Crusader for women’s rights

‘Oh, I don’t think this is for you, Charlotte.’ When a book opens with those words, we know the author is going to prove her school careers adviser wrong.

Growing up in a Staffordshire market town, Charlotte Proudman sets her sights on becoming a solicitor. But work experience during a university vacation takes her to the Crown court where a barrister is on her feet, defending her client. Proudman is smitten; this will be her life.

But her fellow bar students – this was all of 15 years ago – come from a different world. ‘What does your father do?’, they ask. She feels unable to say he was a violent alcoholic who killed himself in a car accident when she was just four years old.

Proudman perseveres and is taken in by Michael Mansfield’s chambers before being awarded her doctorate at King’s College Cambridge and securing her tenancy at Goldsmith Chambers. Beyond that, the book is light on personal details, though it relates two incidents when she says she was touched inappropriately – sexually assaulted, in fact – by senior male barristers.

The final chapter deals with charges brought against her by the Bar Standards Board over her comments about a judge’s ruling in a case where she had been junior counsel.

‘These tweets would not have been pleasant for any judge to read,’ the tribunal said in a written ruling last month. ‘But they are not gravely damaging to the judiciary.’ Proudman is vindicated: her comments did not even come close to professional misconduct, the panel rules.

The remainder of He Said, She Said is devoted to the cases in which she has appeared. Most are carefully anonymised; others were reportable and she names the guilty men. These are cases of domestic abuse, sexual violence, marital rape, controlling behaviour, contact battles, reproductive coercion, child abduction, parental alienation – revealing, disturbing but perhaps not surprising.

Ten years ago, Proudman called out a solicitor after he complimented her on her LinkedIn picture. She publicised the incident on Twitter and found herself being called a ‘feminazi’ by the Daily Mail. In retrospect, she told me in an interview last month, that might not have been a good idea. But, she added, it helped her to carve out her niche representing women who have been subject to misogyny or abuse. This book will do her career – and her campaigning for women’s rights – no harm at all.

joshua@rozenberg.net