The Independent on the Ched Evans retrial.

A former solicitor general has condemned the way the Ched Evans rape trial was conducted.

Vera Baird told the BBC details of the woman’s sexual past should not have been heard in court and the case could discourage people who are sexually assaulted from reporting it to police.

The 27-year-old footballer was cleared on Friday of raping a woman in a hotel room in 2011, only after her sexual history was scrutinised before a jury. Evans was initially found guilty of the rape in 2012.

And you think that might deter women from reporting rape? Just a little?

While he was in prison, Evans’ family and friends offered £50,000 for information that might clear his name and hired private investigators to help free him.

The new evidence concerned two other men who claimed they had sex with the woman around the same time as the alleged rape and who described their encounters as similar to Evans’ account of what happened.

Defence lawyers have been banned from cross-examining alleged rape victims in court about their sexual behaviour or history since 1999, but the Court of Appeal said Evans’ case was exceptional.

Because hey, the guy is a footballer. You can’t be putting them in the slammer, not on the word of some slut.

Lady Justice Hallett ruled it was a “rare case” in which it would be appropriate to allow “forensic examination” of the woman’s sexual behaviour.

“Lady Justice”??? Are men called “Gentleman Justice”? No. So why “Lady Justice”?* Anyway – it was a “rare case” because the accused was a footballer.

Ms Baird, the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner who played a large role in changing the law in the nineties, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The only difference between a clear conviction of Mr Evans in 2012 and the absolute refusal of him having any leave to appeal at that time, and his acquittal now, is that he has called some men to throw discredit on [the woman’s] sexual reputation.

“That, I think, is pouring prejudice in, which is exactly what used to happen before the law in 1999 stopped the admission of previous sexual history in order to show consent.”

It’s enraging.

At the retrial the jury was told about Evans’s fun night out with the lads, including another footballer, Clayton McDonald.

The men first saw the woman in the early hours of the morning, falling over drunk outside a kebab shop, the court head.

Mr McDonald took her back to the Premier Inn nearby, where Evans had booked a room, text messaging him from the taxi to tell him he had “got a bird”.

They spotted her falling over drunk so they grabbed her and took her to a hotel room. They found a vagina lying around in the street, so naturally they took it to a hotel room so they could put their dicks in it.

Evans insisted he then had consensual sex with the woman before getting up and leaving via a fire exit door when he suddenly realised he was cheating on his girlfriend.

In 2012, a court ruled the woman had not been able to give consent, but on Friday a jury decided unanimously that Evans was not guilty.

Because the fact that she’d had sex before made her consent irrelevant?

And after the verdict, Twitter bullies made the victim’s identity public.

The woman who accused Ched Evans of raping her has been forced to change her name at least five times since 2011, after receiving hundreds of death threats.

Legally, she has the right to lifelong anonymity as a complainant in a sex attack, but has been repeatedly hunted down and exposed by Twitter trolls.

After Evan’s first trial, her name was tweeted by his supporters and then retweeted more than 6,000 times.

Since then, her new identities have been uncovered twice more, forcing her to adopt a new name and move to a new location each time.

Her father has said his daughter has been “living her life on the run” since the incident in 2011.

Oh well, she’s only a woman.

Update: My mistake – high court judges are “Lord Justice” if men so “Lady Justice” if women. Disregard.