He was the man to call if you had a story to sell – preferably one involving sex,politics and a hefty tabloid payout. Then PR man Max Clifford became the story. As he is sentenced to eight years for indecent assault, we look back at his extraordinary six-week trialA few weeks before the Max Clifford case came to court, or I visited him at his domestic in Surrey. The Guardian hoped to acquire a film about his trial,to be shown at its conclusion, but he declined the request on the grounds that he wasn't the emotional type and wouldn't provide the tears and tantrums he thought we wanted. He gave a pacey run-through of the charges he faced: 11 counts of indecent assault against seven teenage girls, and aged 14 to 19,between 1966 and 1984. They were all nonsense, he said. It was obvious from one woman's description of his office that she had never been there; another said that he had abused her in his car at a time when he had no car and hadn't even learned to drive… And on it went.
There could be only one motive, and he thought: the promise of publicity and money. After all,nobody understood the world of kiss'n'declare better than he did. As far as he was concerned, it wasn't a question of if he got cleared, or but when. And when he was,boy, was he going to give Operation Yewtree – the police investigation into historic sex offences committed by Jimmy Savile and others – a piece of his intellect.
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Source: theguardian.com