Lucy Connolly is considering taking legal action against the police after her release from prison, she has told the Telegraph.
The 42-year-old was jailed for stirring up racial hatred against asylum seekers online in the aftermath of the Southport murders last year.
Mrs Connolly, the wife of a Conservative councillor, was released from HMP Peterborough on Thursday.
On legal action, Mrs Connolly told the Telegraph: “That’s something that I will be looking into. I don’t want to say too much because I need to seek legal advice on that, but I do think the police were dishonest in what they released and what they said about me, and I will be holding them to account for that.”
She said her words were “massively twisted and used against me” in a statement released by the Crown Prosecution Service, which suggested she told officers in her police interview she did not like immigrants.
A press release from the CPS after her guilty plea on September 2 included a quote from Frank Ferguson, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s 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.”
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.”
She was freed from prison after serving 40% of her 31-month sentence, the automatic release point for her sentence.
Mrs Connolly will remain on licence until the end of her sentence.
Speaking for the first time publicly since her release, she also told Dan Wootton on his YouTube show: “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.”
