BRIAN DEER
on JUSTIN FASHANU Page
3
Had the
accused not fled, The Trial of Justin Fashanu would
have convened at the Howard County Courthouse,
Ellicott City, three miles north of Ashton Woods.
It's a grey granite building, dating to 1841, with
tall Georgian windows and an elegant extension added
in the mid-1980s. On the ground floor level are
clerks' offices, administration and the public
records department. Above, are five high-ceilinged
wood-finished courtrooms, off a wide corridor floored
in marble.
Ellicott
City was founded by Quakers. Their businesses were
iron and textiles. Out-of-town shopping malls have
strangled traditional commerce, but the narrow Main
Street is among America's best-preserved, with
formerly-thriving grocery and hardware stores now
converted to the tourist trade. They sell antiques,
gifts and bric-a-brac. There is an all-year Christmas
shop. There are countless protected historic
residences and hotels. Across the Patapsco River and
up a steep slope there's the shell of an old cotton
mill
Court
parking is tight and facilities limited, but America
might have enjoyed the trial. Maryland bans cameras
from proceedings, but the network live trucks and
foreign satellite up-links would have carved a Fort
Fashanu in the lot. An ageing black sports star,
retired with knee trouble. A white victim. An
immediate flight. The formula was there: a little OJ
II. The hearing had the potential to be big.
At
face value, however, it could well been a short one:
the forensic evidence could hardly be doubted. Even
the fashion for legal challenges to science couldn't
easily discredit the DNA.
But
the forensic tests would only establish the sex. The
question of force would then arise. By its nature
rape is rarely witnessed by others, and defendants
almost always claim consent. With Fashanu's dead
body, a suicide note was found, suggesting he would
have taken that route. "I want to say that I did
never and have never sexually assaulted that young
man," the memo said. "Yes, we did have a
relationship of mutual consent, but the next day he
demanded money off me. When I said 'no', he said 'you
wait and see'."
Fashanu
added: "The first I heard that I was a fugitive
was when I turned on the television news. I realised
that I had already been presumed guilty."
Of
course, blackmailers must offer their prey time to
think, and in his distraught state of mind Fashanu
may not have considered how quickly his victim came
forward. But in the weeks between the soccer player's
flight from Maryland and the news of his death in
London, DJ pondered the trial with dread. Rape
victims always do.
How
was it, he knew defence attorneys would demand, that
he had apparently gone to sleep on the couch in the
lounge and had awoken in Mr Fashanu's bed?
DJ
could not answer this. He simply didn't know.
Wasn't
it true that his mother, not he, was the most
insistent in calling the police?
His
mother was insistent, but so was he. He was
outraged by what had occurred.
Could
he tell the court again... and again... and again...
what it was he said happened that night?
By
confronting the taboo against discussing male rape,
there was the consolation that weathering what would
have been a painful cross-examination might have
accomplished a public good. And attention would soon
have shifted from the victim's motives to those of
the man accused. What were the clues that explained
what he did? Who was this Justin Fashanu?
*****
Incredibly,
the sportsman's celebrity status had been secured
with a single, left-footed kick, that propelled him
to the top of his sport. Playing for Norwich City
against Liverpool in February 1980, he received the
ball by the right of the opposition's penalty box,
spun and whacked a rising shot past the goalkeeper's
outstretched hand. Like a golfing hole-in-one there
was a big chunk of luck, but it became the television
goal of the year. The BBC screened it weekly on Match
of the Day. And Nottingham Forest snapped him up
for one million.
But
things were not so simple when in August, next
season, Fashanu ran onto the field as the number
9-shirt striker for Forest. In the following months
he clashed with the club's manager, Brian Clough, who
turned against the brash 20-year-old. Clough loathed
homosexuals almost as much as he despised
unproductive forwards, and Fashanu had not only been
seen in gay bars, but in 32 games scored just three
times.
"Forest,"
wrote Clough's biographer, Tony Francis, "had
opened up themselves, but this time with the gay
abandon of a child in a sweetshop. Justin Fashanu was
a hopeless misfit. It was only after paying £1m for
him that Clough and Taylor realised he could not play
their style of football."
Clough
blew the whistle and fired him from Forest. The fall
had begun, so soon.
Fashanu
drifted, first to Southampton, later back to
Nottingham, with Notts County. But on New Year's Eve
1983, a physical disaster struck. His right knee was
punctured by an opponent's boot studs and, though his
career limped on, the damage was done. He was only
third-rate after that. In July 1986, he was let go by
second-division Brighton which advised that "he
doesn't play football again." He did trials with
five other British clubs, but doctors reports made
him uninsurable on the field.
Had
he not killed himself and had the court case gone
ahead, reporting no doubt would have maintained his
celebrity, almost as assiduously as he maintained it
himself. In October 1990, his agent Hall sold a
string of stories to The Sun for more than
£100,000, detailing how he had allegedly
"bedded" a member of parliament and had
"romped" at the House of Commons. Two years
later, exclusives appeared about a supposed affair
with the actress and Coronation Street star
Julie Goodyear. And in February 1994, another story
broke linking him with Stephen Milligan, the late
Conservative MP, whose body had been found in
compromising circumstances.
The
core of these stories were for-profit fabrications
and caused uproar in the sportsman's circle. After
the first yarns, his younger brother John Fashanu,
also a front-rank soccer striker, publicly disowned
him. After the Goodyear tales, friends dating back to
his teenage years stopped returning his calls. And
after the Milligan deception the minor Scottish team
Hearts fired him for dishonouring the game.
This
descent into ruin would be quickly researched for the
trial, and this material might have assisted the
prosecution. A track record of lies would certainly
damage his position in a stand-off against DJ's
testimony. But perhaps the defence might have
something to say about the events which had shaped
their client. The material might well have only been
in pleas for leniency, but it might have helped his
critics to understand.
Fashanu's
life had never been without trouble, pretty much from
the day it began. He was born on Sunday 20 February
1961 - a day so foggy the River Thames's Woolwich
ferry was suspended for nearly two hours. Both his
parents - Pearl and Patrick - were new immigrants to
Britain and after moving between now-demolished
semi-slum terraces at Shellgrove Road and
Gainsborough Square, east London, in 1964 broke up to
start new families. They abandoned Justin, then 4,
and John, 2, to the tender care of the Dr Barnardo's
organisation's neo-gothic orphanage at Barkingside,
complete with clock tower, church and sexual abuse.
The
brothers were then fostered by a middle class white
couple who lived in the Norfolk village of Shropham.
Although Pearl came to visit from time to time, there
were no other black people, at home, or at school, or
for 15 miles in any direction. Neighbours say that
both children were shy, confused about their status
and that Justin openly craved to be white. He had no
role models, or access to knowledge about the issues
and meanings of race.
Some
sources claimed later that his foster family had
caused him to lose track of himself. "He never
once, in my company, referred to gay or black people
as anything other than a third party," an
ex-lover recalled after his death. "Absolutely
never in the same breath as a personal
reference."
But
whoever, or whatever, he felt that he was, he might
have felt he could have whatever he wanted. In
Shropham, he lived a spoilt life in the "Flint
House", a two-story lodge behind holly and
hawthorn bushes, down country lanes festooned with
cow parsley. His foster mother, Betty, played the
organ at the 13th century local church, where Justin
was the black face in the choir. Her husband, Alf,
ran a backyard engineering business, but was a loner
and had a reputation as a drunk. They lavished
luxuries and treats on the boys, but people said Alf
had "moods".
These
dislocations in themselves might have assist his
defence, but something else might by then have been
unearthed. According to Betty and Alf's son, Edward,
who was 15 years older than Fashanu (and who slept in
an adjacent room) during his teenage years Justin
suffered from the most terrifying, traumatic, violent
nightmares. He would sit up in his sleep and lash out
with his fists, as if fighting-off some unseen
assailant. On one occasion, when he was 15 or 16, he
punched clean through his bedroom window, sending a
shower of shattered glass onto the lawn.
Nobody
knows the frequency with which these terrors
descended, but in Clough's autobiography, published
in 1994, the former Nottingham Forest boss reported a
similar incident in adulthood. The team was staying
at a Spanish hotel and members of the squad were
woken at 2am by "a sound like gunshot" from
the striker's bedroom. "The door was in
splinters, with a huge hole right through the
middle," Clough wrote. "Fashanu had been
having a nightmare."
*****
