Earlier this year, the son of the woman at the centre of the country’s most infamous sex scandal—the Profumo affair—handed in a petition to the Ministry of Justice, calling on the Lord Chancellor to recommend that the king exercise his royal prerogative of mercy.
Christine Keeler was jailed for nine months in 1963 for giving misleading information in court and obstructing the course of justice, in a case in which she was the victim of violence and her attacker (and her stalker) actually admitted the violence.
In May, Seymour Platt, Keeler’s son, together with her granddaughter and legal team, including the human rights barrister Felicity Gerry KC, handed in the petition together with a 300-page dossier.
Historic discrimination against women
According to Gerry, Keeler’s 1963 conviction for perjury was the ‘ultimate in slut-shaming’ and her posthumous exoneration would be an overdue opportunity to acknowledge historic discrimination against women in the justice system.
The writer Rebecca West captured the moral and sexual hypocrisy of the time when
