sympathy for victims who were not prepared to submit to gender ideology. As far as he was concerned they were bigots who could suffer alone. Indeed, it’s not much of a leap, based on some of his public comments, to imagine that he thought such people probably deserved to be raped.)
But it will come as no surprise to anyone who’s paid attention to Scottish civic life in the last decade or so that it seems nobody will be held accountable or answerable for these appalling acts of malicious and premeditated persecution.
ERCC issued a statement expressing no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Wadhwa has not resigned or been suspended, and Sandy Brindley’s only comment has been to kick the can down the road for an indeterminate period (but likely to be several months at a minimum) by announcing an “independent review” and “refresh” of the centre’s practices, in the hopes that it’ll fall out of the news and Wadhwa – who has made no comment and shown no contrition – can continue to run it in the meantime.
But just such an extensive and independent review has already been conducted, by Judge McFatridge. Its conclusions clearly and unambiguously demonstrate that none of the management team of ERCC are fit to hold office, let alone to be entrusted with the care of incredibly vulnerable women.
This site and others have been raising red flags about Mridul Wadhwa – a sinister, pathological liar and fraud who the SNP nevertheless approved as a candidate for TWO constituencies and made the Woman’s Officer in one of their branches – for almost four years.
Today those warnings have been vindicated in the most comprehensive manner possible. But Wadhwa had protection at the highest level.
There was never any excuse for ignorance about who and what he was. But until the poison of gender identity ideology is purged from Scottish civic society – a task which has not yet even meaningfully begun – he and others like him will continue to wreak untold damage on those least able to bear such harm.
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FURTHER COVERAGE
The story is so far conspicuous by its absence in the Daily Record, BBC and Guardian. Perhaps they’ll pick it up if a drag queen gets involved.
