Thread by @carolecadwalla

4 years of abuse. 2.5 years of legal harassment. 3 brutal days on stand. It was designed to crush me. And it might.

The British legal system is adversarial by design. This wasn’t adversarial, it was abusive.

https://twitter.com/rebecca_vincent/status/1483785810075869185

The bullying & intimidation a vivid microcosm of what these last 5 years have been like. There is a pattern of behaviour here. In 2014, Banks was arrested and issued with a harassment notice against a female employee.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2…

The last 2 years & esp the last year, last months, last weeks & last days have taken a massive toll on my physical & psychological health & every other aspect of my life. I have felt under assault. Because I have been.

rsf.org/en/news/ninete…

The so-called section 4 ‘public interest defence’ is fundamental to our entire democracy. We must be able to speak truth to power. And this case is testing that. This judgement will resonate far beyond me. But entire case rested on tearing me apart. They had to break me down.

And they did. I’ve been so lucky to have received such amazing support & 💕 this week. People kept just showing up. But several of the women who sat through it said it brought back difficult memories of their own experiences of being bullied & abused.

At start, lovely @tamsinallen1 (centre) told me 1) libel always a brutal business 2) A public interest defence puts entire burden on the journalism. And 3) Doing it alone without a news org backing is a heavy heavy burden. Makes entire case about destroying you & your credibility

I’ve been so grateful to have @rebecca_vincent from @RSF_en monitoring my case & identifying why it’s so abusive. Banks’s strategy over the entire period of my reporting has been to portray me as ‘crazy cat lady’, to isolate & discredit me & the case is direct extension of this

https://twitter.com/rebecca_vincent/status/1483796292417597443

A measure of how extreme this case is: Banks took legal action *against my lawyers*, conflicting them out. Then came the data harvesting. This is lawfare against an investigative journalist: he got 20k docs from forensic searches of my laptop, phone, emails, Signal, everything

Anyway. It’s closing remarks tomorrow & then in the hands of the judge. Thank you so much to @jesssearch’s Praetorian guard who’s had my back this week. And for so much loveliness & strength & support here. 💕🤞👊

https://twitter.com/hertssid/status/1484090027307147265

Clarifying this: 180k docs in forensic keyword searches, narrowed to 20k with 4k handed over. All because of these 23 words & a whole stack of £££:

‘And I’m not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government’

To be clear, lawyer @tamsinallen1 conflicted out because Banks added new legal complaint against me involving her. Also see thread on parliamentary debate today on lawfare from the incredible @CatherineBelton who’s just fought off SLAPP suits from 5 Russian oligarchs & Rosneft

https://twitter.com/CatherineBelton/status/1484202040083595264