by Stuart Campbell
(Wings Over Scotland, Aug 17, 2020)
The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.
[...] It’s important to remember that the jury of eight women and five men found that all of Alex Salmond’s accusers were lying. All of the accusers said, clearly and specifically, that Salmond had sexually assaulted them, but the jury concluded that he didn’t sexually assault a single one of them. In other words, the jury decided that every single one of the accusers wasn’t telling the truth. Some specifics can be debated but there’s no wiggle room on that. They decided that the things the accusers claimed didn’t happen.
[...] Surprising as it may seem for such a crude piece of sledgehammer propaganda, there are a few moments of (relative) subtlety in the show too, like the sly implied linking of Salmond with Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein, the careful editing of the (very short) contributions from people supportive of Salmond – which mostly focus on negative comments about him, like Jim Sillars saying unspecified aspects of his conduct were “deplorable” – and the ludicrously comical pantomime-villain voice used for the words of Salmond’s chief counsel Gordon Jackson QC.
There’s also the way that, eight minutes in, Wark reads out, in her own voice, her own interpretation of events, intertwined with an actress reading out the accuser’s evidence from the courtroom. The two accounts – the actual evidence given in court and Wark’s paraphrasing of what was claimed – are blurred together until the viewer isn’t sure what’s fact and what’s fantasy. The jury, as we’ll recall, concluded it was all fantasy, but it’s clear that Wark’s own opinion is rather different...
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