Ex-Official Threatens Suit in Pedophile Scandal

A lawyer for the politician, Alistair McAlpine, said his client would have “no choice” but to file suit to clear his name of the accusations, which Mr. McAlpine dismissed as “wholly false and defamatory.” It was not immediately clear who would be the target of the suit, but the lawyer, Andrew Reid, indicated that the BBC could be one defendant when he said that the state-owned broadcaster had played a part in encouraging the Internet speculation about Mr. McAlpine.

The allegation stemmed from a report last week by the BBC program “Newsnight,” which has been under fire for canceling an investigative segment late last year on accusations of a long history of child sexual abuse, some of it on BBC premises, against Jimmy Savile, the host of wildly popular BBC programs from the 1970s to the 1990s. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011.

The “Newsnight” report contained an interview with a man, Steve Messham, who said he had been taken to a local hotel from a children’s home in the North Wales town of Wrexham in the 1980s and abused more than a dozen times by a man he identified as a senior Conservative politician from the years when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in power. The “Newsnight” segment fueled widespread speculation on the Internet as to the identity of the politician involved.

But then The Guardian newspaper posted an article on its Web site on Thursday night saying that the man most prominently named on the Internet, Mr. McAlpine, was “a victim of mistaken identity.” It quoted a local council member as saying that a member of the McAlpine family who lived locally might have been mistaken for the former Conservative politician.

With that, Mr. McAlpine went public, condemning the “media frenzy” and innuendo that he said had led to the accounts on the Internet that he was the man implicated in the “Newsnight” segment and giving a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Messham’s account. Mr. McAlpine said he had “never been to the children’s home in Wrexham, nor have I ever visited any children’s home, reform school or any other institution of a similar nature.” He said he had never stayed in a hotel in or near Wrexham, never owned a Rolls-Royce, never had a “gold card” or a “Harrods card,” and never wore after-shave — all features cited by Mr. Messham.

On Friday, Mr. Messham apologized, saying the actual Mr. McAlpine bore no resemblance to the man in the photos shown to him by the police in the 1990s.

“Newsnight” on Friday evening featured a broad apology to Mr. McAlpine by the management of the program and the BBC, coupled with an announcement that all investigative reporting by “Newsnight” was being suspended indefinitely.

Alistair McAlpine, heir to a construction fortune, was Conservative Party treasurer when he was named to the House of Lords by Mrs. Thatcher in 1984. He is now 70, in poor health and living with his third wife in southern Italy. The McAlpine relative who lived near Wrexham, said in his obituary to have had a large collection of vintage cars, has been dead since 1991.

It was another twist to a scandal that has sent shock waves through the BBC and the police, as well as hospitals, children’s homes and other institutions where children are said to have been systematically abused over decades. Allegations that it is fomenting a wave of public hysteria with unsupported accusations have been aimed at “Newsnight,” the flagship BBC program.

Mr. Cameron warned against a hysteria that threatened to drag innocent people into the fray.

“There is a danger if we are not careful that this can turn into a sort of witch hunt, particularly about people who are gay, and I’m worried about the sort of thing you are doing right now,” he said on Thursday when he was handed a list of conservative politicians alleged to have links to pedophilia that had been downloaded by the host of ITV’s “This Morning” program.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/world/europe/ex-official-threatens-suit-in-pedophile-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss