Just started watching the Amol interview... Opening question from Amol: "how are you?".... Big dramatic pause, pretend swallowing of tears, pause, "I understand how Caroline Flack felt..." On and on he goes, fairly incomprehensible stuff, bad acting... Then Amol asks "Do you feel up to doing the interview?" and he says "Yeh".
So ok "yeh" I feel genuinely broken and suicidal but I'll still give an informal "yeh" to doing a public interview as if this is the easiest thing in the world. Come off it! It's the equivalent of a liar who smiles slightly after telling a lie: the satisfaction of getting away with it. Here, Schofield says "yeh" casually because he is saying "I'm a professional interviewer, I know what I'm doing, I'm a legend at this. I'm going to convince you I'm innocent. Let's go..."
Odious. Utterly, utterly odious.
Terrible acting of the worst kind.
This is, in my opinion, someone who is deeply narcissistic. It is someone who, not having their way, they threaten violence against themselves. They want to manipulate and gaslight you, the kind of people who say "you leave me and I'll kill myself..."
He's talking about following thousands of people on Twitter, as if that dilutes his relations with the boy he choose to interact with: yes, Schofield, but this is about a very specific relationship you developed with an underage boy. You can ameliorate this issue by suggesting that MM could just as easily have been anyone, that this was random, that MM was drawn from a lottery of thousands and not from your predilection for younger men/boys but we don't believe you (remembering that he more or less admits he prefers younger men because of his comparisons between how he has been treated and how Leonardo DiCaprio is treated for his preferences).
"41 years in television. No accusations. This is all, you know, accusations." Um, no it is NOT just accusations is it???!!! This is actually you admitteding to developing a relationship with someone who you first knew through inviting him into ITV Studios. From Twitter to ITV Studios. Not a girl. Not a fat 30 year-old hairy man. Not a 19 year-old lesbian who wants to get into TV. An underage boy. It happened to be the young boy among all the "thousands" who you interact with on social media who you invited in. Coincidence that MM fitted your preference and he wanted a job? No.
And notice how he says "no accusations" in 41 years, not the more straightforward and clear "I've done nothing like this before." He speaks of accusations not of his specific behaviours. This shows the ego of the man. He avoids using simple, direct answers that would support his claim that he has hitherto been whiter than white. If I ask a thief if they've ever stolen anything previously and they say "I've not been convicted before" then this is obviously avoiding my question. Schofield avoids the question.
He talks about how "nobody knew" about he and MM but that "someone" had to know in order for there to be rumours. He's asked again a minute later if anybody knew and he says, with great certainty, "nobody knew". Well, you cannot advertise self-knowledge that people must have known because there were rumours but then also deny that knowledge by saying that nobody knew... The contradictions are various. He's been caught asserting something he knows, by his own words, cannot have been true: of course people knew, it was an open secret. Tattlers have known for years. He's openly lying.
He says that MM "wants all this to go away", which is Schofield using MM to emotionally blackmail people: to say, you hurt me, but you're hurting MM at the same time. Let us just move on, take the focus off us. So if he knows that MM wants this to go away, then he is saying he is either in contact with MM or feels still so connected to him that he feels he can talk on his behalf: more likely, he is just being manipulative, knowing that MM is too weak to talk out. He is betting the house and what remains of his career on MM not speaking out. He is still using MM for his own ends.
"It was a totally innocent Twitter follow, of which I follow 11,400 people [strange how he knew that exact figure, he has carefully rehearsed his rhetoric], and then it was a completely innocent backwards and forwards [with MM] over a period of time about a job, about careers. What's wrong with talking to someone no matter what age they are?". Here he is deliberately showcasing a naive and reductive view of 'grooming' that suits his purposes, because grooming doesn't start with flirting or overt criminality, it starts as ordinary conversation to build up trust. No one is saying that Schofield said inappropriate things to MM in Twitter.
The accusation is that Schofield spent an unusual amount of time and focus on MM, a young boy, which, outside Twitter, went beyond just talking about careers in a casual, temporary and limited way. It led to a job, to proximity to Schofield and to physicality. He doesn't appear to accept at all that grooming is what he has done in taking an underage boy from Twitter to his dressing room (albeit once the boy was of age - perhaps) and that the grooming started on Twitter with an underage boy. It matters not if they got physical only once MM was of age. The grooming started when he was underage. It's a distinction Schofield obviously wouldn't countenance.
Notice how he could easily have said "I give out advice about the TV industry to dozens of people through the year. I've messaged with many girls, boys, of all ages, I try to be helpful". He doesn't say this because it's not true. He focussed mainly on MM and perhaps other people (boys) he doesn't want to admit to messaging because it would take away from his narrative of innocence. And we know he interacted with other boys.
Innocent people, as Judge Judy says, don't have to think: if you tell the truth, you don't have to think. You just tell the truth. This interview is the opposite of that. He was carefully crafting every sentence. The self-dramatising "I know how Caroline Flack felt" is disrespectful to the dead and her family. It is a wilful manipulation not just of the public, but of his old colleagues and a career which he thinks he stands some chance of restoring once his mea culpa has been broadcast.
This is also a manipulation of what it means to be a human being. I quite understand that it is possible to not think romantically about a young person, but then get attracted to them later when they mature: but MM is notably young-looking and never turned, overnight, from a callow youth to a bearded bloke. It just didn't happen that way. MM looked young for his age, and I don't believe that Schofield had absolutely no feelings until, one day, in his dressing room, "something happened" as if he was surprised by his desire. I don't believe it just got switched on one eventful day once MM matured. This is the same Schofield who, Holmes is happy to broadcast to the nation, was not widely liked, did not know the names of staff on the show. And yet, and yet he makes the effort not only to bring MM into ITV Studios but also spends considerable time with him. And we're supposed to believe the physicality was entirely out of the blue! More like out of the blue tick of Twitter....
We need more facts, sure, but to judge from this interview, Schofield is covering up the bigger story. I've spend considerable time listening to people and reading between lines in the work that I do. I know no more about any of this than most of us here. I have no particular insight, but if this was a HR issue before me now, like dozens of HR issues I've dealt with in my career, Schofield would have been fired years ago.
….the bit about different age groups finding each other attractive?? And then the brass neck to blame the back lash on homophobia?!
