RAPHAEL ROWE: ‘ANYONE CAN BE ACCUSED – ANYWHERE & AT ANY TIME’

THE JOURNALIST AND BROADCASTER IS EXAMINING THE TERRIFYING WORLD OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS

Broadcaster, journalist, and advocate Raphael Rowe is afamiliar face on our screens, particularly from the hit Netflix show Inside The World’s Toughest Prisons, which sees him experience incarceration conditions worldwide. And he’s no stranger to the system he’s investigating.

Raphael was wrongfully convicted of a 1988 murder and spent 12 years behind bars before being exonerated.

So, when it comes to being falsely accused, few have his kind of insight.

We caught up with him to talk about his audiobook You Are Accused, which examines “the devastating impact being accused of acrime can have on the lives and reputations of the accused and those around them”.

You have a personal history of being wrongly accused – is that what drove you to write this book?

Yes. Because of my own experience, Iwas keen to find out what other people had experienced when they were falsely accused. Although most of the contributors in the book weren’t convicted, it traumatised not just them, but their families and others around them. We talk about evidence and facts, but we don’t talk about the ripple effect of false accusations, and that’s what Iwas interested in. Like with the Post Office scandal –how do you walk out of your front door every day when everyone in your community thinks that you’re a criminal? You might have been cleared, but you were accused, and you can’t undo that damage. That’s fascinating for me.

You talk to Jo Hamilton about the Post Office scandal. Had you ever come across a case of so many people being accused at once?

This was dubbed the UK’s biggest miscarriage of justice because of the volume of people involved, but it’s about who those people are, too. Some come from tiny villages, some from affluent backgrounds as well as challenging ones –the dynamics are fascinating. People had their whole lives turned upside down, and they all had something different to lose, whether it was their relationship, their home, their reputation, or their mental health. When you listen to Jo –and I interviewed her way before the recent drama came out –it’s frightening to think of what she went through.

It’s one thing, like me, being accused of murder and then going to prison for something you didn’t do. But it’s equally as frightening for this woman to be sitting behind a desk, knowing she didn’t take the money she’s being accused of. Jo wasn’t alone, but she was told she was, so how isolated must she have felt? She articulates that very well, and we get a sense of what it can really be lik