Things have come to a pretty pass for the government of Malta when the majority of people – or so it seems through general conversation – give the word of prostitutes more weight than they do the word of a Cabinet minister. People generally have little doubt that the reports about Christian Cardona and his staffer in the German brothel are accurate. Let’s face it, the level of detail is very specific – so they were not surprised when Mario Frendo of Net television, and his cameraman, paid their fees to enter the brothel in Velbert, showed photographs of the two men to prostitutes who were taking a break, and were told that yes, those men had been there before.

Some people have been scathing and sceptical about this. Oh, they say, but we don’t know what photographs they showed the girls. It could have been anything and anyone. Do the people who say this actually have functional brains? How on earth would Mario Frendo have known what photographs of regular clients to show to the prostitutes so as to elicit a reply in the affirmative? He showed them, on camera, photographs of two men and asked them whether those two men had been there, and they said yes. So obviously, he showed them photographs of two men who had been there. And who else could those two men have been if not Cardona and Gerada? It’s not as if Frendo has a big list of the FKK Acapulco’s regular clients, complete with mug-shots.

There’s more important information that some people have missed, perhaps because they haven’t followed the reports closely enough. When shown the pictures, and replying in the affirmative to the question of whether the men had been there, one of the girls says, “Yes, but not today.” That’s pretty specific. They then go on to ask Frendo and his cameraman, “Are you the police?” That blows out of the water any accusation put about by the government’s trolls, and picked up by the unthinking, that Frendo bribed the girls to give that reply. Had he bribed them, they wouldn’t have checked afterwards if he was an undercover police officer. They would have asked him beforehand.

There’s another point that many people missed, because it was not in the video that’s gone viral on Facebook, but Frendo reported it during a news conference on Net television. He didn’t show the prostitutes pictures of only the Minister of the Economy and his EU presidency policy officer, Joe Gerada, but also of another (anonymous) man as a control. They dismissed the photograph of the third man outright, saying immediately that they had never seen him there. But they responded completely differently to the pictures of Cardona and Gerada.

Some people asked, but how could the prostitutes, who see so many men that one face must merge into another, remember those two in particular? Well, apart from the fact that Cardona and Gerada had been there just a couple of days earlier, the video footage which Frendo and his cameraman took showed clearly that the regular clientele is made up mainly of old men. So it figures that two younger men, one in his 40s and the other in his 30s, would have stood out like sore thumbs – just as, in fact, Mario Frendo stood out, 40 years younger than all the other men, making his job there more difficult. But then again, the fact that he is still in his 20s will have worked in his favour when talking to the women who work there, because women in general are far less defensive towards very young men than they are towards older men, of whom they are naturally suspicious, and often also disgusted.

Meanwhile, one of the salient points in this debacle has gone largely undiscussed. Chris Cardona and Joe Gerada have denied that they were in the FKK Acapulco brothel in Velbert on Monday night, but they have failed to give an alternative explanation for where they were. That would be the immediate, obvious response of anybody who had been lied about. Right now, I am at a friend’s house writing this after a long lunch. If I were to wake up tomorrow – Sunday, when you are reading this – to find an article in the press saying that I was somewhere shady in the company of drug-dealers and prostitutes, my immediate response would be a statement saying that no, actually I was at X address between the hours of Y and Z, in the company of ABCDE, and we had lunch prepared by M and after that I went straight home, driven by my husband, and spent the rest of the evening and the night there. That is the obvious thing to do when people are not lying.

Take Neville Gafa, whose name ended up in the mix because my source told me that he had no idea who the bald man was with the Economy Minister at the brothel, but that he looks very much like Neville Gafa, whose picture he had seen in the press. Gafa’s response the following morning, as soon as he read that, was to put up a post on Facebook with a photograph showing himself at a Valletta café with an associate, saying “I am here and not there.” But the Minister and his staffer made no such attempt. The staffer, in fact, responded by taking this Facebook page down even though he had not yet been named and it should have been obvious to him from what I wrote that I had no idea yet who the bald man was.

And that is the main reason they are coming across as liars: because while they call me a liar and accuse me of inventing it all (why would I? I would have to be insane), they have made no attempt to explain where they were or coming up with an alibi. And to make matters worse, when pressed on this matter, their response has been to say that they will “supply the evidence in court” – for all the world as though evidence is rationed, and what you supply in court you can’t supply before that. Names are not cleared in court; they are cleared in the immediate aftermath of the accusation, by means of a suitable response and explanation. Any law suit which follows is for damages only. Chris Cardona and Joe Gerada have said they will sue because what they want is the headline. They haven’t sued yet. But even if they do, the whole thing will be water under the bridge by the time the case is concluded six or seven years from now. That’s a long time to wait to clear your name, when you can easily do so – if you’re not lying – by giving people a detailed account of where you were. They can’t do that, though, because they are plagued by the fact that my account is correct.

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