'My husband was arrested for child porn. My 10-year nightmare began'

British police bastardry

Jeremy Clifford was arrested for possessing child porn in 2003, but cleared his name after an epic legal battle. His wife Faith tells Radhika Sanghani how they coped

Jeremy and Faith Clifford were still asleep in bed on a Thursday morning in 2003 when the doorbell rang.  It was the police.

“Jeremy told me the police wanted to search the house,” recounts Faith, now 54. “It’s funny but I just remember feeling devastated at having intruders in my house. I was embarrassed.”

The couple had never been involved with the police before and assumed it was all a big mix-up. That’s when they finally realised that Jeremy was being arrested. For child pornography.

“I was really afraid,” says Faith, “but I knew it was all rubbish. I just know Jeremy. I know he wouldn’t do this, and the fact that we don’t even have any computers at home just proved it to me. I was convinced it would all be over in a few hours when they realised they had the wrong man.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead Jeremy was charged with possessing child pornography and spent the next nine months wondering if he was going to be jailed for a crime he had nothing to do with.

“It was unbelievable,” says Faith. “You think it happens to other people. I’m just an ordinary person – never been in trouble before and suddenly all this happened on the most awful subject. It was this huge struggle.

“Jeremy’s more sensitive. He just started to crumple. It was awful because when I first met him he was very charismatic, entrepreneurial and full of fun. But after this I’d come home and he’d be sat in darkness, he was quick to temper, he was ratty. He just kept saying, no one will ever believe me. Honestly, some of those traits have never gone.”

Eventually, Jeremy was cleared in 2005 – “Even now I cry thinking about the day the charges were dropped,” he says. “We were just sobbing our hearts out” - but by this point he’d lost his film equipment business and their lives had been turned upside down.

It’s why he decided to sue the police for the distress and hurt they caused by falsely accusing him.  “You’ll never know what it’s like to be charged for that kind of offence,” he tells me, now aged 55. “I’m still not over it. It has affected me, I had really bad depression. I was medically unable to continue my job.  "Anyone who has accused of that sort of thing would have that reaction – especially being innocent. They prosecuted me for almost two years."

The couple’s nightmare didn’t end there. Their decision to sue Hertfordshire Constabulary ended up becoming a six-year legal battle that cost them thousands of pounds and thousands of hours of their lives.

They had to sell their home in Watford as well as a house in Spain to afford the legal costs. But they were convinced they would win their case, mainly because they knew that a computer expert found no evidence to prosecute Jeremy back in 2003, but Hertfordshire police charged him anyway.

All the police had as evidence were 10 images of indecent children found on a work computer that were ‘level one’ – the lowest level of seriousness used to categorise indecent images of children, and with evidence that his credit card had been used to access a child porn website six times in 1999.

Jeremy was charged with possessing these images even though there was no evidence he knew they were there. It later transpired that the “thumbnail” images on his computer may have been downloaded accidentally by pop-up ads, and that his card has been used fraudulently – the details had been hacked when he booked his honeymoon with Faith.

But when the Cliffords took the case to trial, their claim for damages was dismissed in 2008, when the judge ruled there was no wrongdoing by the police and the arrest was justifiable.

“You can only imagine what went through our minds,” says Jeremy. “We would have lost all our money and had to pay them as well. It was so frustrating because I’d spent months in a law library learning to litigate for myself, and we think that’s why we lost. So we decided to appeal.”

The couple hired the best lawyers they could, won their appeal, and were granted a retrial in 2011. It was then that justice was finally served and the couple won their case.

The police were forced to pay out £20,000 in damages along with around £750,000 for the legal bills the couple had accrued over the past eight years.

“It was a relief but we didn’t get the compensation we should have,” says Faith. “We’d hoped to retire in Spain but that’s not going to happen now. We had to sell our house which was hard. They have stamped all over our lives.

“Why didn’t they say ‘we made a mistake’? If they’d just given us an apology or compensation back in 2005 when we made the complaint, they could have avoided this. But instead it took six years and two trials. We’ll never get our life back – not to the standard it was at.”

It’s why she has now written a book called Fit Up: Fighting the Police to Clear My Husband’s Name about the couple’s ordeal. “I don’t think the [police have paid enough,” she says. “I want to name and shame them.”

One of the main focuses of her book is the stigma of her husband being charged for a crime like possession child pornography and what that did to her relationship.

“Any normal thinking person has this revulsion about it and to be accused of it is absolutely appalling,” she tells me. “People are very quick to judge. It was hard for me because I couldn’t tell anyone at work. So I ended up just feeling shut out.

“When my colleagues would talk about their weekends and things, I didn’t feel I could join in. My heart was stone cold. I had to carry on being this cheery person, meanwhile thinking what’s going to happen to Jeremy? What’s the next bad news going to be?”

She says it was particularly hard as a wife trying to support her husband: “Your role as a wife is to stand by your man and when you believe in them you can. But there are still moments where you don’t know what to do.

“He once said, I might not be here when you come back. So then you just have that fear in your head. I had to get a dog to refocus him. I thought if I didn’t, he’d do something stupid.

“Our sexual relationship went downhill. Anything to do with that seemed dirty. We used to watch police programmes, like The Bill and so on, but couldn’t even do that anymore. I could see the nice times disintegrate.”

It’s only now that Faith says things have really got better, meaning this one incident has affected more than a decade of their lives. For her, writing the book was a cathartic way to deal with everything she’d been through, and she says it’s made her realise she’s become a lot stronger over the past 10 years:

“I have had to deal with the worst things. So I think anything else will be a doddle. I’ve seen that I’m a strong brave person, and no one should mess with me because I’m quiet but I’ll get you back.

“I think, would we [sue the police] again, and we always would because I can’t let people like that beat me.”

Original report here



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