She was the mother of three children, a pretty young woman described by her family, her friends and her still-loving former husband as a very moral person who did not approve of drug abuse or casual sex.
To the eight men on that P&O cruise ship, she was the bitch who ruined their holiday.
The woman they briefly considered throwing overboard as she lay dead on the floor of a tiny cabin, having been plied with alcohol and the so-called party drug GHB, naked, humiliated, used, with no control of her faculties. Dead at the age of 42.
The death of Dianne Brimble on board the Pacific Star in 2002 represents something of a high point of the evil which men can do.
The best thing you can say about any of the eight men at the centre of this horrible story is that they found themselves at the centre of situation which was ultimately beyond their control – hooking up with men they barely knew, ephemeral holiday friends, whose subsequent conduct would make criminals of them all in the court of public opinion.
But if that generous assessment is truly the case, you have to ask the following question.
Why would any of these eight men choose to remain in touch at all? Worse, why would they venture out in public for a crass celebratory dinner?
Their brazen actions suggests that these men feel no shame at all, and probably even a sense of victimhood and martyrdom at what they have apparently been through as a result of the Brimble affair.
It’s a sickening brand of audacity. They are free to live their lives. That they choose to live them in this way, almost eight years to the day on which Dianne Brimble lost hers, shows they are bereft of any capacity for self-examination and remorse.
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