Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe.
“I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,” she said, referring to the fictional action hero. “Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.”
She remembers noticing that you can’t drown yourself in the toilet, because there’s no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl.
She’d end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime.
Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she’d reposted on X another user’s content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, “If this is true.”
Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times.
The murders resulted in widespread civil unrest in the UK, where mass migration is a central issue for citizens. Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later. Spofforth, 56, a successful businesswoman from Chester, was placed under arrest.
“We’re a year on now and I can honestly tell you that I don’t think I will ever recover,” she told The Post. “I don’t mean that as a victim. Those poor children were victims. But I will never trust anything the authorities say to me ever again.”
Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.”
Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail—all over mean Facebook posts and agitated words on X.
Hellbound and Down 