Lucy Connolly has accused officers of issuing “false information” over her police interview and said she is considering taking legal action against them after her release from prison.
The 42-year-old was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers online after the Southport murders last year.
Mrs Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, was released from HMP Peterborough on Thursday.
Speaking publicly for the first time since her release, she told the Telegraph and Dan Wootton’s show on YouTube that she was considering legal action over a statement which suggested she told officers in her police interview that she did not like immigrants.
She told Wootton: “I do believe that they, you know, issued false information. I do think that they crossed the line and they didn’t do things they should and I will be taking that up with them.
“How far I take that, I don’t know at this point, but it is definitely something I’ll be taking up with them.”
She told the Telegraph that police were “dishonest” and her words were “massively twisted and used against me” in a statement released by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
A press release from the CPS after her guilty plea on September 2 included a quote from Frank Ferguson, head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, which said: “During police interview Lucy Connolly stated she had strong views on immigration, told officers she did not like immigrants and claimed that children were not safe from them.”
Mrs Connolly said she will release the content of the police interview so can people can see what the police and the CPS said are “two very different things to what I said in my interview”.
The former childminder, from Northampton, had pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X and was jailed at Birmingham Crown Court in October last year.
On July 29 2024, she had posted on X: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
Mrs Connolly was arrested on August 6, by which point she had deleted her social media account, but other messages which included further racist remarks were uncovered by officers who seized her phone.
The post was viewed 310,000 times in three and a half hours before she deleted it.
A bid to challenge her sentence at the Court of Appeal was dismissed in May.
In a written judgment, Lord Justice Holroyde, said: “There is no arguable basis on which it could be said that the sentence imposed by the judge was manifestly excessive.”
Mrs Connolly told the Telegraph she pleaded guilty because she thought it would be the “quickest route home” from prison time to spend Christmas with her daughter.
She also disputed suggestions that police discovered racist tweets before and after the Southport post, telling Wootton: “No they didn’t.
“As I’ve explained earlier on, what these tweets were… there was no racism there.”
Asked by the Telegraph if she considered herself “Sir Keir Starmer’s political prisoner”, Mrs Connolly said: “Absolutely. Me and several other people.
“I think with Starmer he needs to practise what he preaches. He’s a human rights lawyer, so maybe he needs to look at what people’s human rights are; what freedom of speech means; and what the laws are in this country.”
Mrs Connolly was freed from prison after serving 40% of her 31-month term, the automatic release point for her sentence.
She will remain on licence until the end of her sentence.
The mother also told Wootton that she is meeting Trump administration officials on Saturday to discuss free speech.
She told the broadcaster they are “very interested in the way things are going in the UK” and their lawyers are “keen to speak with me”.
Asked if she thinks the UK has free speech, she said: “I don’t think so, no.
“And that’s, you know, become increasingly apparent, hasn’t it? How many people are still in prison… we need to remember that there was still other people in prison for a similar thing… other political prisoners.”
On her comments on X, she told Wootton: “I should never have said what I said. It was wrong. But I am no far-right activist. I’m no far-right thug.”
She added: “You’re shutting people’s voices down. It’s ‘let’s give them a label. Let’s tell them they’re bad people and then they will be quiet’.”
The CPS said it has nothing to add to the statement made on Mrs Connolly’s conviction.
An updated statement from the prosecuting body issued in October, once Mrs Connolly had been sentenced, said she told officers she did not like “illegal immigrants”.
Both versions of the statement added: “It is not an offence to have strong or differing political views, but it is an offence to incite racial hatred – and that is what Connolly has admitted doing.”
A Northamptonshire Police spokesperson said the force was aware of comments made by Mrs Connolly after her release from prison.
The spokesperson added: “We hope to contact Mrs Connolly in the coming days to understand the issues she has raised around Northamptonshire Police.”
