Bernadette Spofforth, the 55 year-old woman from Cheshire arrested and held for 36 hours because she’d misidentified the Southport attacker, has been informed by Cheshire Police that no further action will be taken against her. She released a video statement on X earlier today, making a point of thanking the Free Speech Union. Bernie is a member of the FSU and had she been prosecuted, the FSU would have paid for her legal defence in full.
The Times and theTelegraph has covered the story, as has the Mail.
A businesswoman “dragged from her home” and “locked up for 36 hours” for allegedly spreading a false name for the Southport dance class knifeman spoke of her “nightmare” today after being told she faced no further police action.
Bernadette Spofforth, 55, was held on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred as part of a crackdown on those accused of whipping up tensions online following the shocking killing of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed event in July.
False information that the suspect was “an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list” spread rapidly around social media, with anti-immigration riots breaking out across the country.
After being confronted last month at her £1.5million farmhouse in Cheshire by MailOnline as to why she was apparently the first person to publish the false name on X – formerly Twitter – the middle-aged woman said she had done a ‘really stupid thing’ which had ‘literally destroyed me’.
Today she returned to social media to say that four weeks after police ‘dragged me from my home and held me for 36 hours in a cell’ she had been told she would face no further action.
Insisting that her supposed ‘crime’ had been ‘sharing a tweet’ which she deleted after being told it was inaccurate, she said: “What I’ve experienced over the past few weeks is nothing in comparison to the suffering of the tragic victims in Southport.
“And I’m not trying to compare the two.
“But I am just an ordinary person with ordinary opinions and I think it’s important that the public should know how ordinary people can be treated.
“The nightmare my family and I have lived through over the past month could happen to anyone. And in Britain in 2024 that’s unacceptable.“
I gave a statement to the Mail in my capacity as Director of the FSU that it has reproduced in full:
We’re delighted the police have decided to take no further action against Bernie, who’s a member of the Free Speech Union.
Had she been prosecuted, we would have arranged for a crack team of lawyers to defend her and paid all their costs.
She never should have been arrested in the first place, let alone held in custody for 36 hours.
Yes, she misidentified the Southport attacker on social media, but it was an innocent mistake. She added the caveat “if this is true” and deleted the post when she discovered it wasn’t.
As Keir Starmer said when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, in cases such as these “a swift apology and removal of the offending tweet” should be enough.
The police should not be wasting their time investigating law-abiding citizens because they’ve said something politically incorrect on social media.
It’s little wonder that not a single burglary was solved in nearly half the regions in England last year – the police are too busy policing our tweets to police our streets.
They need to rethink their priorities.
The Mail piece is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The solicitor Stephen Jackson has posted an informative thread on the case here.
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