We tend to concentrate on celebrities because that's all the media assumes the public are interested in but I was fortunate to spend time in prison and learned a huge amount about ordinary people - including many, often vicars, priests or teachers, who had pleaded guilty to crimes that never took place simply because they did not want to cause further distress to the false accusers. Yes; some did it to get lesser sentences or simply to stop the horrid process (often nasty enough to cause suicide; believe me, as I stood in the dock recently and heard the horrid Cottage woman (prosecutor) spout total lies about me, without being able to speak up and deny them, I knew how ordinary people, with less thick skin, could kill themselves). But many were genuinely decent people who simply felt it was better they suffer than make the loonies, or greedies or simply deluded, suffer more. A Christian attitude. And they had nothing to gain by telling me that. In honest conversations - their lives already ruined or almost over - some in their 80s. The crimes simply never happened but why ruin someone else's life when they were only going to be alive for a few more years anyway? Often their wives and children knew and believed the truth; essentially that was all that mattered. These men didn't have the "killer instinct" I have - not for revenge but to prevent other innocent people suffering similar. They were decent, honest, honourable men. Most will now be dead. I hope I gave them comfort, friendship, understanding.

This is sobering. But I still find it hard to believe that someone would plead guilty to spare a false accuser from suffering.

Misa wrote:
This is sobering. But I still find it hard to believe that someone would plead guilty to spare a false accuser from suffering.

You might if it was your bonkers son or daughter?

This has been going on for years with bent lawyers telling scallywags to just say " I did it guv" because you want go to prison they will give you a slap on the wrist. Now tell someone who has never been in trouble before who is shitting bricks because the inadvertently put a pair of pants in their pocket and walked out of M&S and pleading guilty to shoplifting.
Plenty have and plenty will.

Just one thing, if you end up in prison, Don't blame it on
drinking to much
The taking of drugs
I have a mental issue
All the above will have you on courses inside and out.
Do blame it on
Being sexual abused as a child
By
Your mother
Father
A relative
The bloke who took you fishing
Someone from the church
Your local MP
A prime minister
Better still
An aging pop star
A dead pop star

Money and all the help you can get will be granted upon you.
No proof needed.

Off to do my count now

You might if it was your bonkers son or daughter? I had to read that a couple of time for it to sink in. But, thank you honey!oh, that does make sense. If my own child, or grandchild, had accused me, throwing the whole family into a state of distress, pleading guilty might well seem to be the option likely to cause least pain all round.

Very true and I met many during my enjoyable time as Her Majesty's guest and special needs consultant! But I was mainly referring to religious people - vicars and priests who genuinely prefer to suffer rather than to damage those false accusers who, I'm sure, often really believe their fantasies, often only exaggerate, frequently started and provoked any activity whilst experiencing development (you'd be surprised by how many teenagers, males especially, are desperate for any assistance in stimulation during those troubling first few years of adolescence).

It really doesn't take much to convince oneself, as one ages and reads media tales, that one was 15 not 16 and that one was forced into something as opposed to wanting it. Memory can be a tricky friend.

This is a very important point and it must be a factor that a lot of people plead guilty in sex cases because the wrath that will descend upon them for daring to claim innocence (whether guilty or not) is frightening.

And I reckon JK must know a lot about this as the media have endlessly slated him as "unrepentant" and other such slurs..even though now we see that everything is not quite as claimed.

And the media: nasty and repetitive in their demands that you are not only "disgraced" but must grovel to them (and this mysterious public they assume they speak for) as in a certain PEEDEOFILE ex-footballer who dares, dares ( How Very Dare He) go out in public wearing an expensive watch among other atrocities.