British Sky News has issued an apology for accidentally revealing the name of a woman raped by Sheffield United soccer star Ched Evans, according to New Statesman.
The Telegraph reports that Sky News used an image of a Twitter feed naming the victim during a report on the Evans case, and that her name even became one of the top "trending" words on the social-media site over the weekend.
23-year-old Evans was convicted of rape and sentenced to five years in jail at Caernarfon Crown Court on April 20, after he and Port Vale defender Clayton McDonald admitted to having sex with the 19-year-old victim. The BBC reports that both men claimed the sex was consensual.
According to the Daily Mail, the judge in the case said the victim was "too drunk to consent" to sex while two of Evans' friends recorded the ordeal.
McDonald was acquitted in the trial.
Sky inadvertently displayed the victim's name while reporting on the stream of Twitter posts by outraged Evans' fans since the conviction, New Statesman reports. Some of those tweets displayed the victim's name.
In a statement, Sky News said it would "like to apologize to the victim and her family for any distress caused," according to the BBC, but that "if watching in real-time viewers would not have noticed" the published name.
According to The Telegraph, the victim's mother said, "Putting her name on Twitter is just another horrendous ordeal for her and we have been assured the police are going to come down like a ton of bricks on these people."
North Wales Police warned Twitter users that they may be prosecuted for violating rape-shield laws:
As and when criminal offences are identified on such websites they will be dealt with robustly and arrest made if appropriate and the offenders will be brought to justice. We find this to be profoundly disturbing and are determined to seek out those responsible.
According to The Mirror, Evans' teammate Connor Brown tweeted that the victim was "a slag" and a "money-grabbing tramp," among other choice words, though the offensive remarks were eventually deleted. BBC reports that Brown was suspended by his team for the incident.