30th October 2001 prosecution under section 390(a) of Norwegian Penal Code

On the 11th October 2001 at 9a.m. I was surprised to get a telephone call from my local police station. The policewoman who spoke to me was our local community liaison officer and she wanted me to collect something at the police station. “What is it you want me to collect?” I enquired. “Oh, it’s too complicated to explain over the phone, but it won’t take long”, she replied.

“Could it have anything to do with Norway?” I asked myself, as that was all it could possibly be.

“Yes” was the answer when I was led into a side room at the police station. The Norwegian police had used Interpol to serve on me a Summons to attend a Magistrates Court hearing on Tuesday 30th October at 9a.m. in Hokksund (near Drammen). The only information on the Summons was that I was “charged with the violation of Section 390(a) of the Penal Code” and was “to appear and give testimony during the main hearing.”

Of course, it all related to my large information campaign conducted from 1995-1998, acquainting the Norwegian public with my side of the story giving the life history of my accuser.

I immediately phoned Mr. Lunde and then wrote to him telling him that I would not attend any hearing until I got outstanding replies with regard to my two letters of 25th August 2000 to the Drammen police, in response to that earlier Summons served on me in the Drammen City Courthouse on the morning of my own private criminal libel prosecution. In particular, I wanted to see what the exact extent of the ‘evidence’ against me was.

So on 17th October, I faxed a letter to Torill Sorte, the policewoman in Norway, telling her that Mr. Lunde had appointed a criminal lawyer for me, to whom the police evidence must be sent, together with replies to my letters to the police of 25th August 2000. I also mentioned to her that there would not be enough time for my new criminal lawyer, Harald Wibye, to look through so many years worth of my own papers, plus the police “evidence” and to take proper instructions from me, in time for the trial on 30th October. I thought it oppressive for me to face a trial in the midst of my own criminal and civil prosecutions. There was enough paperwork to attend to as it was.

The real agenda for the police in Norway, was of course to trip me up by forcing an abrupt criminal trial, and give me a fine in time for the conviction to be presented to the court in my own criminal and civil libel prosecutions, thus undermining my case. For I had been assured by Mr. Lunde that I would be found guilty, as it was a strict liability offence I had committed, i.e. telling my side of the story about Heidi’s life to the Norwegian public whereby I had named her. It was no defence, I was told, that she had waived her anonymity by allowing her name to be published and photos printed in her national and local press. Perverse isn’t it? Their press hadn’t named me, allowing them to print total crap. They had named her, but I couldn’t name her in my retaliatory campaign. I could respond but only by leaving her name out, when of course no-one would take any interest as they wouldn’t know who I was talking about.

I was also concerned that Heidi Schøne wouldn’t turn up to the Magistrates Court. She was the chief police prosecution witness, along with policewoman Torill Sorte. Heidi Schøne was now back under the supervision of her psychiatrist from 1988, Petter Broch. Not unnaturally, she was under some stress. This psychiatrist actually wrote to Heidi’s lawyer giving reasons as to why his patient should not face me in any legal proceedings. The letter was given to the Court. I paid for the letter to be translated into English but before I received the translation I phoned up the doctor to ask him if his letter was “for” or “against” me. He said it was neither for nor against me and that I would have to wait until it was translated. He did say that he had no recollection of ever having told me in 1990 that Heidi had told him I was her “favourite”, or that “she made a lot of other men very angry”. Dr. Broch was now very reticent and icy in his talk with me. His letter dated the 6th September 2001 said:-

Re: our patient Heidi Cecilie Schøne, DOB 20.08.63
My communication concerns the imminent legal proceedings in connection with the British citizen Frederick who is bringing an action against the abovementioned person for defamation.

I have known Heidi Schøne since 1989. She has consulted me mainly for difficulties she has had in her adult life after an unusually stressful adolescence. She is currently a patient of the psychiatric ward of Buskerud Central Hospital for similar problems, but also to a considerable extent for the stress and anxiety caused to her by the imminent legal action and the long sequence of events leading up to the action.

Heidi Schøne was roughly 18 years old when an au pair in England. While there, she became acquainted with a man of Egyptian origin, Frederick, with whom she spent some time together; as I understand, this was not in the form of a sexual relationship. The contact with this Egyptian was very difficult. He was insistent and tried to behave as if she was his property. I am under the impression that he had also had similar relationships with women previously.

His taking over of Schøne (at the time Heidi Overaa) gradually became such that she virtually had to run away. She has since been pursued by this man throughout the rest of her life. He has sought her out no matter where she was when she attempted to hide herself away, and he has published long malicious articles about her in Norwegian newspapers. He has sent similarly malicious audio tapes to family and friends etc. I assume that the sequence of events and the details surrounding this are known. I myself also received audio tapes from him in so far as he traced me as the person treating her. The content of these articles and the audio tapes is as far as I can understand of such a nature that they could destroy all the relationships Heidi Schøne might have with other important people in her life. I myself did not retain the material I received because at the time I did not yet fully appreciate the depth and seriousness of the matter. This activity is of such an intense and comprehensive nature that the driving force and the motivation behind the pursuit must be assumed to have a morbid nature. In international literature, such activity is described as “stalking” and has gradually become a clinically recognized concept. I have myself this year also attended an international conference at which experience of this phenomenon was gathered.

The conclusion is that the activity is of a very serious nature for the victim and that the underlying motivation and driving force of the pursuer have various psychological causes, but are of an obviously morbid nature. The driving force behind the actions is virtually uniquely to obtain one form of contact or another with the victim again. Every such contact with the victim or those closest to the victim functions as a type of reward which generates new motivation and perseverance. It is, therefore, central to managing the problem that the pursuer does not achieve the desired contact. Contact is sought if necessary in attempts at prosecution, the contact with the victim being more important than the outcome of the action.

It is against this background that I am writing this in order to contribute to finding a solution to an imminent legal action in such a way that the plaintiff does not have contact with Heidi Schøne through the action. It is in keeping with the guidelines which also [were given] at the American Psychiatric Association’s conference earlier this year with reference to some internationally known legal cases in recent years. It is thus of great importance, partly for Heidi Schøne’s mental state, but first and foremost in order to make a contribution to bringing this situation to a conclusion, that the plaintiff does not achieve any contact with Heidi Schøne through the legal action by Heidi herself being represented by her lawyer without her being present or in any way whatsoever accessible to the plaintiff.

Regards,
Petter Broch
Consultant

So neither “for” or “against” me eh? This misuse of psychiatry to denigrate the foreigner/the Egyptian was appalling. It was also an insult to Lunde, who had issued the criminal and civil writs against Heidi Schøne and the newspaper – as if Lunde didn’t have a mind of his own and was just meekly complying with my requests.

Dr. Broch’s letter served to remind me of the use psychiatry was put to in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Surely the man could have asked to see a copy of Lunde’s criminal and civil writs to see why I was suing. He had no grasp of the reality of the situation and his facts were wrong. He was relying on hearsay. What he was basically saying on behalf of his own psychiatric patient was that I myself was an evil lunatic. I had never sent audio tapes to family and friends of Heidi. Obviously I had not published long malicious articles in Norwegian newspapers. This particular assertion in Dr. Broch’s letter showed a complete lack of care on his part. I had “published” my own articles on her in response to long malicious articles about me in the Norwegian newspapers.

With about a week to go to the Magistrates Court hearing, I made contact with my new criminal lawyer, Harald Wibye. I was entitled to state financial assistance (legal aid) in Norway as this time I was being prosecuted, but Wibye would still be out of pocket so I sent him a cheque for £450. He’d known about my case for many weeks as Stig Lunde had warned him to expect a Summons after I refused to settle out of court with the police. Wibye had been sent some papers by Lunde on the case but it was only in the week leading up to the case that he read through them. We discussed the case over the phone as best we could and to make sure he had all the relevant papers, I sent copies by International datapost on 25th October.
The Drammen police ‘evidence’ arrived at Mr. Wibye’s office whilst I was speaking to him on the 29th October – the day before the hearing. My own datapost package had not reached Wibye on the 29th October, so I hurriedly did an 8 page fax to him of the essential papers he did not have. The datapost package only arrived after Wibye had departed for the hearing on 30th October.

Harald Wibye was a first class criminal lawyer who, as a favour to Stig Lunde, was defending me at the Magistrates Court. He had spent two years at a boarding school in Wales and his English was excellent. To repeat, my offence was one of strict liability, i.e. there was no defence available as I had named the woman and described her lurid life history. I, of naturally, protested that the bulk of my ‘reports’ on Heidi had been sent in response to the 1995 newspaper articles so as to acquaint the Norwegian public with the background of the woman who had told such nonsense to the press. Wibye insisted that this was not a defence; the press stories and Heidi’s lies was one case, and the police prosecution of me was another. The two were not related. Wibye was frustrated at my inability to understand this “straightforward” point.

Harald Wibye told me that after strenuous pre-trial negotiations with the police prosecutor, the latter had agreed only to ask the Court to fine me 10,000 Norwegian kroner. This replaced the police’s initial desire to ask for a 3 month prison sentence, which they asked for because they were annoyed I didn’t pay up on their 5,000 kroner request from August 2000. However, the judge could still send me to prison if it was in the interests of justice.

After the hearing was over, I spoke to Wibye on his mobile phone and he related the day’s events. He’d spent a full 6 hours in Court and the judge – a woman – was going to deliver her verdict within the next few days. When he arrived at Court, Heidi Schøne was nowhere to be seen, so Wibye insisted to the Court that Heidi Schøne be forced to attend the hearing for cross-examination. The judge agreed to adjourn the case for Heidi Schøne to be brought to Court. When she arrived, she sat next to the policewoman, Torill Sorte, and waited with Wibye in the foyer of the Court building. Then a stranger came up to Heidi and said, “You’re Heidi Schøne aren’t you? I received a letter about you with your photograph!” and he walked off. This was one of my reports on her past life with a newspaper photo transposed on the back of the report that had been sent to so many hundreds of people in her town. This incident was another sign of the success of my campaign.

During the hearing itself, Wibye behaved as a true defender should. He gave Heidi Schøne a hell of a time. She admitted in Court to having been sexually abused by her stepmother’s father. She refused to talk about the alleged rape of her person by the Bergen shopkeeper but admitted she’d made the allegation to the police. Looking at my evidence of her past, Wibye remarked, “You’ve been abused by quite a lot of people haven’t you?” implying that she was a serial complainer.

Importantly, another version seems to have been given by Heidi Schøne as to my threats to kill her two year old son, but Wibye couldn’t with clarity recall the exact form of words used in this long drawn-out day. What seems to have been said by Heidi is that I phoned her up one day and told her that her son was “a bastard” (i.e. illegitimate), that “bastards don’t deserve to live” and therefore “I shall kill your son”, which words Heidi said her son overheard and asked his mother, “Why does Frederick want to kill me?” Wibye was stopped by the judge in pursuing this line of enquiry, which was a great pity. No dates were given by Heidi Schøne as to this new version of events. Even this allegation in itself perplexed me, as when I spoke to Daniel in 1995 his English was not very good at all. Obviously, in 1988 when he was two, he couldn’t speak or understand a word of English and when he was 4½, when I met him, his understanding of English was still nil. Nothing, however, was said by Heidi about the alleged letter I’d written putting my threat to kill the boy in writing, which letter she said was given to the Bergen police.

Wibye nevertheless told the Court that I should not be convicted because my letters and campaign had been provoked by my 1990 arrest, false allegations of attempted rape/rape plus the 1995 and 1998 newspaper stories and he read out in Court Stig Lunde’s writs.

On being questioned about her allegation of rape against me, Heidi agreed that if she did not tell a chap she doesn’t want to have sex with him, how is he supposed to know different? Her 1998 allegation of rape “by holding her down” was at odds with her 1986 statement of attempted rape in 1985.

On the subject of the police charge of my telephoning Heidi, well, earlier you have seen the sort of experiences I had on that front when trying to talk to her. Wibye told me that the police had tapped Heidi’s phone for only a week in May 1995 but even then, as they had not managed to get the full numbers of the caller’s phone, the judge dismissed the ‘evidence’ as inadmissible. Strangely no tape recording of the conversations were even made. It was all so amateurish. My calls to Heidi in May 1995 included the one I made from a Denmark nightclub.

By the end of the cross-examination, Heidi Schøne was in tears. At long long last, probably for the first time in her life, she had been put on the spot. At least by my absence from the hearing, she had no excuse for not turning up at Court. There might have been difficulty in getting her along if I had turned up, but I’d have thought no right-minded judge would have allowed her – the chief prosecution witness – to stay away on grounds of my alleged mental condition of only wanting contact with her which her psychiatrist said was an end in itself, regardless of the outcome of the trial.
On November 2nd, the verdict came through and as expected I was found guilty of the strict liability offence and given a fine of 10,000 Norwegian kroner. A fine I had no intention of paying if I could help it.