EXTRACT- LA BELLE FRANCE

 

Anna Crichton worked for the BBC as a freelance journalist. She was currently working the late night news slots during which she interviewed someone who had made the news during that week. On the night that preparations for a trip to France were finalised in Daresbury, she interviewed Ernest Robbins MP a prominent backbencher who was campaigning for the introduction of universal female enslavement.

The interview ran reasonably smoothly till she asked him if he considered his proposal to extend female slavery through the use of ministerial orders to be a breach of the democratic process. Robbins called her a feminist cow and then, when she protested, he appeared to lean forward and squeeze her left breast. The incident lasted only a few seconds and Robbins seemed contrite at what he had done. But the situation escalated when Anna slapped him hard across the face and called him a male chauvinist pig.

BBC security guards separated them and on Robbins request the police were summoned. Both of them were arrested on charges of assault. Robbins protested his innocence but Crichton went quietly.

The case against Anna Crichton had to be accelerated under the Amendment Act but because Robbins' case was directly related to hers, his case was also accelerated. Therefore, the following day both of them appeared at the London Crown Court.

Robbins pleaded guilty and was given a sentence of three months' imprisonment, which was suspended for a year. Crichton pleaded self-defence but was also convicted and sentenced to 50 strokes of the senior cane, plus enslavement, with a minimum length of five years.

Crichton immediately appealed and the case went straight to the Supreme Court because of the double assault convictions. Crichton argued that the sentences were totally disproportionate. Robbins had sexually assaulted her first and he had been virtually let off, or so she claimed. She had been sentenced to a possible lifetime of slavery and was to receive 50 strokes of the cane.

The judges asked to see a replay of the incident using the BBC's own recordings. The President of the court agreed that she had indeed been assaulted and it was only reasonable to expect some reaction. However, by the time that reaction came there had been a significant pause and, as a result, he concluded that her reaction was not instinctive but considered. He took into account that previous judgements before female enslavement had allowed that for women the reaction might indeed be delayed but, on balance, he felt that the conviction was justified.

The key significance of the case was that he then introduced a new penalty into the law. Up till then, enslavement sentences could only be ended by the owner freeing his or her slave or someone paying the manumission fee to enable the slave to buy her freedom. The President of the Supreme Court upheld Crichton's enslavement but reduced its period from a maximum of life to a limited period of three months. He also reduced the caning from fifty to twenty strokes.

He concluded by saying that such a sentence would only be used rarely but as there was clear evidence that she had been assaulted, he could not in equity hand down a much more severe sentence to her. He declared that considered retaliation should draw a more serious response. If Crichton had not slapped Robbins, she would have gone free. The three-month enslavement was punishment for that retaliation, as was the twenty strokes of the cane. He ordered that Crichton should serve her sentence as a slave of the BBC and that her caning should be carried out at a suitable PPFP (Public Place of Female Punishment). Crichton was required to strip and taken off gagged and in chains.

It later became known that he was something of a sports fan and his judgement had been influenced by the treatment of retaliation in the infringements of sporting rules.

The BBC already had a use for her. It was an assignment that she had already turned down but now she had no right of refusal. Arrangements were quickly made to have her attached to David Williams party to travel to France. The BBC and other broadcasters had wanted to do an exclusive interview with David for some time. Now the BBC could offer something that the others could not. A slave for three months for his own use. The only restriction was that he could not cause her permanent injury. That was something that he readily agreed with, as it was already part of DGH's policy on the treatment of slaves.