Ched Evans: I fought this for my family, I’m not a rapist

In his first interview since clearing his name in court, British footballer Ched Evans tells of his agony at being branded a rapist.

Chesterfield F.C football player Ched Evans leaves Cardiff Crown Court with partner Natasha Massey after being found not guilty of rape. Picture: GEtty

At 2.30pm on Friday at Cardiff crown court, Ched Evans’s life took a new turn. For eight days he had sat in the dock in court 5, listening to the re-telling of a sordid story that had dominated his life for more than five years.

The footballer had watched as Mrs Justice Nicola Davies presided, softly spoken and scrupulously fair. “I will never have a judge as good as this one,” he thought. He had looked endlessly at the seven women and five men of the jury. How they reacted to what they were hearing would determine his future.

When his legal team told him things were going well he was not presumptuous. If he had learnt anything from 2 and a half years in prison and his first months of freedom - which had been more difficult than his time behind bars - it was that you never knew what would happen.

To get here, he had been through a legal process that rarely succeeds. Only 3 per cent-4 per cent of cases before the Criminal Cases Review Commission are upheld but it had considered his conviction for rape “unsafe” and the Court of Appeal had ordered this retrial.

The jury, sent out before midday, returned at 2.30pm, having also broken for lunch. Evans could not stop himself thinking: “If they’ve taken this little time, it’s because they know I’m innocent.”

He was right. The verdict was unanimous. “Mr Evans, you are discharged. You can leave the dock,” said Davies.

Ched Evans in action for Sheffield United. Picture: Getty

Evans walked into the arms of his fiancee, Natasha Massey. They hugged and sobbed. Later he would talk about a case that has divided the country.

When friends said he could now get on with his life as a footballer without the burden of a wrongful rape conviction, he thought: “That’s actually an irrelevance.”

He explained: “This has never been about me as a footballer but [about me] as a person, a human being. A father who wants to take his son to the park knowing that no one can look at me and say, ‘He’s a rapist.’ That’s why I wasn’t going to stop until I was proven innocent. From the first day, I would have agreed never to kick another ball in return for people accepting I was not a rapist.”

From the beginning there had been a striking incongruity that made me curious about this case. Two men - Evans and his friend Clayton McDonald - have a threesome with a woman in a hotel bedroom, both have sex with her, one is convicted of rape, the other is acquitted.

The woman did not complain of rape and insisted she could not recall what happened. At the first trial, the members of the jury decided that she was not in a fit state to consent to sex with Evans and convicted him; but they acquitted McDonald, who shouted at them: “If I’m innocent, he has to be innocent!”

What does Evans now feel about the woman, who has received both widespread sympathy and vilification on social media. “I have got mixed emotions really,” he said. “The fact is I cannot say she has ever accused me of rape. She hasn’t. She went to the police, believing her bag had been stolen. When me and Clayton got arrested we told the truth straight away and still to this day five years on she has never claimed that she had been raped.

“My belief is that it got put to her that she had been raped by two footballers. But my feelings towards the girl involved is that I can’t actually say I am angry, because - if she genuinely doesn’t remember - it doesn’t mean that we raped her. It doesn’t mean she didn’t consent. It just means that she can’t remember.

“I’d be lying if I said I feel some hatred towards her. I don’t. It would probably be more [correct] to say I feel sorry for her because of what she has been put through.

“I didn’t ask people on the internet to abuse her. I didn’t condone that. I don’t condone that.”

Evans was 12 when he got a trial for Manchester City and was still only 18 when he received his first big monthly pay slip for $55,000. Soon afterwards he went home to his mother’s council house in Rhyl and showed her his new $16,000 watch.

“Do you know,” she said, “I’m still paying off catalogue bills from Christmas presents when you were 10 and you’ve just bought a watch that cost $16,000?” It would not be the last time he would disappoint his mother.

He was 22, and his team Sheffield United had been relegated at the end of the 2010-11 season, when he went back to Rhyl for the May bank holiday weekend. That Sunday he texted his friend McDonald, whom he’d met when they were teenagers at Manchester City. “Fancy a night out in Rhyl?”

“I’m at my Nan’s in Liverpool. Got no clothes.” An hour later McDonald sent a second text. “Found some pants, have you got a T-shirt?”

Evans books him a room at Rhyl’s Premier Inn. And so it begins. After an evening’s drinking in the town’s bars the friends get separated. McDonald texts Evans: “I’ve got a bird.”

Evans goes to the Premier Inn. “I have gone in the room and at the time Clay is having sex with the woman. As soon as I walked in, and I will never forget this, the door bangs behind me and they have both looked at me.”

According to McDonald and Evans, the young woman agrees that Evans can join them. “It escalated into sex and as soon as I did that, I started to think, Tash [girlfriend Natasha] was coming up the next day and I’d better get home because I couldn’t have explained why I’d stayed in the hotel. Clay decided to come with me and he stayed at my house.”

Next day his mother called him. “The murder squad is at my house,” she said. That was the single most terrifying moment because he presumed the young woman had died and he and McDonald were being blamed. He rang his friend. “Something’s happened. The murder squad is at my house.”

At the police station in Rhyl, Evans answers the police officers’ questions about what happened. There are no “no comments”, nothing that he cannot recall.

A month later they were charged with rape, although the woman, aged 19, could not recall what happened and there was no forensic evidence, just their statements.

The final moments of the first trial in 2012 were seared onto his consciousness.

“How do you find Ched Evans? Guilty, your honour. I look towards the jury. Two women jurors, seated alongside each other on the left side were crying. The young lad who had been looking at Clay and I all through the trial had his head in his hands. Then my head was gone. I couldn’t focus on anything.”

Through his 2 and a half years at HM Prison Wymott in Lancashire, Evans maintained his innocence. When he refused to undergo a sex offender’s rehabilitation course, insisting he didn’t believe he was a sex offender, they denied him enhanced prisoner status.

That made his life in prison more difficult. Less phone credit, less access around the prison, worse prison clothes, much less interesting jobs. Evans sewed towels and made key rings for Blackpool Pleasure Beach. “You have to put the plastic bit into a metal ring and get 2,500 done every day.”

The decision to challenge his conviction turned on the evidence of two new witnesses not involved in the first trial. Each said he had had a sexual relationship with the woman around the time of the alleged rape. Under Section 41 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, a woman’s sexual history cannot be admitted as evidence in rape cases unless it falls within four exceptions.

Evans’s legal team argued that ruling the evidence of the new witnesses inadmissible would deny their client a fair trial. The evidence appeared to corroborate what Evans had said about the sexual encounter. The second jury believed them.

“When I got the guilty verdict, it was something so bad you just couldn’t imagine,” said Evans. “But having my name cleared, that is even more powerful. It was hard for everyone, my family. My mum, it took a real toll on her.

“For Tash, it was hard. We would sit in our house waiting for the next story to come that would hurt Tash, hurt me, hurt my family.”

Massey’s support for him has been unwavering. He betrayed her that night in Rhyl and, after finding out, she ended their relationship. Two weeks later, she forgave him. They have been together ever since and now have a nine-month-old son, Flynn.

“Tasha’s life would have been easier if she just cut all ties with me the moment I told her I cheated on her,” he said. “She knows me, she knows I wouldn’t commit a crime like that. She didn’t stay with me for money, that’s for sure.

“She’s much more advanced in her business career than I am in my football career, and she can go on in her job long after I’ll be finished with the game.

“She has got potential to do whatever she wants. I believe we are going to be together for the rest of our lives and we make a perfect team but it would have been easy for Tash to walk away because of the stress and heartache she has had to put up with. My behaviour that night was totally unacceptable but it wasn’t a crime.”

He joined League One club Chesterfield at the beginning of the season and has been trying to pick up the thread of his career. Opposition fans target him for abuse.

“They sing a song saying, ‘She said no Evans, she said no,’ then finish it with ‘rapist, rapist, rapist,’ ” he says. “You can imagine some of the fouler things that come out of people’s mouths and ten times out of ten the opposition players are saying, ‘Don’t listen to them, get on with the game, just don’t worry about them.’ That’s encouraging considering it is coming from the opposition team.”

Does it get to him? “No. Honestly not. All I have to do is revert back to one day in prison and it trumps any amount of verbal abuse. Any single day in prison and the abuse I get compares to it not one bit. On the field I am free. I am playing football. I am getting paid for it. I am looking for a goal. A few people shouting stuff is irrelevant.”

This morning he and Natasha will take Flynn to a duck pond near where they live. They’ve thought about this and see it as their little celebration. “I will go there with my fiancee and our son, without that label on my back.

“I had to learn to live with being a convicted rapist, to get over the barrier of walking into somewhere and feeling awkward. I did that. Being cleared is for my family, Tash, our son Flynn.

“I love football but I could just as easily go fishing. I never believed I was a rapist. But strangers, people in restaurants, in supermarkets, people writing in newspapers, on social media, that’s what they had on me. You have been convicted, you are a convicted rapist.

“Then a different group of 12 people turn round and say, actually he’s not a rapist. That is what is so weird.”

The Sunday Times