Christmas Inside a Case Built to Fit

Reflections from a Scottish Prison

Christmas in prison is not quiet. It’s not reflective. It’s not a sad little pause where a man learns life lessons.

It’s noise without meaning.

Doors clanging. Keys scraping. Radios barking. Boots on the landing. Someone shouting through a hatch. Someone else kicking off because their head’s gone and they’ve got nowhere to put it. Toilets flushing behind thin walls. Telly sound leaking through concrete like a bad dream. The same soundtrack, on repeat, until you stop noticing it and then suddenly you notice it again and it makes you want to tear your own skin off.

That’s the backdrop to my Christmas. I’m in a Scottish prison for offences I did not commit. And the strangest part is how ordinary that sentence looks on paper. A few lines. A label. A number of years. The system’s tidy ending.

In here it doesn’t feel tidy. It feels like being locked inside a story that was written about you while you were still trying to live your life.

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People outside think convictions are built on evidence. They picture a clear moment where facts land, doubt collapses, and the truth stands up on its own. That is not what happened to me.

What happened to me was this. The police decided there was a pattern, and then they went looking for the pieces that could be made to match it. Exes. Fallouts. Relationships that ended with bitterness instead of closure. Old arguments that never died, they just went quiet and waited.

And here’s the part the public doesn’t want to hear, because it ruins the clean moral story. Some of these women were struggling, badly, before the police ever came near them. Mental health problems. Medication changes. Crashes and spirals. Days where reality doesn’t hold steady. Money problems that don’t just stress you, they squeeze you until you can’t think straight.

When somebody is fragile, angry, broke, or desperate, the world becomes simpler in a dangerous way. They start needing a villain. They start needing the kind of explanation that turns chaos into meaning. Then the police arrive, and they don’t arrive as neutral. They arrive with a frame.

I heard the compensation talk hovering at the edges. Not always explicit, not always written down, but present. The idea that being recognised as a victim comes with support, sometimes with money, and with a kind of moral authority that turns personal failure into righteous injury. It offers relief. It offers payback. It offers a way to wipe away shame and replace it with sympathy.

Police interviews reward certainty. They reward consistency. They reward the story that fits the frame already forming in the room. Doubt is treated as something to fix. Complexity is treated as confusion. If the first account is messy, it gets tidied. If the timeline is jagged, it gets smoothed. If emotions contradict facts, facts get bent to match emotions.

That’s where Moorov becomes the glue.

Separate allegations, which would look weak on their own, are bundled and presented as mutual support. The case stops being “prove this event” and becomes “look at the pattern”. And once it’s a pattern case, the jury isn’t just judging acts. They’re judging an identity.

“The kind of man who does this.” That label is lethal. It turns ordinary human mess into sinister intent. A confusing message becomes manipulation. A row becomes coercion. A break-up becomes a power campaign. A complicated relationship becomes a story of abuse that can be told cleanly in court.

Christmas makes this worse because you have more time and less escape. Longer bang-ups. Different routines. More tension. Men trying to act like they don’t care, then snapping over nothing. You sit with the noise and your own thoughts, and you picture your family trying to make a day out of a wound.

You picture your mum forcing her voice steady on the phone. You picture your partner doing that tight smile, the one that says, “I’m coping”, while the kids watch and learn what absence looks like.

The court calls it justice. From where I’m sitting, it feels like grudges turned into allegations, instability turned into certainty, and care turned into a weapon, with my life as the price.