PPT is what he goes by. That’s all we’re currently allowed to call a well-known man accused of using his celebrity status to prey on young women. He is anonymised while he seeks an injunction in the High Court this week against news outlets publishing stories about his alleged behaviour.

The progress of this tale is bizarre. In September, this man wrote directly to ITN and the Guardian, who had apparently spent four years and interviewed more than 100 sources in the course of their investigations, to tell them: “I understand your story is important to you but if it is published or broadcast, at the earliest opportunity I will kill myself.” This, I think, we can categorise as emotional blackmail.

Granting this injunction would set an absolutely demented precedent

He has since lawyered up. He is now seeking a lifetime ban on publication of the claims about him. Again, the pleaded cause is his risk of suicide. Not because he admits to having done what he’s accused of, but because of (unspecified) trauma. The court has been told he “does not intend to commit suicide because the allegations are true; but because of shame arising from deep-rooted childhood trauma”.

Still more oddly, the man’s lawyers are claiming that he deserves protection from exposure in the same way as the murderers of James Bulger, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, were granted lifelong anonymity on conviction. Which ignores that a) these two boys were anonymised because they were children when they committed their crime and b) they did commit the crime, which our man claims not to have done. This, I think, we can categorise as chutzpah.

Does that mean we must dismiss the case out of hand? Not entirely. We don’t know all the facts. It is certainly the case that public exposure will negatively affect the mental health of criminals, and public accusation – whether or not you’re found to be guilty – can have the same effect. In recent memory the false accusation of Harvey Procter and Sir Cliff Richard of sex-crimes were traumatising, life-shaking events and those men deserved and deserve deep sympathy.

Shame and disgrace are very difficult for anybody to cope with. Is it possible that those so exposed might reach so extreme a condition of distress that they present a suicide risk? Undoubtedly. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t stick around to hear the verdict of a jury of his peers. Does that mean that the press has a duty of care to such people that eclipses their duty to investigate the truth? I tend to think not.

First, let’s not forget the balancing point that being sexually abused can have a negative effect on your mental health as well. The Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was another who took her own life. To complicate it further, many abusers start out as victims; many predators are acting out their own trauma. Hurt people hurt people, as the cliche goes. There’s no conveniently clear monopoly on empathy, on risk, on the dark waters of mental distress.

But on top of all that moral murk sits the need to establish a practical means of investigating and exposing sexual predation. Private Eye‘s editor Ian Hislop told the Sunday Times: “I know it sounds extremely callous, but I think if this was allowed, it would set a very dangerous precedent. Because then I can imagine almost anyone we contacted on any story would say that this impacted their mental health very badly and could result in them becoming suicidal. And I think it would have a chilling effect on all journalism.” Hislop, in this as in much else, is right on the money. Granting this injunction would set an absolutely demented precedent.

The structure of the argument here, it strikes me, is exactly the structure of the argument over self-ID for trans people. You do not have to consider every transwoman a potential sex-criminal – you do not, to steelman the gender-affirming position, have to consider any transwoman a potential sex-criminal – to oppose male-born people entry to women’s spaces on their own recognisance. You only have to observe that if you set things up that way, you make it impossible to exclude bad-faith actors who’ll claim to be trans in order to cavort naked in the women’s changing rooms at the swimming pool.

Likewise here. You don’t have to deny that some sex-offenders, or accused sex-offenders, will present a suicide risk if they are named in the press. You don’t even have to forfeit your (possibly rather qualified) concern over that risk. You need only recognise that if we start granting injunctions based on that risk, we open the door to bad-faith actors who will reach for mental health concerns as the first line of defence against investigation. What are the bets that the bad-faith pleas will end up forming a significant majority of such injunction applications? Lawyers and tame psychiatrists will, you can imagine, soon get a lucrative mini-industry going.

Civil society can’t operate properly if unfalsifiable personal assertions are privileged over commonly agreed standards of knowledge and evidence. And better, surely, to have a chilling effect on potential offenders –”how would I feel if how I was behaving towards this young woman were described on the front page of the Daily Mail?” – than a chilling effect on those investigating their offences. If you’re falsely accused of something in the press, the laws of libel are still available to you and in this country they’re pretty generous to the plaintiff. At the risk of sounding callous, PPT needs to buckle up and take one for the team.

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