I wasn’t going to write this today.

In truth, I have spent years wondering whether I should ever write it at all.

Then I woke up and read that Professor Jason Arday had died.

And I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.

I didn’t know Jason personally. I cannot tell you what he was thinking or feeling, and I will not speculate about the circumstances of his death.

But I looked at his photograph and something about it hit me incredibly hard.

He was a successful Black professional whose name had suddenly become engulfed in allegations, headlines, public scrutiny and judgement.

And I recognised something.

Not his case.

Not the allegations.

The feeling.

I know what it feels like when your name stops belonging to you.

I know what it feels like to open your phone and discover strangers discussing your character as though they have known you all your life.

I know what it feels like when an allegation becomes a headline, the headline becomes a Google search, and eventually that Google search becomes people’s entire understanding of who you are.

Twenty years of work can disappear behind a few words.

Every good thing you ever did suddenly seems irrelevant.

People stop asking who you are.

They stop asking what happened to you.

And eventually, it can feel as though nobody sees the human being anymore.

I know how dangerous that place can become.

Because I went there.

I tried to take my own life.

I spent three days in intensive care.

I survived.

And when I read about Jason, that knot in my stomach would not go away. I also remembered the fire Chief Wayne Brown a black public servant who sadly took his own life after intense media scrutiny into his credentials.

Wayne Brown came to mind because a black female blogger had written something about Jason, which gave me cause for concern, I commented ‘You need to be careful , he doesn't end up like Wayne Brown’ 3 days later Jason was gone.

I kept thinking about something:

What happens to the human being at the centre of the headline when everybody else has finished reading it and moved on with their day?

Because the person in that headline still has to live.

They still have to wake up the next morning.

They still have a family.

They still have memories.

They still have a history.

They still have to somehow carry the weight of thousands of people discussing the worst moments of their life.

And suddenly I knew I couldn’t stay silent anymore.

So I am going to tell you who I actually am.

Not because I expect everybody to agree with me.

Not because I am asking anybody to ignore my conviction. I am currently appealing it, and because those proceedings remain ongoing, there are things I simply cannot discuss publicly.

And not because I believe everything I have ever done was right.

It wasn’t.

I have made mistakes.

But I am tired of allowing the worst period of my life to become the definition of my entire existence.

My name is Miriam Virgo.

I joined the police when I was nineteen years old.

I gave more than twenty years of my life to policing.

And this is the part of my story that most of you have never heard.

I joined the police because I knew what it felt like to need them

Before I ever wore a police uniform, I knew what it felt like to be a victim.

As a child, teenager and young woman, I was sexually assaulted on several separate occasions.

One of those assaults changed my life forever.

I was drugged.

I was raped.

I was left pregnant.

I found the courage to report what had happened because I believed that was what victims were supposed to do.

I needed somebody to listen.

Instead, I felt completely unsupported.

One comment has stayed with me for decades. An officer made a remark about the appearance of one of the men I had reported which left me feeling that what had happened to me was somehow being trivialised.

“I can see why you reported it, he’s not a pretty sight is he?”

That was his response to a young teenager who had just reported sexual abuse. That man was subsequently accused of abusing other children. He ended his life before his trial could take place.

And do you know what I did?

I blamed myself.

For years.

I wondered whether I should have shouted louder.

Fought harder.

Made somebody listen. Or not reported it at all. I felt I had killed him. Unknown to me at that time, it set a precedent in my mind. If I report abuse and the man is not physically unattractive, I won’t be believed. If that abuser dies, it’s my fault.

Of course, his actions were never my responsibility.

But trauma isn’t logical.

It left me with something that followed me into adulthood: an enormous difficulty standing up to men who hurt or controlled me.

Strangely, though, those experiences also helped give me my career.

Because I remember thinking:

If this is how it feels to be a victim, I want to become the police officer I needed that day.

So at nineteen years old, that is exactly what I did.

Black, female and wearing the uniform

For a long time, I was the only Black female officer in my borough.

That wasn’t always easy.

One of my sergeants alluded to this fact by saying

‘Miriam, you’re a very rare commodity’

I heard racist comments.

I heard Jamaican accents mocked.

Both of my parents are Jamaican.

Perhaps other people considered it banter.

I didn’t.

There were times when I felt I had to work twice as hard while swallowing things other people never had to think about.

But I stayed.

I stayed loyal to policing.

I worked.

I studied.

I passed my examinations.

I became a detective.

And above everything else, I cared about people. Despite being one of only 3 recruits who passed an initial exam at training college with extremely high marks, the “She only got this job because she's black” remarks echoed relentlessly.

Another shift sergeant said

‘Miriam, criminals aren’t going to walk around with swag written on their backs’

I had actually grown up in an area without many black people around, my brother and I were literally one of the only few black kids in an all white primary school with just a couple of other ethnicities present.

My father had come to England and joined the Brtish army. He wanted us to understand British culture and values, therefore, in my former years pretty much everything about our lifestyle was white british.

At training college, I was singled out by one of the police sergeant trainers.

‘Miriam, you’re black, tell us about the black communities response to Steven Lawrence, and how racism affects the black community’

I froze in my seat,

‘Why is he singling me out?’.

You see at that stage of my life, black culture was completely unfamiliar to me. I was actually far more engrossed with white british culture than anything else.

Then came a new force directive, ‘The 6 strands of diversity’:

1. Religion

2. Race

3. Sexuality

4. Gender

5. Disability

6. Age

A sergeant once joked:

“Miriam you just need to be gay, and then you will tick all the boxes”

Officers needed to complete their PDR’S (Performance development reviews) because of the institutional racism report by Macpherson on 24th February 1999. Race was a prominent issue.

One section of our then handwritten performance development reviews was that we had to be seen to interact with the ethnic community.

Colleagues would joke,

‘Oi Miriam, can I go on patrol with you today so that I can tick the box that says i've interacted with a member of the black community’

Although, on the surface, this appears very racist. I can actually understand some of these comments. Because some police areas genuinely, at that time, did not have a black community to engage with.

I had two choices, either I chose to leave or I just chose to accept some of this as ignorance and banter in order to survive.

My colleagues sometimes joked that I should have become a social worker because I was too nice and cared too much

I never considered that an insult.

Compassion was exactly why I had joined.

I knew what frightened people looked like because I had been one.

The part of my character a headline cannot show you

There is something else I am no longer embarrassed to say.

I spent an enormous part of my adult life helping other people.

I’m not telling you this because charitable work makes someone perfect.

It doesn’t.

Nor does helping other people mean you can never make a mistake.

Of course you can.

But if the public is entitled to examine the worst moments of my life, surely I am entitled to tell you about the rest of that life too.

I founded The Naked Truth Ministry to help women who had experienced abuse.

I created The Black and Blue Project because I wanted to improve relationships between the police and the Black community.

I occupied both worlds.

I was a Black woman.

I was also a police officer.

I understood the distrust that existed, and I believed somebody had to be prepared to stand in the middle and start talking.

I worked with and established a firefighters’ charity. A Christian organisation that helped disenfranchised communities.

I helped homeless people in my community.

My charitable work reached Africa, where I supported widows and orphans and helped provide schoolchildren with books and educational opportunities.

I have sat with people who had nothing.

I have encouraged women who believed abuse had destroyed their lives.

I have tried to give children opportunities.

I have tried to make people feel less alone.

Most of those moments never made a newspaper.

Why would they?

There was no scandal.

There was simply one human being quietly trying to help another.

That woman existed.

She still does.

The Naked Truth

In 2011, I wrote a book called The Naked Truth.

The title was deliberate.

I exposed the things most people spend their entire lives hiding.

The abuse.

The trauma.

The relationships.

The pain.

The manuscript was approved before publication by the then Chief Constable, Sarah Thornton.

Then something happened that I hadn’t anticipated.

My story became news.

The newspapers came.

My profile grew.

Social media followed.

People started recognising me.

Women contacted me to tell me that reading my story had encouraged them to confront their own abuse.

That meant more to me than any publicity ever could.

But visibility is a strange thing.

When people watch you rise, there will always be people watching when you fall.

I just didn’t know how far I was eventually going to fall.

Then my world started disappearing

After another traumatic sexual assault from a man I met while on duty, I eventually had to step away from policing for treatment for PTSD. I never wanted to speak out about that, but my choice was taken away from me. A sergeant took it upon himself to disclose that I had been raped to all of my team without my permission. The police dealt with that with a swift apology and putting me in a ‘department of my choice’ to shut me up and make their mistake go away. In the end, I could not cope so I took a career break to get some help.

I fought my way back.

I returned in 2016 believing I could rebuild my career.

Then my mother died

Suddenly. The day before her 61st birthday.

A few weeks later, I lost my aunt, one of the very people who had been helping me cope with losing Mum.

Then there was another death.

And another.

And another.

Deaths and a tragic murder among people I loved until eventually I had experienced seventeen bereavements.

Then, in 2022, my brother died. Suddenly. The day after his 41st birthday.

That broke me.

What made his death even more traumatic for me was that Thames Valley police had been asked to inform our family, yet we were not notified at all. My brother had been lying on a slab for around ten hours and we only found out because he had not been answering his phone, and so I called the hospital to find out what was going on.

The response, from a rather unsympathetic foreign doctor?

“Matthew pass away today 3pm”

I was in sincere disbelief, I had only just seen him the day before I had travelled up north, he was doing well and wanted to go home from the hospital. In between my utter despair I had questions.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

They responded, that they had contacted Thames Valley Police to inform the next of kin immediately.

My brother was dead.

And we didn’t know.

I had spent my adult life serving that police force, they knew he was my brother, and I could not comprehend how that had happened.

Something inside me began to unravel.

I wasn’t simply sad.

I was psychologically deteriorating.

I was carrying years of unresolved trauma alongside PTSD and extraordinary cumulative bereavement.

I became severely depressed.

I drifted away from my Christian faith because I couldn’t understand why God would allow so many people I needed to disappear.

I became desperately vulnerable.

I was not Detective Virgo functioning as she had for the previous two decades.

I was Miriam.

Bereaved.

Traumatised.

Lonely.

Mentally unwell.

And desperately trying to keep herself together.

Then I met someone

Days after burying my brother, a friend posted online saying she had been bitten by a dog and needed help.

I took her to hospital.

Afterwards, we visited my brother’s grave and then went to her local pub.

Through that completely ordinary sequence of events, I eventually met a man who subsequently contacted me through Instagram.

I was honest with him.

Painfully honest.

I told him I was vulnerable.

I told him I had been through too much.

I told him I wasn’t interested in somebody entering my life unless they were serious.

I couldn’t take another emotional blow.

He reassured me.

At one point, he even told me that my brother had sent him to look after me now that my brother was gone.

Imagine hearing that when you are grieving your brother.

I believed him.

There are things that subsequently happened that I cannot discuss because of continuing legal proceedings.

Eventually, however, I became devastated by the deception, dishonesty and betrayal that I believed had happened within that situation.

I wanted answers.

And here is something I have never tried to hide after being harassed and bombarded with over 25 calls and text messages:

I lost my temper.

I said things I regret.

I was angry.

I was hurt.

I was grieving.

I was traumatised.

And psychologically, I was in one of the darkest places I had ever experienced.

I don’t say that to excuse everything I said.

I say it because context matters.

What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that some of my most distressed moments were being secretly recorded by him.

Those moments would later become part of a case that changed the rest of my life.

The detective became the suspect

Months later, while travelling to the police station for another shift, I was arrested.

Even now, those words feel surreal.

After more than twenty years on one side of the criminal justice system, suddenly I was standing on the other.

The allegations included offensive messages.

At around the same time, I had myself been receiving racist and offensive anonymous messages.

The police examined my phone and concluded that messages relevant to their investigation had originated from my handset.

I maintained that the handset had not been in my possession on at least two occasions when messages were sent.

I wanted to fight.

I believed evidence existed that supported me.

Because I had become concerned about the anonymous communications, I had installed call-recording software.

There was a recording associated with my phone that I believed was potentially extremely important to my defence.

I maintain that recording was subsequently lost while my device was in police custody.

A phone which to this day I have never been allowed to have personal access to in order to defend myself against these allegations.

And that was not the only problem.

We spent a trial looking at the wrong person

This is one of the aspects of my case that still leaves me almost speechless.

There was a woman whom I considered one of the strongest potential witnesses for my defence.

Police provided information indicating that she had a criminal conviction. This rendered her an unreliable witness and she could not give evidence on my behalf.

There was a serious problem.

It wasn’t her.

The criminal profile we had been given related to a completely different person.

Throughout the trial, both my lawyer and I repeatedly challenged this.

We kept saying it.

This is not her.

You have the wrong woman.

We repeatedly tried to explain that the profile did not belong to our witness.

Yet, according to my recollection and the evidence available to me, the mistake was not finally accepted until the last day of the trial.

By then, it was too late.

We had spent an entire trial dealing with another person’s criminal profile in relation to a woman I considered one of the strongest witnesses for my defence.

This wasn’t an insignificant spelling mistake.

It concerned somebody I believed could provide important evidence for my defence and the police got it wrong.

There were other witnesses who were not called. Evidence that was not presented to the jury.

I went through three different law firms and three trials.

One firm representing me which had been supplied by the police federation, was closed down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

I was not made aware of this until the day I was charged by the police, and material I believed I had supplied for my defence was no longer available in the way I expected.

But something else happened during the trial.

Something that gave me enormous hope.

Then the jury asked for more evidence

The jury wrote a note to the judge.

They wanted further evidence.

My phone was central to the case, and from my perspective their request showed that they were not prepared simply to accept what had already been presented to them.

They wanted more.

They wanted to understand the evidence.

I cannot explain the hope that gave me.

After years of feeling as though nobody was listening, twelve ordinary members of the public appeared to be asking some of the questions I had been asking.

The phone mattered.

The evidence mattered.

And the jury appeared to recognise that. They wrote that the case relied upon whether or not my phone was secure, and they did not have enough evidence to prove that.

They were subsequently informed that no further evidence could be provided to them.

Then they returned their verdict.

Not guilty.

I remember the relief.

After everything I had endured, I thought:

It’s over.

The jury had considered the offence before them.

They had asked for further evidence.

They had been told they could not have it.

And they had acquitted me.

In my mind, it should have ended there.

It didn’t.

The charge that came at the end

For approximately two years, a basic harassment charge had not been pursued by the Crown prosecution, despite this being offered several times by Judges.

In fact at the second trial the Prosecutor told the court that without the anonymous messages, there really was not a case as an angry call and a few other bits, does not amount to harrassment.

Then, at the end of the proceedings, after the jury had acquitted me of the offence they had been considering, the lesser harassment allegation was pursued.

I remember thinking:

Why now?

After everything.

After the jury had asked for further evidence.

After they had considered the case.

After they had acquitted me.

After the prosecution had previously stated they wouldn't pursue it

Why couldn’t that verdict simply be the end?

I know how it felt from where I was standing.

It felt as though being acquitted wasn’t enough.

It felt as though there still had to be a conviction somewhere.

The prosecution may characterise those decisions differently, and there are legal questions surrounding what happened that belong in my appeal rather than in a Substack article.

But this is my account of what I experienced.

Eventually, I was convicted of a basic harassment offence.

And I am appealing that conviction.

What does “basic harassment” actually mean?

I want to explain something because words in newspaper headlines can create images that bear little resemblance to the legal reality underneath them.

I spent more than twenty years policing.

During my career, before the old police harassment warnings were abolished, I dealt with situations involving unwanted contact following relationship breakdowns.

Some people were absolutely mortified when police became involved.

Harassment can, of course, be extremely serious and frightening. I have dealt with genuine victims and would never minimise their experiences.

But the word covers a much wider range of conduct than many members of the public realise.

A basic harassment offence involves a course of conduct on at least two occasions that amounts to harassment where the person knows, or ought to know, that it amounts to harassment.

Importantly, the individual acts making up that course of conduct do not necessarily have to be separate criminal offences themselves.

Different forms of contact can form part of the overall course of conduct.

That doesn’t mean somebody who telephones an ex-partner twice is automatically guilty of harassment. The legal test is more complicated than that.

But it demonstrates why context matters.

Someone can read the word HARASSMENT in a newspaper headline and imagine something terrifying.

They fill in the blanks themselves.

That is why I want people to understand what I was actually convicted of rather than allowing a single word to create an entire story in their minds.

I was acquitted of the more serious allegation put before the jury.

I was subsequently convicted of the lesser harassment offence. Bear in mind that this is an offence that used to in some cases, just be given a warning letter. It was never designed for issuing an apology of flowers and a card because you didn't realise that someone's parents heard you shouting or for reaching out to an ex girlfriend for clarification. It was for serious cases that destroyed peoples lives.

I even received a phone call from an Inspector saying that they were extremely sorry that this was happening to me and they know i'm not a bad person, but it's unfortunate because of everything that has happened with Wayne Couzens, they have to be seen to be taking a stance.

And that conviction is being appealed.

The legal arguments belong before the courts.

But my story belongs here.

There was another side nobody heard

There is something else the public did not know.

During this period, I had myself made a serious allegation concerning the complainant.

I believed I had been a victim too.

I reported it.

And once again, I did not feel that what I was reporting was taken seriously or investigated with the determination I would have expected.

There is considerably more surrounding that allegation, including evidence and information about the individuals involved, that I am deliberately not publishing here.

Not because it doesn’t matter.

Because it matters too much.

Those issues need to be dealt with properly through the legal process rather than tried in an article or fought over on social media.

But the public was presented with a remarkably simple story.

There was an alleged victim.

And there was me.

The accused.

What the public didn’t know was that I had also gone to the police saying that something serious had happened to me.

They didn’t see the woman behind the defendant label.

They didn’t see the psychiatric crisis.

They didn’t see the PTSD.

They didn’t see the seventeen bereavements.

They didn’t see the woman who would eventually become so unwell that she attempted to take her own life.

And they didn’t know about the allegation I had made myself.

I have subsequently learned about the psychological concept commonly called DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

I am not using this article to diagnose another person’s behaviour or declare that DARVO legally explains my case.

But learning about the concept forced me to ask difficult questions about my own experiences.

Questions that will have to be dealt with elsewhere.

There is evidence I have not published.

There are allegations I will not litigate on Substack.

There are questions that belong before the courts.

Silence about those matters should not be mistaken for an absence of them.

What was happening to my mind mattered

There is another part of this story that I believe people need to understand.

My psychological condition had become extremely serious.

I was under the care of a mental health Crisis Team.

I was suffering from bulimia and making myself sick almost every day.

My mental health deteriorated to the point where I attempted to take my own life.

Ultimately, I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder.

Those diagnoses matter to my story.

I am not ashamed of them.

And I am not mentioning mental illness as some magic phrase that absolves somebody of responsibility.

It doesn’t.

I am mentioning it because when people are being asked to make judgements about someone’s behaviour, reactions and state of mind, their psychological condition can be enormously important context.

I believe that context mattered in my case.

Profoundly. Yet no juror was presented with any of this evidence.

I had just tried to take my own life. Then I was interviewed.

This is one of the experiences I still struggle to understand.

After my suicide attempt, police interviewed me again.

I had spent more than twenty years policing.

During that career, I had seen vulnerable detainees receive medical assessments before interview.

I had seen interviews delayed because somebody’s welfare mattered.

I had seen healthcare professionals involved when there were questions about whether somebody was fit to be interviewed.

Yet after I had attempted to take my own life, while under the care of the Crisis Team, I do not recall receiving the medical assessment I would have expected before my final interview.

I was nevertheless deemed fit for interview, not by a medical professional, but by the police themselves.

I remember thinking about all the prisoners I had dealt with during my career.

And I couldn’t stop asking myself:

If I had been responsible for this detainee, would I have been comfortable proceeding without first making absolutely certain she was medically and psychologically fit?

For me, the answer is no.

I wasn’t asking to be exempt from investigation.

I wasn’t asking for special treatment because I was a police officer.

I wanted the same humanity I had seen extended to vulnerable people throughout my career.

I did not feel I received it.

Then the judge said something I had waited years to hear

There was a moment at sentencing that I will never forget.

The judge acknowledged that I was also a victim.

Those words meant more to me than I can adequately explain.

Because until that moment, I felt as though virtually nobody involved in the process had been prepared to recognise that possibility.

I had become the defendant.

And once that label was attached to me, everything that had happened to me seemed to disappear.

My trauma disappeared.

My vulnerability disappeared.

My mental health disappeared.

My experiences within this situation disappeared.

Suddenly there was only one victim and one villain.

Life is rarely that simple. The Judge also acknowledged over twenty character references from people who knew me personally, from all walks of life and all different races. He had never before received so many character references of ‘exemplary character’.

So when the judge recognised that I too had been a victim, something inside me broke. Because somebody had finally acknowledged that.

A psychiatric report also categorically stated I had no malicious intent towards the complainant. Despite still having to face the consequences of what I believed to be a spurious conviction. I finally had some hope.

Somebody had finally seen me.

Apparently I wasn’t allowed to define my own relationship

There is another issue that continues to trouble me and which forms part of the wider legal questions surrounding my case.

Both the other person involved and I gave evidence about the nature of our relationship.

We both maintained that we had not been in a relationship.

Think about that.

The two people who actually knew what their status was both gave their evidence.

Yet the case was nevertheless treated through a domestic context.

That remains extremely difficult for me to comprehend.

How can somebody else define the nature of a relationship between two adults when both of those adults say that wasn’t their situation?

There are important legal questions surrounding the case being labelled ‘Domestic’ as a classification and its procedural consequences.

I have very strong feelings about why it mattered. I have spent years advocating against domestic abuse. In fact I was used as an example in the police of how to complete thorough and detailed domestic reports and highly praised for my work with domestic abuse victims. Yet somehow I am labelled a domestic abuser? That cut me deeper than anything else.

But those questions need to be dealt with through my appeal.

I am not going to try to resolve them here.

What I can say is how it felt.

I felt as though even my own account of my own life no longer belonged to me.

Then came the character assassination

Perhaps one of the most painful things was watching the person I had been for more than twenty years replaced by a caricature I barely recognised.

“Gangster cop.”

Imagine reading those words about yourself.

Gangster.

Where did that come from?

I had never been some violent police officer terrorising people.

I have never even had a fight.

I was the officer colleagues teased for being too caring.

Yet suddenly this was the public image attached to my name.

And as a Black woman, I cannot pretend that terminology didn’t trouble me on another level.

I cannot know what was inside the mind of every journalist who used or repeated descriptions of me, and I am not going to accuse individuals of racial prejudice without evidence.

But I am entitled to question the imagery.

Because words like gangster do not exist in a cultural vacuum.

Put that description beside the photograph of a Black woman and ask yourself what image it creates.

Aggressive.

Street.

Dangerous.

Violent.

That wasn’t me.

It still isn’t.

And once those words enter the internet, they don’t disappear when the newspaper moves on to tomorrow’s story.

They remain.

Someone searches your name five years later and there it is.

Gangster cop.

Not the nineteen-year-old who joined because she had been failed as a victim.

Not the detective who gave more than twenty years to policing.

Not the woman who helped homeless people.

Not the woman who supported widows and orphans.

Not the woman who provided books for schoolchildren.

Not the woman who created a ministry for abused women.

Not the Black police officer who tried to build bridges between the police and the Black community.

Gangster cop.

Two words.

A whole human life erased.

The newspapers ran with

• ‘Gangster cop harrasses her ex’,

• ‘Couldn’t handle break up’

• ‘Sends threatening messages after being dumped’

This could not have been further from the truth! The other terrible thing about the media is that nobody turned up to court after the first day of the trial. Remember there were two collapsed trials, at the first trial, the prosecution didn't even bother to turn up.

Entire articles were being written based on conjecture, assumption and interpretation of what they believed to be the facts based on prosecution opening statements and things that occurred at one of the collapsed trials.

Things which were debunked at the main trial, and yet still reported as fact in the papers.

For example at the final trial, jurors rejected that the complainant was in fear of me or my family or was threatened.

Despite evidence to the contrary, it was wilfully listed in papers that my cousin had issued threats.

The papers portrayed me as a ‘crazed psycho’ who couldn't accept being dumped by a person that I'd only known for 3 weeks.

This was ludicrous.

Again, for legal reasons I cannot go into any more than this, however my complaint to several media establishments to rectify their reporting, was met with the fact that they are just simply too busy to attend every court hearing and don’t have time to amend the articles.

At what point do the press get to destroy people's lives based on conjecture, lead people to their graves and not face consequences for it?

For years I believed that if I stayed quiet, dignity would eventually speak for itself.

It doesn’t.

Google doesn’t know dignity. Google knows headlines.

And that is why I am finally putting my own words beside theirs.

The Media Circus

And then came the media.

Perhaps this is one of the most important parts of my story to tell now, because when I read about Jason Arday, one of the first things I thought about was what happens when a human being stops being treated as a person and starts being treated as a story.

I know what that feels like.

I felt hounded by sections of the media.

There was one local media outlet that I felt showed me genuine compassion, as soon as I presented the correct evidence, they removed their article altogether, they felt i’d suffered enough. Beyond that, my experience was very different.

I wrote repeatedly to major publications, including The Telegraph. I contacted the Daily Mail. I tried desperately to explain what was happening to me.

I wasn’t asking journalists to declare me innocent.

I wasn’t asking them to suppress legitimate reporting of court proceedings.

I was begging them to recognise that there was a human being behind the headline.

I told them that I was severely mentally unwell.

I told them that I wasn’t coping.

I told them that I was reaching the point where I feared I might take my own life.

Think about that for a moment.

I wasn’t complaining about a bad review.

I wasn’t saying that I simply didn’t like what had been written about me.

I was telling people that I was frightened I might die.

And I felt as though nobody was listening.

Eventually, I did try to take my own life.

I spent three days in intensive care. I had a near death experience, which I will explain at another time.

But before and around all of this, the media attention had already moved far beyond the courtroom.

It came to my home.

Journalists turned up at my house.

And they didn’t only approach me.

They went to my neighbours.

They knocked on their doors.

They asked questions about me.

They wanted information about who I was, what I was like and what my neighbours knew about me.

I cannot adequately explain how violating that felt.

I had spent more than twenty years serving as a police officer.

I was a mother.

I was an elderly mans daughter.

I was already psychologically falling apart.

And now people were going from door to door in the place where I lived, asking questions about me.

My home was supposed to be the one place where I could close the door on everything that was happening outside.

The courtroom.

The allegations.

The newspapers.

The photographs.

The judgement.

Instead, the story followed me all the way to my front door — and then knocked on my neighbours’ doors too.

And through all of this there was another person I desperately wanted to protect.

My daughter.

I had a young, vulnerable daughter at home.

Whatever anybody thought about me, whatever allegations I faced and however newsworthy journalists considered my case to be, my daughter had done absolutely nothing.

She wasn’t a police officer.

She wasn’t a defendant.

She wasn’t accused of anything.

She was my child.

Yet journalists were appearing around the place where she lived and asking the people around us questions about her mother.

I remember thinking:

Where does this stop?

What happens to the children of people who become headlines?

What happens when journalists arrive outside the place they call home?

What happens when neighbours are being questioned about their mother?

What happens when the one place where a child should be able to shut out the rest of the world suddenly becomes part of the story too?

Nobody had sentenced my daughter to any of this.

Yet she had to live through its consequences alongside me.

At a time when I was already severely mentally unwell, I wasn’t only frightened about what was happening to me.

I was frightened about what it was doing to my child.

That is something I wish more people understood about public humiliation.

The person whose name appears in the headline is rarely the only person carrying its weight.

There are children.

Parents.

Families.

Friends.

Neighbours.

People who never volunteered to become characters in somebody else’s news story.

Eventually, the journalists go home.

But so do you.

Except you go home to the street where they have just been knocking on doors asking questions about you.

You go home to your child.

You go home knowing that the most private place in your life no longer feels private or safe.

The photograph that came to define me

And then there was the photograph.

There is one image of me from this period that became particularly prominent.

People saw that photograph and judged the woman in it.

What almost nobody looking at it knew was what had happened immediately before it was taken.

I had come out of hospital that very morning.

Not a few days earlier.

Not the previous week.

That morning.

I was extremely unwell.

Despite that, I went to court.

I tried to carry on.

I tried to do what I had spent my whole career doing: turn up and get through it.

But I wasn’t well enough.

Ultimately, I was not fit to remain at court and I was sent home.

But there were photographers outside.

And there I was.

Fresh out of hospital.

Unwell.

Exhausted.

Traumatised.

Trying somehow to walk through another day of a situation that was already destroying me.

And I was followed and photographed.

Those photographs showed me looking terrible.

Of course they did.

I had come out of hospital that morning.

But nobody looking at the photograph knew that.

They saw a photograph.

They didn’t see the hospital.

They didn’t see the illness.

They didn’t see the psychological crisis.

They didn’t see what it had taken for me simply to get out of bed and make it to court that morning.

They didn’t see the woman who wasn’t even well enough to remain there.

They simply saw an image.

And that image became part of the public version of Miriam Virgo.

That hurts me even now.

Because photographs have extraordinary power.

Freeze somebody at their lowest point and you can make that moment look like their identity.

But that photograph wasn’t my identity.

It was one morning of my life.

They weren’t showing the photographs of the nineteen-year-old girl proudly wearing her police uniform.

They weren’t showing the woman who had given more than twenty years to policing.

They weren’t showing the detective.

They weren’t showing the charity worker.

They weren’t showing the woman who helped homeless people.

They weren’t showing the woman who supported widows and orphans.

They weren’t showing the woman who gave books and educational support to children.

They weren’t showing the woman who created a ministry to help abused women.

They weren’t showing the mother desperately trying to protect her daughter while her own world was collapsing.

They showed a profoundly unwell woman on one terrible morning.

And that image helped define me.

That is the extraordinary power of a photograph attached to a headline.

It can freeze a human being on one of the worst days of their life and preserve that version of them forever.

The journalists moved on. The internet didn’t.

Eventually, the cameras disappeared.

The journalists stopped knocking.

The court case stopped being today’s news.

But the articles remained.

I contacted publications asking them to consider what those stories were continuing to do to me.

Again, I wasn’t asking anybody to rewrite history.

I wasn’t asking for legitimate court reporting to disappear simply because I didn’t like it.

The proceedings happened.

They were entitled to report them.

What I struggled to understand was why, long after the immediate public interest had passed, old sensationalised stories and photographs still had to define me.

Because there is something profoundly different about being reported on in the internet age.

Once upon a time, yesterday’s newspaper became tomorrow’s rubbish.

Today, yesterday’s headline becomes tomorrow’s Google result.

To a news organisation, an old article may simply be another piece of content sitting in an archive.

To the human being whose name is in that article, it can follow them everywhere.

Into a job application.

Into a new friendship.

Into a relationship.

Into a business opportunity.

Into a conversation with somebody who has never met you.

Into every attempt to rebuild your life.

Someone types your name into Google and suddenly one of the worst periods of your existence is alive again.

The newsroom moves on.

The person in the headline doesn’t get to.

And when that headline is accompanied by a photograph taken on the morning you came out of hospital, the internet doesn’t tell people that either.

It simply shows them the picture.

That is why the phrase “gangster cop” hurt me so deeply.

That is why the photographs hurt.

That is why the continued articles hurt.

A caricature was created that I simply did not recognise.

And I was left living underneath it.

I wasn’t asking them to make me innocent. I was asking them to remember I was human.

This distinction matters to me.

Journalism matters.

Open justice matters.

Freedom of the press matters.

The public has a legitimate interest in what happens inside its courts and public institutions.

I understand that perhaps better than most.

I spent more than twenty years inside the criminal justice system.

But surely there is a difference between accountability and dehumanisation.

Surely there is room between reporting somebody’s case and reducing an entire human life to its most sensational headline.

And surely, when somebody contacts you repeatedly saying:

I am not coping.

I am mentally unwell.

I am frightened I might take my own life.

That should mean something.

I wasn’t asking journalists to become therapists.

I wasn’t asking newspapers to become my friends.

I was asking for humanity.

Because eventually the thing I had warned people about happened.

I tried to take my own life.

I spent three days in intensive care.

I survived.

My daughter nearly lost her mother.

My family, after everything we had already endured, nearly had another funeral.

And perhaps that is why what happened to Jason affected me so profoundly.

Why Jason brought all of this back

I need to be very careful here because I will not speculate about Professor Jason Arday’s state of mind or the circumstances of his death.

I didn’t know him.

His story is not mine.

But when I read that he had died, I felt that knot in the pit of my stomach.

Because suddenly I remembered all of it.

The headlines.

The photographs.

The strangers discussing me.

The journalists at my home.

My neighbours being questioned.

My daughter caught in something she had absolutely nothing to do with.

The letters I wrote asking somebody to recognise how psychologically unwell I had become.

The photograph taken on the morning I came out of hospital.

The feeling that the woman I actually was had disappeared and been replaced by a character created from headlines.

And I remembered where that despair eventually took me.

So Jason’s death made me ask a question that I don’t think we ask nearly enough:

What responsibility do we have towards the human being while exercising our right to report the story?

Accountability matters.

Justice matters.

Freedom of the press matters.

But surely humanity matters too.

Surely somebody can be investigated without being dehumanised.

Surely somebody can be prosecuted without every other thing they have ever done disappearing.

Surely somebody can make mistakes without those mistakes becoming their entire identity.

And surely when somebody tells you that they are psychologically collapsing, we should at least hear them.

Because there is something that I understand today that perhaps I didn’t understand before all of this happened.

There is a human being behind every headline.

There is a family behind that human being.

Sometimes there is a frightened child behind the front door.

And sometimes the person everybody is photographing, judging and talking about is hanging on by a thread.

You just can’t see it in the photograph.

Why I didn’t resign

Later came the battle for my career.

Some people may ask why I didn’t simply resign.

There was a reason.

Before my misconduct proceedings concluded, I became aware of another officer who had received a criminal conviction for Domestic assault yet had been permitted to retain her position, with her mental-health circumstances forming part of the context considered in her case.

Her circumstances were not identical to mine.

No two cases ever are.

But the comparison was overwhelming and mattered to me.

I had served for more than twenty years.

I had not spent my career abusing my position.

I had an extensive history of public and charitable service.

I had profound documented mental-health difficulties.

And the conviction I was facing was not for violence.

I was legally advised to stay and fight.

So I did.

I didn’t resign.

I turned up.

I faced the misconduct process.

I hoped somebody would look at the whole person rather than simply the conviction.

Strangely, it was only on the day I ultimately lost my career that I finally felt something from the organisation that I had desperately needed much earlier.

Compassion.

For the first time, I felt somebody could actually see how broken I was.

But by then it was too late.

My career was over.

The force accepted that it could be discriminatory to dismiss me, however, to them, it was a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

Then a few days later, came a certificate thanking me for 23 years of service. It felt slightly disingenuous.

Losing my career didn’t end the punishment

I wish I could tell you that everything stopped afterwards.

It didn’t.

Nothing appeared in the press for almost eight weeks after I was dismissed. Yet miraculously out of nowhere the media circus started up again.

To me that was extremely cruel. Why allow me to relive the pain of conviction, the pain of dismissal, slowly come to terms with the loss of financial income and career for 8 weeks and THEN publicise it in the press? Just for all of that pain to resurface again. Why when the information was released as it happened and the press were invited to the misconduct hearing, was, it not reported immediately?

My honest belief? The press were tipped off by disgruntled parties who were unhappy that my dismissal was not publicly reported.

People connected to those involved in the case continued coming onto my social media.

I was called names.

I was taunted.

I was humiliated.

I felt watched.

My reputation had already been damaged.

I had lost my career.

I had been through the criminal justice system.

I had already tried to take my own life.

And still it continued. Anonymous accounts were created to torment me on social media, comments of which could only pertain to someone close to the case.

There were moments when I genuinely wondered:

How much punishment is enough?

When does somebody stop being a defendant and become a human being again?

I felt as though I had been thrown to the wolves.

And then everybody walked away.

And that brings me back to Jason

I want to finish where I started.

With Professor Jason Arday.

Again, I am not comparing our cases.

I did not know him.

I do not know what happened privately in his life.

And I will not speculate about his death.

What I recognise is something much more human.

I recognise what it feels like when your professional identity collapses publicly.

I recognise what it feels like when your name becomes content.

When strangers who know almost nothing about your life feel entitled to tell you what sort of human being you are.

When decades of good suddenly seem incapable of competing with one headline.

And I recognise the psychological place that relentless public humiliation can take a person.

Because it took me there.

I survived.

There was a point when I very nearly didn’t.

Whatever allegations are made against somebody, whatever investigation needs to take place and whatever accountability may ultimately be appropriate, surely we cannot forget that there is still a human being standing in the middle of it.

Accountability and humanity are not enemies.

Surely we are capable of both.

So this is Miriam Virgo speaking

Not a newspaper headline.

Not somebody else’s description of me.

Me.

I joined the police at nineteen.

I gave more than twenty years of my life to policing.

I survived sexual violence.

I experienced racism.

I lived with PTSD and Complex PTSD.

I buried my mother.

I buried my aunt.

I buried my brother.

I endured seventeen bereavements.

I created a ministry for abused women.

I tried to build bridges between the police and the Black community.

I established charitable projects.

I supported homeless people.

I helped widows and orphans in Africa.

I gave books and educational support to children.

I became seriously mentally unwell.

I was ultimately diagnosed with PTSD, Complex PTSD, EUPD and Major Depressive Disorder.

I made mistakes.

I was harrassed.

I lost my temper.

I was acquitted of the more serious allegation put before the jury.

I was convicted of basic harassment.

I am appealing that conviction.

I lost my career.

I tried to take my own life.

And I survived.

None of those sentences, taken alone, tells you who Miriam Virgo is.

Together, perhaps they begin to.

Some people may read this and still dislike me.

Some people made their minds up years ago.

I cannot control that anymore.

What I can control is whether I remain silent.

And I won’t.

I still believe in policing.

I still believe in justice.

But believing in justice does not require me to remain silent when I believe the system got things wrong.

My appeal will take its course.

The courts will determine the legal arguments.

I will respect that process.

But my life belongs to me.

My story does not belong to a newspaper.

My voice does not belong to the people who have tried to humiliate me.

It belongs to me.

For years, I believed silence would protect me.

It didn’t.

Silence almost buried me.

So whatever happens next, I want this on record.

My name is Miriam Virgo.

Before I was “The Detective in the dock” , I was simply a little girl who wanted to make the world kinder than the one she had grown up in, despite everything that has happened, I still believe it can be.

I pray that one day when people search my name, they will not only find the story of how I fell, they will also discover the story of how I chose to get back up.

I am still here.

And this time, I am telling my own story.

Citations:

Jason Arday words

Wayne Brown