Falsely Accused Day 2024: Report from the Tower of London
Sean Parker
September 11, 2024
With campaigners for Lucy Letby’s innocence all over the news, Falsely Accused Day 2024 took place outside the Tower of London in central London. The Brian Buckle Massive, including the recent exoneree himself, were out in force, with excellent attitudes and picture t-shirts galore.
FASO (Falsely Accused Support Organisation) CEO Margaret Gardener opened proceedings with a brief history of the movement, going back to the organisation’s founding in the early 2000s, and her husband’s own false allegation.
Brian Hudson, tireless secretary of FACT (Falsely Accused Carers & Teachers) was up next. Hudson not the first to call out the fact that the new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was the very man who introduced the ‘believe the victim’ policy to the Crown Prosecution Service in the early 2010s, leading to the epidemic of false allegations we see today.
Brian Buckle gave a beautifully moving talk about his journey from false allegations dating from 1992, the pain of trial and imprisonment, and long struggle for exoneration following. Brian and his family recently heard he wasn’t entitled to compensation as he couldn’t ‘prove he was innocent,’ so the already momentous achievement of being exonerated by the Appeal Court is still apparently not enough in trying to recoup some of the £500,000 spent on legal fees.
Dr Kevin Felstead, formerly of the British False Memory Society (BFMS), spoke about his organisation’s work over the years, and how false memories are still being weaponised when therapists think they could get away with it.
There was a rare public appearance by former policeman William Merritt, author of a brilliantly thorough book about the allegations against world-famous artist and presenter Rolf Harris. Merritt spoke eloquently about everything he had discovered in the writing of that book, and how an allegations can snowball with the collusion of an incentivized media.
This author had a word about the work of Empowering the Innocent, FASO, and the recognition of the ‘courtcraft’ used in the Lucy Letby reports in many accounts of wrongful convictions. Pop producer and songwriter Jonathan King delivered his conviction that Keir Starmer would at some point soon have false accusers coming for him, and find himself (metaphorically) in the ancient Tower opposite the demonstration.
Representatives from Spoken Injustice, the Falsely Accused Network, and individual campaigners were also present, and co-demonstrations in Liverpool and around the world were far from forgotten. Let alone the cases from previous decades — in just the 2020s, the cases of Johnny Depp, the Postmasters, Julian Assange, Andy Malkinson, and Lucy Letby have elevated the chronic problems of the justice system into public consciousness.
The attendees of IFAD 2024 knew these were ‘not the only ones’, to say the least. The movement continues to grow, because the truth will always out.