Tag Archives: Lies and Defamation

Guardian Country Diarist Jim Perrin’s plan fails to materialise

Jac’s children were not convinced (ref. the preceding post) and knowing their mother had wanted only their security they felt unwilling to accept Jim Perrin’s story of her ‘last wish’;  they were well aware their landlord had given Jac his assurance that they would be able to take over the tenancy should the need arise…

They told their ‘Welsh’ aunt about the conversation and she drove over to their house to discuss this  latest development.  She had spoken with Jac at great length in the recent days — as had each of her sisters — and she was able to say with certainty that there could have been no such ‘last wish’. Indeed Jac’s last thoughts had been quite otherwise: they were concerned with how Jim Perrin would treat her children if he did have control over them, and knowing how badly he had treated them she was deeply anxious. Her ‘Welsh’ sister had reassured her as best she could and had faithfully promised her that she would protect them should it become necessary.

For the record:  Jim Perrin lied when he wrote that he was with Jac when she died, nor had he been, for many hours, at her bedside whilst she was alive.  He had left her quite alone, early on the previous evening,  yet afterwards he spoke with two of her sisters in phone calls, telling them that she ‘was much better’, ref. our post Our account of Jac’s illness — part three and, in the period between taking her into hospital in Chester on Wednesday,  gravely ill with her cancer,  he had made time to leave her and to drive to Derbyshire where, he wrote, he stayed with friends. ref. our post Our account of Jac’s illness — part four — before he ‘hurried back to her side’! Continue reading

Jim Perrin loses a court case? (Well, no! The matter was settled ‘OUT of court’!)

In the 1990s Jim Perrin libelled a fellow climber (Jim Curran) so vilely, impugning his climbing credentials, that he was to be sued for it: a date was fixed for the trial.

Spectacularly, further damning evidence was produced against Jim Perrin and an offer was made in settlement — of many tens of thousands of pounds — within only days of that trial. Today the figure is enormous — then it was a fortune — a sum however which ‘luckily’ was covered by the insurers of the magazine that had published the libel of which Jim Perrin was guilty: he would, it seems, have the Luck of the Devil and, as we have written elsewhere, ‘he sailed away Scot-free’.

Nevertheless the details of this case are well known in the climbing community — and to us through close friends in that community: it is a brush with which he has been tarred ever since. He has learned though to be more circumspect in his writing and over the years has developed a unique style which we believe to be — and have described as — ‘Libelling libel-lessly ref. our post Jim Perrin writes libellously? and it may be observed that he uses this ‘style’ frequently, and to great malicious effect. Continue reading

Jim Perrin’s ‘fait accompli’

Our sister met Jim Perrin at a reading on the evening of October the 29th, in 2002.  Jac had known him nearly three decades earlier — as she explained to us, ‘briefly and intermittently’ — and there had been no contact at all in the intervening years:  he was in the past.

At the time of the meeting he was living in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant — although he had been there for less than a fortnight — a removal firm had delivered his possessions from his previous address in Ruabon only on the 18th of that month, as the receipt for the payment of their services showed.

However, having met her only on the 29th of October, 2002, and seeing very little of her up to the Christmas of that year he wrote:

‘Over Christmas she was away on a dutiful and extended tour of relations‘.

Away?  The implication — and this book is very largely based on implication — being that she was not (‘as usual’?) living with him…

Nor was she!  Nor had she been!  She was living in her own home celebrating Christmas as she had always done, with her children and family and with her partner of sixteen years.  (Ref. our post ‘Jac’s Last Long Relationship’.) Continue reading