On the Saturday morning, as I had expected, the court case was all over the papers.
In my victim impact statement, which was read out in court, I talked about the effect the case had had on my family and me. I said that Forrest had robbed Gemma of her childhood and that it felt like the daughter I knew was dead because of what he had done to her.
I hadn’t prepared myself for how much the press would completely twist my words.
Somehow or other, a reporter had misquoted me and stories appeared, claiming that I had said ‘My daughter is dead to me’, as if I was saying that I wanted Gemma out of my life. It was totally untrue; the papers were totally misrepresenting what I had said. If I could have, I would have bought every newspaper printed and burnt every single copy.
That horrible line ‘My daughter is dead to me’ implied that I never wanted Gemma in my life again, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. My actual words – ‘I feel the daughter I knew has died and it upsets me beyond words’ – were my way of saying that I felt that my delicate, innocent child had been taken away from me.
I knew that Gemma would see the headlines, too, so I immediately emailed her, warning her about what she might read and telling her that it wasn’t true. She didn’t get back to me, so I could only hope that she had read my email and had understood that I would never have said anything like that.
I was desperate to speak to the media and put the record straight. People needed to know that what they were saying simply wasn’t true. Chloe, though, rightly said that it was beyond my control and persuaded me not to contact the papers.
Thankfully, not all the press repeated this horrible ‘My daughter is dead to me’ statement – the Mirror, for example, accurately reflected what I had said in my impact statement – and many of them went on to report on how Kennedy High School had failed Gemma and my family and explained how the East Sussex Local Safeguarding Children Board had begun a serious case review into the actions of the school.
The Daily Telegraph’s report included quotes from Lucy Duckworth, founder of the child protection charity See Changes – ‘The repeated child protection failings at that school make it a complete shambles with clearly devastating consequences for the pupils in attendance there,’ she said – and a number of others quoted representatives from the NSPCC.
The Daily Mail, meanwhile, featured a front-page story with the headline, KIDNAP TEACHER GROOMED ME AT 13. Inside was an interview with Chloe Queen, the girl that Forrest had allegedly groomed at the school he taught at before he started at Kennedy High School. The police had told me about her during the course of their investigations, and I had hoped that her evidence might have been used in the trial, but I suppose the Crown Prosecution Service must have felt that it wasn’t directly relevant to Gemma’s case.
But there was one newspaper article, written by the television presenter Judy Finnigan, which particularly made my blood boil. It appeared in the Daily Express around a week after the trial ended.
In the piece, she criticised me for having made Gemma go to court. As if I had any say in the matter! It was the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision who appeared before the court. She made all sorts of unfair assumptions about me as a parent and, because she was famous and in the public eye, I feared her comments would be taken as the truth.
I wanted to contact her to put the record straight and even considered sending her husband and fellow presenter, Richard Madeley, a message on Twitter, but I knew that Twitter posts were public and that it could potentially lead to even more bad press and Twitter trolls.
It was incredibly frustrating, but I knew I just had to let it go. Judy Finnigan is a mother herself and I would have hoped that she would have looked into my situation properly, rather than simply jump to conclusions. I remembered that her own daughter had once been the subject of some negative and unpleasant press coverage, so presumably she too had felt attacked as a parent. The fact that she was criticising me like this was very hurtful.