Letters to the Editor
Parson Jim
Published Letters: 576 Editor's Choice: 7
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Serial false accuser - where are the laws to prevent this from happening again?
[Read the article: Warning men about "gray rape"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Girl who cried rape four times
by NICK CRAVEN and KATHRYN KNIGHT
Shoppers at the sprawling Cheshire supermarket would have had no reason to take any notice of the man sorting out the jumble of trolleys in the busy car park this week. Mark Berry, after all, is an ordinary-looking man doing an ordinary job.
But 26-year-old Mr Berry’s life has been far from normal of late.
In recent months, he has undergone a terrible ordeal which continues to hang over him to this day: last year, on a warm September evening, he was arrested at home on suspicion of rape.
Thrown into police cells overnight, the terrified and bewildered employee could only repeat what he knew to be the truth - that he’d only ever spoken to his 22-year-old ‘victim’ twice and had never so much as laid a finger on her.
Only after several tense days - days in which he was suspended from work and made to feel like a pariah in his local community - were the charges dropped. Confronted by flaws in her story, Abigail Gibson was forced to confess that she had fabricated the whole incident.
The unfortunate Mr Berry told the Mail this week: "Since the arrest, I get terrible flashbacks to what happened and keep crying about it. I was detained in a custody suite overnight. It was very cold in the cell and I felt terrible.
"I should not have been there in the first place. I was unable to sleep and totally confused. I was terrified about what would happen to me."
In total, Berry spent 18 hours in custody, during which he was forced to undergo a medical examination.
And shockingly, he is not the only man to be so humiliated at the hands of Abigail Gibson.
In the past few years, she has made three other false accusations of rape, including one against her own father, a Methodist minister no less.
It is a grim roll call, and one for which Gibson is now, finally, being punished.
Last week, she began a two-year jail sentence for what Chester Crown Court was told were her "wicked lies".
The news has come as some comfort for her string of victims.
Nonetheless, hers remains a chilling and bewildering tale. For Abigail Gibson, the Mail has discovered, is a young girl from a comfortable and loving home. Her parents are said to be ‘in despair’ over what she has done.
So what made her intent on wreaking terrible emotional havoc on a number of men in her path?
Born into a respectable, middle-class household in Winsford, Cheshire, there was nothing in her background to suggest she had anything other than the usual advantages of a loving childhood.
The younger of two girls born to Elizabeth, a nurse, and Ian, a minister for a local young offenders’ institute, neighbours near the family’s semi-detached home recall her as a shy girl who did not readily mix with the local community.
At 11, Gibson - known as ‘Abby’ to friends and family - was enrolled at a comprehensive in nearby Newcastle-under-Lyme, but, neither particularly academically gifted nor popular, she struggled at school.
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As one former neighbour recalls: "Abby wasn’t ambitious at all. If you asked her what she wanted to do with her life, she just shrugged."
It seems the troubled young woman had become preoccupied by different matters: in her late teens, the Mail understands, she made an allegation of rape against her father.
The exact nature of this allegation remains unclear to this day - both Abigail’s mother and father have refused to comment, and no charges were formally brought.
Was there some residual bitterness as a result of her parents’ divorce?
Did she blame her father for the fragmentation of her family?
Was she still seeking revenge for the countless males who had bullied her throughout her teens?
Whatever the truth, what is beyond doubt is that this terrible accusation was to foreshadow a further dramatic series of official complaints that would blight the lives of other men.
In 2003, at the age of 19, Abigail went to police to claim she had been raped in Northwich town centre.
A police source told the Mail: "She was very distressed and said she had been attacked by a stranger. The allegation was taken seriously, but after studying CCTV footage it was revealed to be unfounded."
Astonishingly, given the dramatic nature of the accusation, no further action was taken, and she was only given a caution for wasting police time - one which clearly, as we have seen, made little impact.
Was Abigail desperate for the attention she had for so long been denied by her peers?
Or perhaps she saw some perverse badge of honour in being labelled a rape victim, in that it marked her out as an object of male lust.
Whatever was going on in her mind, outwardly she embarked on a series of ill-advised romances with men far older than her.
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As she settles into her cell at Styal women’s prison this week, Abigail Gibson has all the time in the world to contemplate the legacy of her terrible lies.
For her own sake - and for the sake of the men whose lives she has tarnished with her fantasies - we can only hope she has learned her lesson.
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Another violent act
[Read the article: Warning men about "gray rape"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]False accusation.
Unfortunately, this is a violent act which is only lightly punished under the law, and it is a violent act that feminists refuse to acknowledge exists.
What massive egotism and bigotry.
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Not just schizophrenia
[Read the article: My name is Jane, and I'm a drunkorexic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is high comorbidity of smoking in a large number of psychiatric disorders, not just schizophrenia, but it's very high in schizophrenia. All neurological disease with a dopaminergic component can be symptomatically alleviate with nicotine.
Since nicotine increases attention and awareness in everyone, though (healthy or not), its effects on concentration are not specific to schizophrenics.
See here for more on nicotine and schizophrenia:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/483888