Mr Wedger, time for your fact check

Yesterday we shared a Facebook video from ex-Met police officer Jon Wedger, who made a number of claims in it regarding his recent appointment as a core participant in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).

Since that post was published, we’ve received information from several sources, debunking nearly everything Wedger stated in his video, which echoed information in a tweet he posted on 8 March 2019 in response to this one from Mark Watts:

In response to a query about this tweet, an official at the IICSA made the following response:

This email debunks Wedger’s claim to have been accepted as a core participant in the Westminster investigation, and states that in addition, he was denied CP status in the Accountability and Reparations investigation, as we’ve already pointed out here.

The email was sent prior to Wedger’s acceptance as a core participant in the Child Sexual Exploitation in Organised Networks strand of the Inquiry, which invited applications at the end of March 2019—so at the time of writing, Wedger was officially unaffiliated with the IICSA.

In reference to Wedger’s claim that his “evidence was classed as credible, corroborative & compelling”, the IICSA email points out, “The Inquiry makes no determinations upon the credibility of evidence until it produces its reports, some months after the public hearings.

Wedger claims in his tweet that “IICSA sought a judicial review as a core participant stating I was too low-ranked to give evidence”. He reiterated part of this claim in Friday’s video, stating,

…there was an incident earlier on in the year where IICSA themselves actually got a judicial review to narrow the parameters, which my legal team believed was a deliberate attempt to prevent me from giving evidence.

The IICSA version, unsurprisingly, is quite different:

The Inquiry does not make decisions based on the rank of officers, nor has it been subject to a judicial review in this matter.

The IICSA also pointed out that Wedger had got the name of the Inquiry’s solicitor wrong, but we’re willing to accept that that might have been a genuine error on Wedger’s part, and not a deliberate untruth.

Some of this information was discussed on the TrollExposure blog last week.

But wait! There’s more!

In Friday’s video, Wedger made some rather extraordinary claims about the Criminal Justice Act:

They brought out a statute law in 2003, under the Criminal Justice Act, which was deliberately brought in, in my opinion, to attack witnesses that come forward that have got a criminal past. And they class them as people of dishonesty.

Now it doesn’t mean that these are people that are giving false testimony, it means that they can now use the judicial process to rubbish people coming forward.

They knew, long ago, the Establishment, the big “They”, knew that there was going to be an influx of victims and survivors coming forward, especially post-Jimmy Savile.

Commenter Naqsej pointed out that Wedger seemed to have got it back to front:

His reference to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 refers to the revised bad character rules there. The CJA replaced bad character rules for defendants which had been in place since 1898, and introduced a brand-new statutory regime for referring to the bad character of 3rd parties, including witnesses. This actually made it HARDER to cite the bad character of witnesses, quite the opposite of what Jon Wedger is saying.

As anyone who thought about it for a second would realise, the Act does not class all witnesses as “dishonest”. That would make it rather pointless calling any witnesses, wouldn’t it? One of the grounds for admitting the bad character of DEFENDANTS (not witnesses) is that it is sought to prove they have a tendency to be untruthful (e.g. a conviction for perjury). So there’s no assumption that all defendants are dishonest, but the prosecution are entitled to show the court that they’ve been untruthful before. But as I say, that doesn’t apply to witnesses at all.

Oddly, in the video where Wedger made this strange claim, he appeared to stutter over the phrase “to attack witnesses”—he started to say “to attack def–” but then corrected himself to “witnesses”.

Almost as though he knew the real answer, but remembered at the last minute to insert the more inflammatory version.

Lies and the Spreading of Fake Information