Friday, 19 February 2016
The Cesspit
The Experts
Oh God, he never learns, does he? It seems that Mr Bennett has issued an Official Cesspit Declaration today about the Malicious Communications Act and how people he names, including little Blacksmith, need to be aware of it. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
One of the reasons Bennett had such problems as a lawyer is that, ridiculous as it sounds, he genuinely doesn’t understand the law and, in this case, the distinction between defamation, a civil matter, and malicious communications, part of the criminal law.
The 1988 act makes it an offence to "send or deliver letters or other articles for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety". And, Baldie, the intention to cause distress and anxiety has to be proved. The result is that only the most obvious, unanswerable cases, usually involving very stupid, very cowardly, people, ever come near the courts.
For very few more or less normal people wish to cause such distress: they have better things to do and more important battles to fight. In fact only one case jumps to mind, outside the usual Twitter and Facebook lowlifes, of an outright malicious communication, where the intention to cause distress was so clear as to be overwhelming.
That case, some years ago, involved the printing of defamatory leaflets by an elderly, but by no means harmless, eccentric. What took it into the criminal realm was that the leaflets were taken to the neighborhood of the defamed victims and a team put them through letter boxes throughout the area. By these actions the civil issue of defamation had crossed over into criminal territory.
To "send or deliver letters or other articles for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety".
What did the malicious perpetrator think would be the effect of flooding a neighbourhood with poisonous claims implying the subjects had committed a very, very serious crime? It's not as though the buffoon wandered the streets with a few leaflets, handing them out. No, he organized a team of accomplices to get the maximum coverage and maximum shock and distress. Could he possibly have believed that doing such a thing wouldn’t cause distress or anxiety? Readers, think about it for yourselves: would you have been untroubled if you found out your neighbours had all received these things? About you and your family? What a creepy, malevolent, twisted, as well as malicious, thing to do. The offender was Bennett, of course, Urgh! Bennett, you horrible person, you planned it with accomplices, you had to know it would cause distress and you did cause distress. It's what you do. The cesspit is a factory for creating malicious communications, as all those screenshots show.
Now, the word cesspit, which greatly to the discomfort of Mr Bennett, has been universally adopted as a description of his squalid “forum”. A cesspit, is a tank of excretia floating in froth and scum. It is the only word I could ever find that expressed my utter revulsion at the horrible, leering, lip-smacking libels that the Bennett group throw out day after day, week after week about their latest innocent targets. There is never an iota of truth in these clinically sick claims – we know that as fact because now and then people decide to test them via the legal process. Truth, of course, is a complete defence to a libel claim.
So what happens when people like the McCanns or the Kennedys or anyone else test them? The one thing Bennett never comes out with is a simple, measured, dignified (dignity and Bennett don't co-exist) statement: the claims are true and here is the evidence to demonstrate it. Not once.
When sued he delays, temporizes, looks for escape routes, bluffs. Then he starts wriggling and delaying. Then, when reality and the consequences of his reckless lying, finally close in on him, he crumbles. And then he grovels. And then he pays, and goes on paying. It is a pathetic, craven, unmanly record, one that makes one turn ones eyes away.
None of this is opinion. What we’ve written here is all, unlike the outfall from the cesspit, based on the record, including court evidence and judgements. It is fact and no attempt by the cesspit to counter these facts – a small selection from a huge number of targets – will alter it. People we know don’t want to distress you, Bennett. They want to express their utter disgust at your dreadful, cowardly, malicious, lying behaviour.
