I was horrified to read the news report of those four women – Moira Gauci, Abigail Azzopardi, Charmaine Scicluna and Phyllis Phillips – who made false accusations of sexual harassment against their manager, in an attempt to get rid of him. Their accusations actually went beyond sexual harassment: forcing them to perform sexual acts on him against their will. Their victim, Carmel Grixti, has gone through seven months of hell, starting with his arrest and interrogation last August, until now, when one of the women broke down on the witness stand and admitted that it was all a plot and that she and her colleagues had lied. I wish I could say that his hell ends now, but it won’t.

Those nasty, spiteful creatures, who give women a bad name in the sense that they have now made it doubly difficult for a woman to come forward with a true case of sexual harassment and be believed, have caused this man and his family the sort of psychological damage that will last. They have ruined a part of his life, a part of his family’s life, and that will last. A time that should have been made up of good memories for them – one daughter’s graduation from medical school, another daughter’s graduation from the Police Academy (imagine how this particular daughter must have felt), and their 25th wedding anniversary – has instead been poisoned.

The case was heard behind closed doors but the judgement was reported because of one witness’s admission that they had fabricated everything. The magistrate said that he had had his doubts about what the women had said, from the beginning, because they sounded as though they were repeating something that they had heard third-hand rather than describing what had happened to them. This one witness in fact broke down after been dispatched for a spell in the cooler to focus her mind, having been warned of the dangers of committing perjury. Her colleagues must love her for it, but good luck to them.

I hope that the matter will not rest here. The behaviour of those four women is nothing short of criminal. They can be prosecuted for making a false report to the police, lying to pervert the course of justice, criminal slander and perjury. And so they should be.

The fact that they thought it would be a brilliant ruse to concoct these false allegations of the sexual harassment, sensing that political correctness would ensure they’d be taken at face value, shows what scant regard they have for the law and other people, how very immoral they are. They would have an innocent man sent to prison, his family traumatised beyond measure, just because he didn’t let them do as they pleased in the workplace.

I hope they’ve lost their jobs and that nobody else gives them another one for a long, long time. They deserve no better. They are worse than employees who can’t be trusted. They are dangerous – not physically dangerous but worse than that, for I am quite sure that Mr Grixti would much, much rather they had broken both his legs than do what they did. Legs heal, but the effect of this kind of thing goes on for years.

Freedom came a week early

Last Friday, the Labour Party commemorated the day in 1979 when Britain refused to renew its lease on its military base here and sailed off instead. I was terribly confused when I saw Joseph Muscat lighting up that cauldron on the Freedom monument in Birgu.

In the mad whirligig that is my life, had a whole week and one day flown by without my noticing it? Was it 31st March already, when there I was, thinking it was the 23rd? But no, it really was the 23rd. I looked hard for a convincing explanation for the premature celebration, but found none. The Times didn’t even bother pointing out to its readers that the commemoration was eight days too soon, still less tell them why this might be. So I was left to my own conjectures, and the best I could come up with is that our Joseph and Michelle don’t want to adapt their holiday plans to fit in with 31 March, so 31 March has to fit in with them. It figures.

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