“I want to offer my sincere and humble apologies”: Steve Messham admits he wrongly identified Lord McAlpine in sexual abuse claim
Steve Messham, the victim of sexual abuse at a care home in North Wales, has apologised for wrongly identifying Lord McAlpine, saying that that his claim was based on a case of mistaken identity.
Messham said: "After seeing a picture in the past hour of the individual concerned, this [is] not the person I identified by photograph presented to me by the police in the early 1990s, who told me the man in the photograph was Lord McAlpine," he said.
"I want to offer my sincere and humble apologies to him and his family."
Following the BBC Newsnight programme, which led with "this man says a leading Conservative from the time was one of his abusers", the name of the Tory quickly began circulating on the internet.
According to BBC sources, the journalists involved with the BBC programme decided that there was no need to contact McAlpine for right of reply, as they would not name him directly, thus discarding any evidence which could have proved him innocent.
As such, in light of the investigation McAlpine denied the abuse claims and said he had only once been to Wrexham, the town where the abuse was alleged to have taken place.
Director of BBC, George Entwistle told BBC Breakfast that Steve Messham made "an inaccurate identification" but stressed he was not blaming him "at all".
He added: "It was our responsibility, Newsnight's responsibility, to make sure that any misidentification did not end up on television and I am afraid we did not manage to do that, therefore we have to absolutely take the blame."
However McAlpine has indicated that he intends to sue the BBC after it led to him being identified on the internet.