Nothing but the truth
“Come on, Clearie, tell the truth. God will forgive you,” she says, imitating her elderly mother’s voice — sometimes wheedling, sometimes bullying — in the courtroom and shuddering at the memory. “It was extraordinary — like being a child all over again.”
Few people have travelled farther from their childhoods than Briscoe, now 54 and a successful barrister and part-time judge. Even her name is different — her mother called her Clearie, “because she could see clear through me” — and she did not discover her birth name until she applied to university. “I was born in the gutter,” she says bluntly, “and rose without a trace.” As well as her legal career she is also an author, not only of two non-fiction books, Ugly and Beyond Ugly, but also of a novel, The Accused. But it was her 2008 court battle to prove that Ugly was not a work of fiction that made her into something approaching a household name.
