Artist Anthony Lister found not guilty

What really saved Lister was he had the proof to show the accusations were based on total lies. That was the amazing thing. Lister records everything in his life. It started as a boy when he videoed his latest skateboard moves but then he found it helpful to keep track of progress in his art. So, the camera was always on, recording everything that happened in his studios and everywhere else he went.

It was all there – over 30 hard drives of data, including all his social media messages. Everything he needed to disprove the allegations the young women were making. Naturally, the police weren't interested in his side of the story, and the prosecution built their case against him using the carefully edited social media messages produced by his accusers. It was Cunneen's team that did the hard work of compiling all the proof that brought these women undone.

• Like the complainant who claimed Lister had assaulted her…but he was able to produce a message from her saying something like "that was the best day of my life… he didn't even try to fuck me."

• Allegations of sexual assault given in a trembling voice by a complainant dressed in pigtails were undermined when the jury watched her in an explicit video showing raunchy, consensual sex with Lister.

• Another complainant claimed to be horrified about his bag of drugs but then the next day she was shown to be snorting ketamine off the table, and then later changing her evidence saying, "Oh, forgive me for that, I was on acid at the time."

• One woman accused him of locking her in her bedroom while he had a crew from an overseas fashion magazine visiting his home. Photographic evidence proved that the only lock on the bedroom door was in fact a simple latch lock on the inside of the door.

• Then there was the vital sequence where an accuser claimed to have been raped before parading around in a wedding dress as he worked in his studio. He was able to produce vision of her in the dress as the artwork progressed, long after she said she'd fled from the scene after the alleged rape.

• One complainant wrongly claimed Lister had offered her an internship. Messages were produced showing her begging for him to give her one. "INTERN ME!" she demanded in a text message.

That was one of the intriguing themes in the case. Here was the prosecutor claiming there was a power imbalance with this man taking advantage of his fame to bully women into sexual favours. But the reality was the women who ended up as complainants were all wannabee artists who were desperate for this man's attention. And the evidence was there that they actively pursued him to try to help their careers – a theme we've all seen before, particularly in the Weinstein case. See these comments from the trial:

"I was really just going along with it, sort of the whole time I was just doing whatever and hoped that it would get me opportunities or something".

"Well, I couldn't imagine hanging out with him if I didn't think it would have some sort of benefit on my career."

So why did these doting fans turn on him? Margaret Cunneen made the case in her summing up that Lister had consensual sex with the women who had "admired" or "idolised" him because of his fame, and that some reinterpreted events after feeling "heartbroken" and betrayed by his behaviour – when it turned out he was also having sex with other women or had no interest in a proper relationship with them.

"Poor X thought that she was going to be the girlfriend, really. She thought that there was a romantic aspect to it, and that's what she was expecting, and then she got a broken heart because there were other women and that was awful," was how Cunneen described one such reaction.

Disappointing, yes. But it is a sad reflection on our times that these women were prepared to try to gang together to try to destroy the man who had let them down. Five, six years after the alleged events, these mid-twenties women were prepared to dress up in pigtails and clutch teddy bears to peddle their implausible stories in front of a jury. And now, even though he has been found not guilty, they are still out there lobbying in "survivor" groups claiming our courts let them down. 

These women were part of a mob prepared to adorn Lister's front door with "Rapist lives here" signs, deface his famous street art, close down his exhibitions, demand his art was removed from galleries. For year after year, they were out there, trying to destroy his life. But ultimately, they came undone.

Three cheers for the good sense of that jury which ignored the pleas of the prosecutor claiming it is "antiquated thinking" - promotion of those much despised "rape myths" - to make assumptions about how rape victims should behave. He tried to convince the jury that it was normal for a woman to keep sending Lister messages asking to see him for years after the alleged rape. Going to visit him, sending him topless pictures of herself, having sex with him in a hotel. Somehow, they were supposed to believe that didn't undermine her story that he'd attacked her. The jury wasn't having a bar of it and took only a matter of minutes to dismiss the prosecution case.