He was the king of the kiss-and-tell and the breaker of reputations. A man who kept his own secrets under lock and key, while entertaining the UK national press with an endless supply of explosive celebrity scandals.
At the height of his influence, Max Clifford boasted that he kept more revelations out of the public eye than he put in as he became the A-list poacher-turned-gamekeeper.
However, on Monday the public relations man became one of those stories he might have fought to keep quiet when he was convicted of eight charges of indecent assault. He was acquitted of two others and the jury could not decide on one further count.
Clifford set up his eponymous PR agency in central London in 1970, aged 27, and became a household name for his involvement in the lives of the rich and influential.
He also became a patron of countless charities and privately brokered his ￡1 million (US$1.6 million) settlement with Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group over alleged phone hacking by the News of the World.
In all this time, Clifford’s criminal abuses were kept hidden from the public gaze. His devastating secret began to unravel in November 2012 when, amid the revelations about Jimmy Savile, a number of women finally made complaints to the police.
Clifford was arrested on Dec. 6, 2012, at his ￡3 million mansion in Hersham, Surrey, where detectives made a discovery that was to be key to his prosecution.
In a bedside table, Clifford kept a letter he had received in 2011 from a girl who wrote in vivid detail about the sexual abuse she had suffered at his hands 35 years ago.
In the 900-word letter, the woman wrote that Clifford had made her life a “living hell,” to the point where she had contemplated suicide and relied on counseling.
“I had no one to turn to. You were very clever. ‘A+’ in grooming children. How proud you must be,” she wrote.
On March 12 this year, the woman behind the letter, now 51, told Southwark crown court that Clifford had groomed her for months after befriending her parents in Spain in 1977.
The woman was one of seven complainants who gave evidence in Clifford’s trial, with a further six who testified as witnesses for the prosecution.
Clifford’s reputation was shattered by increasingly sordid and distressing stories about his sexual behavior and a bizarre obsession with the size of his penis.
He admitted having extramarital affairs and being the ringmaster of sex parties involving “good honest filth for adults old enough to know what they are doing.”
The sexual assault claims were “utterly revolting — utterly, utterly disgusting lies,” Clifford insisted.
However, the jury refused to be dazzled by the sharply dressed 71-year-old, deciding that Clifford was beyond all reasonable doubt a “master in the art of intimidation and manipulation,” who sexually abused starstruck teenagers while promising them a life of fame and fortune.
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