The Guardian wonder how Fergie must feel after his trip to South Africa.
It smelt like a set-up from the very beginning, but the tussle between Sunday tabloids to obtain the story illustrates the chasm that exists between the press's supposed duty to tell the truth and its desire to print circulation-boosting material. After the story of the complaint broke, her fiancé, Brian Ebden, opened negotiations to sell Nadia's story to the Mail on Sunday.
Peter Wright, the editor, was then unaware of Ebden's rather murky role as a media agent, though enough of his past activities emerged in time for the Mail on Sunday to refer to him as "a master of reinvention".
Having agreed a £75,000 price tag, Wright authorised his executives to contact the three Sunday red-tops to see if they were prepared to stump up half the cost in return for running Nadia's "exclusive" interview. This may seem strange but such sharing arrangements between titles which feel their audiences don't overlap are common. They usually involve pictures, but it is not unheard of for papers to sell each other copy too.
Indeed, the Sunday Mirror's presentation of the allegations - with its poster-style front page headlined "I was groped by Sir Alex" - was even less sceptical than the Mail on Sunday's.
By her own admission, Nadia had been drinking heavily. There was no one else in the car and, therefore, no corroborating evidence. I'm fully aware, of course, that in most sexual assault cases, it is one person's word against another and we must be careful not to deny Nadia's freedom of speech. But the moment a person decides to cash in on their alleged plight, it is bound to make people suspicious. They become less believable because they might be tempted to exaggerate in order to secure the money.
We could go on kicking this kind of argument up and down the field, but the
essential truth would remain the same: the Manchester United manager was
traduced by two newspapers which ran tendentious headlines and unbalanced
stories on the basis of allegations by a young woman who was paid a fortune.
And where, we might reasonably ask, is the public interest for this invasion
into Ferguson's privacy? Does anyone really think that a tale in which the
most salient fact is strenuously disputed merited such coverage?