A teacher subjected to a torrent of abuse after doctored footage falsely alleged she used a racist slur while canvassing for the Labour party has said she was forced into hiding and feared it would ruin her career.
Cheryl Bennett, a PE teacher from Wednesbury in the West Midlands, was helping her colleague, Qasim Mughal, hand out Labour leaflets during the local elections in May last year when she was recorded on a household security camera.
Soon after, footage of her leaving the property appeared online with subtitles falsely alleging she had used racist language, including a slur against Pakistani people, towards the homeowner.
The clip was viewed millions of times and shared widely on social media, including by Akhmed Yakoob, a lawyer who was at the time standing as an independent candidate in the West Midlands mayoral election.
He posted the video alongside a clip of himself saying: “Those who are still in the Labour party, now is your time to leave.” He also shared Bennett’s name and place of work.
Bennett told the Sunday Times she had been paid “substantial” damages and costs from Yakoob after she filed legal action for defamation and a breach of her data protection rights.
Nick McAleenan, a partner at Brabners solicitors who represented Bennett, said this was a first of its kind case that highlights potential legal issues as video manipulation, often powered by artificial intelligence, becomes more commonplace, along with the proliferation of home security and doorbell cameras.
“It’s her voice but it’s been synthetically messed around with to say those things,” he said. “The volume on it is exactly the same when she’s next to the camera as it is when she’s about five metres away, that was one of the telltale signs.
“This kind of thing has obviously happened in previous elections abroad, but I don’t really think it’s ever happened in the UK, so to that extent, it is a precedent. This settlement does show the risk to people of misusing things.”
Yakoob, who remains under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over the incident, told the Sunday Times: “Of course I’m sorry. If I wasn’t sorry, I wouldn’t have agreed to settle with her and give her a sum of money […] I acknowledged my mistake.”
No one has ever admitted creating the original video with the false subtitles. “That is the only part that I haven’t really got any answers for, to be honest, which I think will always bug me,” Bennett said. “I don’t need an apology. I just need people to be able to know the truth.”
Bennett said she was inundated with messages after the video went viral. One message from a pupil at her school read: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.”
Her school received 800 formal complaints and Bennett was told not to return to work for her own safety. People went to the homes of her family members to track her down and her car number plate was shared online.
“I was just constantly in survival mode,” she said. “Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
McAleenan said it was not exaggeration to say Bennett was forced into hiding. “She had to stay at home, people had to go out and buy food for her. She received a tsunami of abuse. She was really worried and had to have security cameras fitted in her house.”
West Midlands police said they had obtained the original audio and found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
“This is a lesson to be learned in not believing everything you see on social media. Just because you see it, doesn’t mean it’s always true,” Bennett said.