Among the many unedifying aspects of the fall of Huw Edwards has been a possible glimpse into how the man sees himself. At the hearing on Monday, the chief magistrate, Paul Goldspring, held Edwards firmly responsible for his own actions – namely, being in possession of sexually explicit images of children – and gave him a suspended six-month sentence. But while Edwards’ barrister said the former presenter “apologises sincerely” and acknowledged the “repugnant” nature of the images, the narrative that the defence team offered during the hearing sought to tell a less contrite and more familiar story.
You take with a pinch of salt the testimony of expert witnesses, of course. What is fascinating about the opinions put forth about Edwards by psychiatrists and therapists introduced by his legal team is that they were thought sufficiently compelling – and sympathy-inducing – to act as mitigation for a crime this serious. Factors introduced by the defence team ran the gamut from mental anguish brought on by Edwards’ emotionally abusive father, to his repressed sexuality, to the much-mocked contention that Edwards’ failure to get into Oxford contributed to lifelong issues with self-esteem – a claim so audacious you almost had to admire it. A case as serious as this is a tough gig for the best of lawyers, and at some level – hats off – they gave it a punt.
The Oxford claim was instantly and widely ridiculed, but it is only a slightly more ludicrous example of a common defence used by lawyers in sex crimes or domestic violence cases. It is hard to imagine a woman in the dock pleading mitigation on the basis that she didn’t get into the university of her choice, and not only because 98% of adults prosecuted for sex crimes in England and Wales are men.
That a man accused of accessing child abuse images can launch the defence that he didn’t get what he wanted, that his station in life was less elevated than he felt it should be – that his pride had been so mortally wounded it contributed to, as the defence daintily put it, seeking validation online – is extraordinary. This is the starting position of the “incel”. That this should be used in the context of Huw Edwards is a sign of how acceptable the excuse has become.
And it crops up all the time, alongside a range of other mitigating factors brought to bear when men are convicted of sex crimes. Take the weaselly defence of, for example, the “Stanford swimmer” Brock Turner, whose conviction for three felony accounts of sexual assault was excused by, among others, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, as a result of the disinhibiting effect of alcohol. Women get drunk all the time and don’t tend to rape people, but no matter. The idea that as a disinhibiting factor misogyny, or entitlement, or any number of conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses that defence teams tend to avoid – narcissism, say, or psychopathy – might play a pivotal role in any given sex crime rarely features in these accounts.
Instead it’s always “low self-esteem”, isn’t it? Or in the case of apologists for Roman Polanski, a convicted sex offender, prior trauma. Or in the case of Harvey Weinstein, the vulnerable position entered into by a man in the public eye. (Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, contended that it was Weinstein himself who had been manipulated by women, a similar line of defence furthered by Donald Trump’s lawyers in 2023, when the civil courts found him liable for the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll.) There is, it turns out, no end to the self-victimising ideation of the powerful man.
The incredible thing is not that Huw Edwards might genuinely still be clinging to this grievance about being snubbed in the workplace by BBC poshos – although, as a source of low self-esteem, I’d have thought WhatsApping with a convicted paedophile might be a bigger blow than not going to Oxford – but that it was thought a sufficiently credible injury to bring up in court. Damage to a man’s pride is not seen as a dismissable event, nor might he be expected to metabolise disappointment in ways that don’t result in injury to others.
Which isn’t to say that details emerging from Westminster magistrates court this week haven’t been interesting. For anyone seeking to write a novel about the Disappointments of Huw Edwards – where’s Trollope when you need him? – this information about how he sees himself is fascinating. In a court setting, it is entirely, offensively irrelevant.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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