Ronaldo Allegation

I'm just reading the "secret agent" book now which is along the same lines as the secret footballer.

It seems most agents have these kind of requests for payments regularly and have a standard contract ready and have a slush fund ready to pay them. If it happened she should have continued with the police not take money.

I’d hope City would respond better than this if anything similar came up about our players

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One for, initially, the prosecutors to decide if there is a case and, if so, for a judge and jury to decide on guilt. We don't have any evidence either way so we're not in a position to denigrate either party at this stage.

However, wouldn't it be nice if we were all in the position of being able to pay someone £280K to keep quiet about something that didn't happen

As for the debacle of the judicial appointment in the USA, that's exactly why such appointments should be completely removed from the political process as in this country.

the money means nothing. even someone 100% innocent might easily do something like this to not potentially put his chances in the hands of strangers and have his name dragged through the mud. Its not any indication whatsoever of guilt

Quite right. I once sold a car and the buyer incurred several hundred pounds worth of tickets . It was nothing to do with me and I certainly could have proved that but I paid the tickets to avoid the embarrassment of appearing before the magistrates as a defendant.
I note this morning that Nike are reconsidering a £270 MILLION sponsorship deal with Ronaldo because of this ALLEGATION . This is my point ,you see, that people who may be entirely innocent can suffer ruinous consequences over allegations without the formality of any proof or conviction.
This being so, we empower every female in the world to demand money, override democratic processes or change the path of history itself by making allegations of this nature.

There is a proper recourse for genuine victims of crime and no real excuse for those who want to do it another way.

I think I spoke of a burglar called Billy Smith or something in relation to the fact that his victims would come forward immediately rather than wait 30 years. Well to develop that one , if the victim had Mr Smith beaten up or demanded money from him instead of reporting him to the police , then he'd be the one in trouble. This is obvious, but somehow the issue is fudged when we speak of rape , and that is more to do with identity politics and the victim culture than it is with Justice or common sense.

I do like the way that Billy Smith, who was an instant and random invention on my part to make a point has been mentioned now several times in here. Digressing from the issue, I think we should develop the character a bit and maybe eventually give him his own thread. Have you had any trouble from this man, and what can we do to bring him back into the fold ?

Firstly you jumped to the conclusion that I've said that the money indicated guilt. Read it again. I haven't.

But what people might perceive is that he isn't confident that he can't raise a case that stops his accuser proving beyond [b]all reasonable doubt[/b] that he is guilty. Don't forget that the onus is on the prosecution to prove that he is guilty not for his defence to prove that he isn't.

Just one final point. Society is a much different place in the last 2-3 years, thankfully, where people of all persuasions feel much more confident in speaking up against historical abuse whereas when the incidents actually happened the likelihood is that they wouldn't have been taken seriously.

Did the passage of time mean that the abuses of the Catholic clergy, Saville, Cyril Smith, Rochdale (where the girls weren't initially believed even when they did raise it), Gary Glitter, etc., didn't actually happen ? Clearly not, therefore probably best to wait for the trail on this one before merely be-littling it just because it wasn't fully reported at the time.

Not necessarily a case of whether he thinks he's be convicted , as I thought I'd made clear. The mere allegation has been enough to jepordise his 270 million Nike Spomdorship and perhaps he was concerned about that sort of consequence, plus the fact that in the real world his reputation would never have recovered even if he were acquitted .


You raise the wider issue of various historical prosecutions and I'm afraid I can't approve of those either. I'm sure that a percentage of these allegations are true, but whether they can have been properly proven is another matter. Insofar as the respective juries have reached verdicts then it's correct to say that they've been proven, but I can assure you that juries rarely understand the law as explained to them and reach unsound verdicts in either direction. ( in fairness they probably aquitt more guilty men than they convict innocent ones though).
We can't cross the barrier of reasonable doubt in the absence of a timely investigation and preservation of evidence and although I certainly don't like the idea of people getting away with such awful crimes, we really should be applying the traditional checks and balances for everyone's sakes. If we "move the goalposts" to get the result we'd like, no matter how honourable our intentions might be, then we irrevocably harm justice itself.

Borderline subject in terms of relevance on this board but I think people here will have opinions on the matter.

In recent weeks in the USA we've seen the weaponisation of sex allegations in an attempt to block the appointment of a Supreme Court Judge or delay it in the hope that the mid terms will go the way of the Democrats so they can block any nominee who would stop them destroying the first and second amendments.
Now we see a similarly dubious allegation about Ronaldo from some woman who claims that he raped her in Vegas in 2009. Is she trying to get more money out of him, or acting on behalf of some rival interest or third party who wishes to damage him ?

For about 1300 years we took the view that all criminal allegations should be thoroughly investigated as to whether they were true or concocted, that people who were accused could only be convicted when proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt , and that we don't generally even try to prosecute on allegations made many years after the alleged crime.

Common sense will tell you that it's suspicious for someone to come up with an allegation of a crime which they didn't bother to report at the time, but complain about years later. ( in the case of the woman in Vegas she did report it at the time but didn't identify Ronaldo as a suspect). Perhaps more importantly, it's impossible to investigate anything years later when memories have faded, forensic evidence is long gone and vital witnesses may be now untraceable or dead. Thus ,any conviction in such cases would be intrinsically unsafe.

Unfortunately, one aspect of the society wide mental illness which currently afflicts us in so many areas of life, is that we must apparently make an exception to this requirement for proper reliable evidence where the alleged victim is female , just in case she finds the whole experience a bit upsetting. The presumption seems to be that no female is capable of lying or imagining anything and so, unlike other crimes,evidentially verifying the truth of the allegation is unimportant .

This is a powerful tool to place into the hands of every female and a terrifying prospect for people like football players who are known to be very rich and subject to huge payouts to alleged victims of vague and unprovable tales from the distant past.

As I said, it's of dubious relevance to this thread, but I suppose that once it's caught on as a quick way of screwing money out of footballers or disrupting their ability to play, we could see local club attending females catching on and trying to get a few grand out of Cardiff players. Could that happen , and is this something we should challenge or just another freakish development of a ver sick society that we should just put up with like all the others ?

Common sense doesn't tell me that a crime not reported at the time is necessarily "suspicious". The situation will be unique, and the reasons for not reporting the incident need to be considered in context of the circumstances and not generalised as you appear to be doing

Of course it's suspicious ! I didn't say it's impossible that there might be some extraordinary reason which explains a delay in complaining, but this would be the exception since most people who suffer a serious crime do so immediately , or at least tell someone else whom they trust about it.
Be that as it may, and whether you might feel sympathetic towards the alleged victim or accept whatever reason they give for taking decades to mention the matter, well it's still impossible to investigate it properly at that stage for the reasons I mentioned above, plus the fact that we can hardly rely upon someone's memory of something so long ago to convict someone.

If you tried to tell the police that Billy Smith burgled your house in 1999 and you'd now like him arrested ,they'd laugh in your face wouldn't they ? Quite rightly so, and for all the reasons I've mentioned here. The difference is that this is a "trendy" issue which seeks to evoke in people a different standard based upon political correctness rather than evidence or truth.

It's hardly the sole example of ridiculous logic in the dumbed down and politically driven nut house which is our current version of a society , but it is a particularly dangerous one and at least worth mentioning even if people are unwilling to take it on board for fear of being seen as unhelpful to one of the special groups accorded automatic victim status by the Islington trendies and completely naive social justice warriors.

Rape is a deeply traumatising and shameful occurance often carried out by people in power. Burglary doesn’t come close in terms of the anguish it causes. I’m assuming your Billy Smith character is an opportunist scrote, not someone who is a pillar of society protected by powerful friends. There would be no obvious reason not to report a burglary, whereas rape could be harder to prove so there’s more of a dilemma built in. I get the feeling that the “trendy” tag you give these situations is clouding your judgement.

In fact you make my point , don't you ?
You seem to be quite happy to treat the standards of evidence required differently according to which crime has been committed. You justify this with some emotional description of rape which isn't the issue. Yes it's a serious crime and that's why they can send you to prison for it, but murder for example is also serious and yet no one is suggesting that we drop the requirement for proper evidence for a murder conviction.
Now , I must inform you that burglary is also a serious crime to those who suffer it and an even more serious matter for anyone wrongly convicted of it, which is why we insist upon proper evidence and due process before we find them guilty.

Incidentally, most rapes are not in fact committed by influential people whose powerful friends subsequently protect them from prosecution and I think that it's your judgement which is clouded by the amount of coverage such matters receive. By all means empathise with rape victims, I hope we all do, but in truth it's something which has been happening for thousands of years and isn't treated lightly by the courts, and like all other serious crimes is best addressed by proper investigation and prosecution rather than emotive speeches and virtue signalling.

I didn’t say that the standard of evidence should be treated differently. I merely said that context around someone reporting rape after the event should be considered carefully. And as piledriver 64 indicates, the amount of institutional rape committed by people in power is substantial eg he clergy.

I think there's far more at work regarding allegations against the clergy than the gullible acceptance of political correctness.
I appreciate that you're not personally recommending or intending this sliding scale of standards according to the trendiness score of the particular allegation, but I'm pointing out that it has crept quietly in as a consequence of a much wider campaign of social saboutage.
Like so many wicked and destructive attacks upon the fabric of an imperfect and yet overall decent country and society, it has been dressed up as some wonderful enlightening gift to the world. So successfully has this been carried out that if anyone should see it for the "wooden horse" it actually is, and dare to say so, they will tend to be seen as the bad guy.

in considering all such matters , we should consider the apparent benefits of whatever new scheme or movement the treacherous state and its media echo chamber is trying to sell us - does it outweigh whatever liberty or fundamental right they want to curtail in exchange for it, and would it actually work anyway ?