I was one of the most trolled women on the internet — and now I’m fighting back

Go ahead and ask the internet who I am – you will learn a lot about me. 

I’ve abandoned my children – one of whom was taken away from me. Once, I tried to run somebody over with a car. I have stolen and extorted money from vulnerable women — victims of domestic violence. I was never actually diagnosed with complex PTSD – I made that up.

I also have lied, repeatedly, about my job history, inventing career milestones that never happened. On top of all of that, I’ve been cut off by my family. 

None of these things are true. 

An army of online bullies made them up — mostly groups of other trolling, stalking women who have engaged in a concerted, organized campaign over the period of nearly a decade, trying to destroy my reputation.

And I’ve been powerless, for years, to do anything to stop them from their lying.

Here’s what is true: I’m a mom, I love my family. I’ve worked hard in a nearly 30-year career in media and entertainment where I’m thrilled I get to help people. 

I started in television in the UK, back in the late 90s. I wasn’t what you’d call famous, but I was respected and known by my peers. 

After I married and had my first three kids (I now have four, aged 28 to 8), I became a parenting commentator and writer, mostly about family life and motherhood. 

I’ve written five books, of which two are international bestsellers.

I have put personal things out into the world about my life, all carefully documented for accuracy — about getting divorced, and about living with an alcoholic. My goal was to help others. Yes, I chose to share these details. 

For this, I have been abused. Relentlessly, for years. I’m talking about a sustained and coordinated campaign of stalking, harassment, defamation. The perpetrators have come closer to breaking me than any other challenge I’ve ever faced. 

These trolls — moms, grandmothers, people you’d say hello to at the grocery store — have targeted my friends, followers, employers, colleagues, business clients, children and romantic partners. Their abuse has touched and destroyed almost every aspect of my life. 

Hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms and handles, they share extraordinary and elaborate untruths — about me, my conduct, my professional and personal reputation, my suitability as a mother and my credibility as a writer and publisher (I own an independent publishing company). 

In close to a million words posted on threads about me — yes, take that in, one million — they have ripped into everything from my physical appearance to my mental health, my private life and my finances. 

These obsessive haters have repeated these lies so many times it’s become accepted ‘fact’ on these gossip websites where I have countless threads devoted to gossiping about and destroying me — then ingested by other readers, and spread further on parenting forums and gossip websites like a virus with no known cure.

Online bullying is nothing new. We know it as one of the biggest issues of our time. But I think it’s about to get a lot worse. This isn’t just women or men at home in their bedrooms lashing out. This is a pandemic of group-based, online attacks. And this time, it’s not the manosphere, it’s not incels — this is females destroying each other for sport.  

The women who indulge in this public, unregulated blood-letting feel entitled to say whatever they like — and even claim to be morally duty-bound to expose ‘bad behavior’. 

Never mind if it’s entirely untrue and devastating — they feel all-powerful and protected from any consequences, hiding safely behind anonymous names and handles. 

Because, for now, the law and the justice system can’t touch them. 

Until very recently, few who have been bullied like this, like I have, dared to speak up.

In my least dark moments, I have almost found it funny that enough people would care this much about me. I am not exactly a global superstar. 

But in my worst moments, I have contemplated if my loved ones wouldn’t be better off if I were dead. 

I first became aware of the extent of the online campaign to destroy my life in 2023, when friends started messaging me to say they’d received a string of DMs on Instagram from somebody I’ve never heard of. 

These messages contained hyperlinks to long threads on gossip websites, filled with defamatory, libellous, reputationally catastrophic claims, all of which were entirely untrue. 

There were even Instagram and Facebook accounts set up just to spread more hate and lies about me, with pictures of my face lifted from my own account, and captions containing threats to expose my ‘lies’, and more false claims about me. 

I was absolutely horrified.

Worst of all, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. 

Sure, I could block the account and not look at it, but that didn’t stop them posting links to these vicious lies to anyone they chose to. 

And it didn’t stop people reading these awful things.  

Worse still, my abusers went beyond the online page. 

Seemingly empowered by the total lack of regulation, my abusers contacted people in my local community. 

As the network of gossip spread to my real life, I heard nasty gossip about me in my youngest child’s school playground and in school text groups. 

Someone even wrote to the primary school where I am a parent governor, warning them that I was a terrible influence and not suitable for the position. 

I had recently started a publishing company, a lifelong ambition of mine, but as soon as I mentioned it in public, my trolls started destroying it. 

Fake social media accounts were set up pretending to be that company. Defamatory comments were posted on platforms where most of my clients came from, discrediting me and claiming that the publishing company was a front for taking money away from vulnerable women and extorting them and their stories. 

They would send emails to me, ostensibly enquiring about my writing courses but posting in their cackling threads of bile that it was just to see when I was available. One person even attended, just to see how I looked and behaved, to report back. 

After less than a year, I decided I had no choice but to close the company down.

It left me feeling utterly hopeless about how I could continue working at all, if everything I did was ripped to pieces by the vultures immediately — and with such force and success. 

My lowest point was in February 2024. I was away on holiday with my then 5-year-old daughter, in a place where we used to live and still came for peace and freedom. 

I was spotted by a local friend of one of my trolls, and our whereabouts, our private time, was shared on the major gossip platforms, Tattle Life, where the conversation about me was most plentiful and most vicious. 

I had shared nowhere that I was there with her. I protected her from that. Yet here she was, being spoken of on a gossip website by people hell-bent on harming her mother. 

I remember lying in my bathtub that night in tears and feeling that there was no way I could carry on living in this world if there was nowhere I could go with my own child and be safe and at peace.

I shared a post about it online, describing what had been happening to me and how low and desperate I felt. 

To my horror, far from finally leaving me alone, my trolls simply laughed at how broken I was, mocking my apparent sadness, claiming it was proof of my narcissistic personality disorder and a pathetic cry for more attention for ‘me me me!’

I remember calling my father when I got home, in floods of tears, and sobbing down the phone, asking him, “What will it take to make them stop? What can I possibly do that will ever make them stop? If I die will they finally stop?”

For two years after that February day in 2024, I didn’t look at any of my trolling. I decided it was simply too poisonous for me; it was killing me, and I had to get away from it. 

I knew I had to find a way to ignore it, restart my life and build my career again — this time away from public life, and away from the work I had always loved so much and had such success with. 

It was very hard to rebuild from such a low point, and especially not to be able to tell anybody why I had had to give up on so many things I was once really enjoying and very good at. People kept asking me where I had gone.

I couldn’t tell them that I had been hounded away by a pack of blood-thirsty women, hell-bent on killing off everything I touched. 

I tried various things, but all the time I knew it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the person I naturally am. This is one of the worst side effects of being the victim of trolling: we stop being who we are and we start trying to live our life to appease them. 

Finally, in August 2025, on a trip around California, out in the vast Mojave desert, I felt a sudden sense of freedom, release and peace, far away from the trolling. 

And I knew it was time to take back the narrative. I wanted to write again, to restart my publishing company, to hold the women who had nearly destroyed me to account. 

Finally, in June 2026, I switched my Instagram account to ‘public’ again, and put a short reel on my grid. Unrehearsed, unplanned, un-made-up, I spoke calmly to the camera and explained that I had been the victim of a long, persistent and highly damaging campaign of sustained and group-based online abuse.

I said that I no longer wanted to keep quiet about it and I needed to come back. I had to be able to promote my authors’ books and my own work.

I didn’t expect very much would happen, except perhaps a few friends or loyal followers writing to say they were sorry to hear that. 

Instead, I received hundreds of comments and replies from people all around the world, and what stood out most was this: the sheer number of people who said almost exactly the same thing had happened to them, and that almost all of them were women, attacked by other women. 

It’s been like walking into a huge room full of people who’ve been hiding, too scared to speak up, afraid nobody would believe what they’ve been subjected to, certain that they were alone in it, that it was shameful and could ruin their relationship or work if news of their online tormentors got out.

Today, I’ve never been more passionate about trying to stop this online harassment. 

For one, let’s call it what it is. It’s abuse, not trolling. 

These unregulated gossip sites have become an almost unstoppable tsunami of abuse, where victims’ entire lives are destroyed in almost every way. 

Friends and family can start to pull away or ghost you altogether when the lies thrown at them by their abusers become too much to bear. 

A victim can lose their job, reputation, livelihood, marriage, and mental and physical health. 

And yet still, it is casually called ‘trolling’, as if it’s just name-calling or harmless chat. 

I call it abuse, and I believe it needs to be seen as such and dealt with as such. 

It is serious injury to a person, and the laws and legislation around this dark, poisonous, deadly subject need urgent and major reform. 

Big Tech companies need to get on board with putting measures in place to stop group-based abuse, employers need to know how to spot it and support victims, laws need to be introduced to make prosecution easier, and the websites themselves need to be closed down. I hope the work and research I’m doing now will all contribute to making these urgent changes.

One thing that would help immediately would be to stop all anonymous posting. If you refuse to show your real name and your face, you shouldn’t be able to rip apart that of others who do. 

To remove the anonymity would make most of these abusers run a mile. 

Ideally, far, far away from me, and I’ll be very happy with that.