CPS and media fake news led to death threats, hate speech, depression and isolation toward wronged Black MP – which she has described as ‘a slow death’ – after a prosecution she has linked to former DPP Keir Starmer

Claudia Webbe, left

The Independent Assessor of Complaints (IAC), responsible for investigating the conduct of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), has ruled that the CPS must give Leicester East MP Claudia Webb compensation for the CPS’s false reporting of a court’s findings in relation to Ms Webbe – fake news that put her life in danger and led to a flood of hate speech toward her.

The CPS falsely told the media that the appeal court had said it ‘could not be sure’ that Ms Webbe had made an acid threat to another woman, when in fact the court had said it was sure that she had not made such a threat. Only Skwawkbox reported the court’s real findings, along with the repeated lies of her accuser and the Met Police’s withholding of exonerating evidence from the first trial.

Webbe had to complain to the CPS three times before it eventually fully corrected its fake claim.

Ms Webbe said:

The CPS falsely and unnecessarily reported that ‘I threatened to throw acid’, when it knew this was never part of the charge against me and further that any inference to ‘acid’ was dismissed at appeal. The CPS continued to run with this false narrative as part of their press release, even after the appeal court confirmed it had never happened. The actions of the CPS have contributed to me receiving constant death threats, silent calls, vile online social media abuse. I have been told that I am the MP that has received the most of such threats and abuse and particularly online.

The finding of the Independent Assessor of Complaints that the CPS had published false information about me is welcome and I hope it will put an end to this foul smear about me. The claim was one of a series of lies, exposed in the appeal, told about me by my accuser in a case where the Metropolitan Police also eventually admitted withholding a large amount of evidence that was in my favour.

The IAC ruled that it is ‘clear’ that I ‘suffered an injustice’, that the CPS statement ‘was both incorrect and reputationally damaging’ and that it ‘had an adverse effect on [my] health and wellbeing’. This is accurate as far as it goes but barely conveys the impact.

No amount of compensation can address what I have been through, but the offer of just £100 when the IAC acknowledged the seriousness of the suffering this caused me is derisory and the explanation by the CPS that their choice of wording was ‘in good faith’ is astonishing.

It has not escaped my attention that the CPS was formerly run by Keir Starmer. The damage done to me politically and professionally is enormous and the CPS continued to run its false reporting about me for a considerable length of time after the court case. I believe this was done to cause me maximum hurt and harm and, as I told the IAC, has inflicted on me perpetual anxiety, stress and poor health that has felt like a slow death. I believe the actions of the CPS were political, because I am on the left, and their actions were motivated by racism and sexism.

This is yet another example of the difficulty that Black people face in obtaining justice in a system stacked against them.

Claudia Webbe has faced horrific racist abuse and smears because of the CPS’s misleading statements – and received no support from Keir Starmer’s Labour. The IAC ruling puts the record straight, but the level of compensation and the claim that this was an error in good faith are an insult to all Black people and to women in particular – and prolongs the injustice and racism she suffered when the court found she had been accused by a serial white liar yet did not completely overturn the initial travesty of a verdict for a phone call that her accuser made to her and not the other way round.

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