Today the Daily Mail has published a two page article headlined, “Did the SWP cover up nine rapes?” The headline is based on Linda Rogers’ claim that she made in a post at the end of January: “the [SWP Disputes Committee] has investigated 9 rapes in the past (I’m not clear on how recently these ‘investigations’ were conducted).” The Daily Mail notes, “The SWP insists there have been only two such cases.”
The person who made the rape allegation that has led to this crisis, the teenager against leading party member, Comrade Delta is referred to as “X.” The Daily Mail state:
What is beyond all reasonable doubt is that Miss X is not the only woman to have found, to her dismay, that the party insists on playing judge and jury when its male activists are accused of raping their colleagues.
Another alleged victim came forward on the eve of Sunday’s emergency conference. We shall call her Susan. Her testimony, which has striking similarities to the account of Miss X has been posted on the internet.
Susan was a student in Sheffield and a committed member of the SWP until, she claims, a senior party organiser pressured her into meeting him and then raped her in a bedroom in 2011.
She felt that if she’d gone to the police, she would have been expelled from the party. ‘If you go to the police you get kicked out automatically,’ she wrote.
Susan is the clearly the woman mentioned by Shiv Malik and Nick Cohen in their Guardian article. But this is not all. The Daily Mail add:
We have also learned of a third alleged rape case in London, which went before the disputes committee and resulted in the accused — a party member also in his 20s — being expelled from the SWP
And so the Daily Mail formulate the contradiction:
The SWP insists there have been only two such cases.
But we have already highlighted three in this article, so you must decide who to believe: The Socialist Workers Party, or Linda Rodgers, a woman who has spent her life helping abused women.
They both cannot be right. At any rate, one has to agree with this conclusion of Paul Bracchi, the author of the article:
And whatever the actual figure, the fact that any woman alleging rape could be subjected to the vagaries of a kangaroo court in 21st-century Britain is surely deeply disturbing.
Soviet Goon Boy’s question has to be posed:
“Would you let your daughter join the SWP?”