12 Noon Saturday 29 September 2012 Nunhead Heights
Comic Justin Lee Collins kept a ‘Pukka Pad dossier’ of his girlfriend’s sexual past. According to the prosecutor he would often verbally abuse her and mention details in the pad.
Of course Justin Lee Collins had to write down the sexual details. Women remember every single thing you say and throw it in your face years later. Men need to commit it to paper.
Kinky, yes, but is it a crime?
I can tell you the Ten Commandments doesn’t include ‘Thou shall not take notes.’
In yesterday’s post – my defense of Justin Lee Collins – I don’t think I stressed the harm that the laws against harassment are causing in England.
If what has been reported in the press is true, and if I’ve read it correctly, Justin Lee Collins’s girlfriend has accused him of attempted murder and swears that the ebullient Alan Carr was a witness to this act.
‘Justin Lee Collins tried to push his girlfriend under a taxi and left her with thousands of bruises’ is how the Mirror reported it.
Yet Justin Lee Collin isn’t on trial for attempted murder. He is on trial for “harassment – fear of violence”. Alan Carr hasn’t been called as a witness for the Prosecution, or put on trial himself for not reporting a crime. And what about the taxi driver? He or she must have seen something.
The Crown Prosecution Service either couldn’t make “Attempted Murder’ stick. Or they didn’t believe her. Or they didn’t hear about it until late in the day because she chose not to mention it. Are there other options? And the harassment charge is the easiest to prove because it can mean anything.
I can understand attempted murder. Murder was in the Ten Commandments.
His girlfriend felt fear. That is his crime. That’s harassment. Even as I write this I am not sure. Is anyone sure what harassment is?
It would all be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
Tragic for Justin Lee Collins who is seeing his career as a comic go down the courtroom toilet with these accusations. Audiences don’t like comics who aren’t nice to women. Half the audience is women and the other half have mothers and wives and daughters. You may be able to get away with saying bad things but not doing them.
And tragic for the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, who have lost their children to an accusation of ‘harassment.’
A mother says ‘I fear violence’ from the father and BOOM he’s evicted from his home and 500 feet are kept between him and his children. Days in Family Court pleading to see their children turn into weeks turn into months and possibly years without the children and fathers seeing each other.
And when they are allowed to see each other they are relegated to the dreaded ‘Contact Centre.’ A place where the children enter on one side of the church hall and the fathers enter on the other for two hours of “Supervised’ visitation. All because the mother is ‘afraid’.
The sword of the harassment charge is held over every separated father’s neck.
On one hand Justin Lee Collin is lucky he didn’t have a child with the accuser. If he did she might have taken out her vindictiveness on him directly by making it impossible for him to see his child. This is common.
Or perhaps because he didn’t have children with her that she took it all the way to Crown Court and got a felony charge placed against him.
If harassment can include calling a woman a fat pig, being forced to throw out some DVDs, and being asked to tell your sexual history, then every man and every woman is an harasser. We have all asked out partners to do things they didn’t want to do at some time.
When this whole sordid business is tossed out of court, where will Justin Lee Collins go to regain his reputation? That is if he is acquitted. If he isn’t acquitted he will be tarnished for life.
And when will the English Court System stop using this harassment law to stop children from seeing their fathers?
That is what I should have posted yesterday.
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Lewis Schaffer 
we haven’t heard the defense yet so it all may turn out to be bollocks. But one thing is sure, if what she says is true he is a psychopath- and if it is false, she is a psychopath.