‘I’ve been carrying a dark cloud’: manager James Rowe on his trial acquittal

Sexual assault accusations ended flourishing coaching career at Chesterfield but now he feels he has much to give

James Rowe remembers packing a suitcase before the day of his trial verdict, looking at his two young sons and wondering when he would be able to hold them again. He feared that had a jury found him guilty he could have been in prison for up to two years. The level of anxiety was extreme; the loss of control felt almost overwhelming. “Saying goodbye to them is something I’ll never forget in my life,” he says. “I’m feeling I can’t stop the train: that it’s just running away.”

Rowe, a free man since his acquittal last month, orders a still water as he tells his story in a Suffolk pub. He would like a swift return to doing what he loves: to further a career that was flourishing when, as manager of Chesterfield on 24 January 2022, life was essentially put on pause. That morning he was at the family home in Derbyshire when John Croot, the Spireites’ CEO, told him he would be suspended after an allegation of sexual harassment. “It had been released to the media before I could put the phone down,” Rowe says. A matter of days later, police arrived at the house to arrest him; he was charged the following September.