Max Clifford’s conviction based on victims in Spain

VICTIMS of convicted paedophile Max Clifford in Spain formed the cornerstone of the case against him, it has emerged.

A letter from a woman who had been molested by Clifford at the age of 15 in Spain became a key part of his conviction this week.

The celebrity PR, it emerged, had used his luxury Marbella home to groom at least two of the eight victims he was found guilty of molesting.

Clifford, who is now awaiting sentence, promised the impressionable youngster he would make her a star and impressed her parents by taking her for drives in his yellow jaguar.

In the 900-word letter, the woman wrote that Clifford made her life a ‘living hell’, leading her to contemplate taking her own life.

“I had no one to turn to. You were very clever. A+ in grooming children. How proud you must be,” she wrote.

Clifford, 34 at the time, groomed her over a period of months after befriending her parents while they were on holiday in Torremolinos, in 1977.

He told the then 15-year-old girl to expose her naked body to him in his Bond Street office.

He later called her over the phone, using the fake name Terry Miller, to say she must talk dirty to Clifford if she wanted to star in Hollywood films.

The PR guru also molested a friend of his daughter in the jacuzzi of his upmarket 4-bed apartment in Porto Cabopino, Calahonda.

The woman, now 43, told the court how Clifford invited her to join him and his disabled daughter Louise in the jacuzzi before forcing her to touch him under the water, after playing his ‘tickling game’.

“He would play it in the swimming pool. He would just tickle me and ask where I was ticklish, like people do with a child. I didn’t think that much of it,” she told the jury, at Southwark Crown Court in London.

“Then he would ask me to tickle him and he would say, ‘Guess where I am ticklish’, and I would guess the obvious – like the armpit – but I never got it right.”

The schoolgirl had befriended Clifford’s daughter Louise at the communal swimming pool while on holiday with her parents on the Costa del Sol in 1983.

The 71-year-old did a large amount of PR work in the Marbella area, including club La Costa and the Polo House restaurant.

He also offered his services to Marbella Town Hall, however it was decided the €10,000 a month he demanded was too high.

The ‘Max Clifford Celebrity Golf Challenge and Butterfly Ball’ is a key event in the Marbella social calendar, hosted annually by Clifford in aid of the Rhys Daniels Trust, of which Clifford in the patron.

The star-studded event takes place at the La Cala Golf Resort in Mijas, near Marbella, and last year’s event raised more than €42,000 for the charity.

Each of the seven complainants had a similar tale to tell about how Clifford lured them in with promises of stardom, although none of them knew each other.

Clifford is the first person to be convicted under Operation Yewtree, after being arrested in December 2012 as part of the inquiry and charged last April.

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