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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...anger-Facebook-rape--ruined-victims-life.html
Given everything he has been through, one wonders how Philip McDonald can even bring himself to look at Facebook. True, he’s hyper-conscious about his security settings, but then, so would you be if you’d endured what he has over the past two years.
For Philip, a polite and quietly spoken 26-year-old father-of-one, was plucked out of the blue by a total stranger who spotted his picture on the social networking site and decided to falsely accuse him of rape.
In an act of inexplicable viciousness, 31-year-old fantasist Linsey Attridge chanced upon a photograph of Philip and his then 14-year-old brother James and used it to back up a story she’d concocted. She’d done it, apparently, in order to win some sympathy with her boyfriend, when she feared his affections were waning.
It led to Philip, a wholly innocent chef, being harassed in the street and shunned at the school gates. He is still fighting, two years later, to salvage his battered reputation.
Philip, speaking for the first time to the Mail, still struggles to articulate the true horror of what happened to him.
‘It’s frightening,’ he says. ‘We have no idea why she picked on us.’
It is Philip’s partner Kelly Fraser, 27, who describes their experience.
‘It was like our lives were a deck of cards and someone just threw the whole lot up in the air and that was our lives for two years,’ she says. ‘We have only just started to pick up the pieces now.’
It was only two weeks ago that Linsey, a single mother, appeared at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, where she admitted a charge of wasting police time.
And her punishment for a callous deceit that besmirched the names of two innocent young men? A risible 200 hours of community service and a social services supervision order.
Neither she, nor the police, have apologised to Philip or James.
The story has led many to ask, quite rightfully, how this could have happened. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ is the general summary.
Well, it appears you could — if you’re Linsey Attridge, that is.
Philip describes himself as an ordinary ‘family guy’. He has a six-year-old daughter Erin and another baby on the way, and has never been in trouble with the law.
In fact, he has even applied to join the police force twice because he ‘likes helping people’.
He manages a rueful smile as he looks at the photograph that started it all: a close-up of the two brothers, the younger boy’s arm slung companionably over Philip’s shoulder, both staring directly at the camera. Two years ago, it was his profile photograph — the first image people see when visiting his Facebook page.
‘It was taken at a party,’ he says. ‘It was a wedding thing at my mum’s neighbour’s house.’
He had no inkling — and who would — that one night in August 2011, Attridge, sitting at her laptop, barely a mile away on the outskirts of Aberdeen, would alight on that photograph, as she trawled Facebook, looking for faces to fit a story that was in its entirety a figment of her imagination.
She’d claimed two men had broken into the home she shared with her boyfriend Nick Smith while he was away playing football.
The men, she said, subjected her to a brutal attack — she even punched herself in the face and ripped her clothing to make her tale more credible.
When, a few days later, two plain clothes police officers walked into the city centre cafe where Philip worked, he assumed they wanted some breakfast.
‘Then they shouted: “Philip McDonald”, and I said: “Yeah, that’s me,” and they said: “It’s CID, we want to speak to you”,’ he recalls.
Philip, totally unaware that he was in any trouble, was unperturbed. It was only when the detectives said there was an investigation that also involved his brother and that they needed to go to the police station that he began to panic.
‘They told me stuff in the car about the allegation of rape. I was completely shocked and burst into tears.’
Unknown to Philip, his brother, a student at a residential school for teenagers with behavioural problems, had been taken in handcuffs from his mother’s home half an hour earlier.
He recalls how frightened he was during the five hours in which he was questioned, fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA.
‘My life is clear, I’ve had no dealings with the police whatsoever,’ he says. ‘I was just panicking, panicking . . .
‘It was when they mentioned that it was such-and-such a day that I calmed down. I told them I was putting my daughter to sleep at that time. I had an alibi. Kelly’s family were there and everyone vouched for me, saying: “He was putting his daughter to bed.”
‘They finally released me at about half past two in the afternoon and said: “We will get back in touch with you.”
Kelly, who was alerted to the brothers’ arrest by their mother, picks up the story.
‘I just felt utterly sick when I heard what the allegation was. No one can know how that feels unless they have been there.
‘When something like that happens, your mind goes into overtime, you don’t know what to believe. He could have lost his job, his family.
‘It’s a good job I’ve been with Philip for so long and not just a few months. I just knew he wouldn’t have done that.’
Philip and Kelly, who met at school and started their family aged 18, wish they knew why a blonde-haired stranger they had never met — indeed they’ve still only seen her in photographs — dropped such a grenade into their lives.
It took two months for the fiction she had concocted to fall apart, during which time Linsey submitted herself to the rigours of forensic investigation — intimate physical examinations, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, the kind of scrutiny that women who have genuinely been raped endure because they want justice.
Throughout this process, Linsey sobbed, shook with fright and even made herself sick to hoodwink the female friend supporting her through her ‘ordeal’.
Out in the real world, Philip’s ordeal was much worse: ‘He got harassed in the street; even in the school grounds parents were looking him up and down,’ remembers Kelly. ‘It was just horrible. I’m sure people were looking at me thinking “What is she still doing with him?” ’
The whispering at the gates of their daughter’s school became so unbearable that they withdrew her, moving her to another school where the pupils and parents knew nothing of Philip’s arrest.
‘We could tell what people were thinking by the way they were looking at us,’ says Kelly.
‘That’s why we ended up putting her in another school. That was hard.’
‘Why would you do something like that? How many lives has she ruined? I wonder if she realises that it was a little girl’s life she ruined, too?’
Given everything he has been through, one wonders how Philip McDonald can even bring himself to look at Facebook. True, he’s hyper-conscious about his security settings, but then, so would you be if you’d endured what he has over the past two years.
For Philip, a polite and quietly spoken 26-year-old father-of-one, was plucked out of the blue by a total stranger who spotted his picture on the social networking site and decided to falsely accuse him of rape.
In an act of inexplicable viciousness, 31-year-old fantasist Linsey Attridge chanced upon a photograph of Philip and his then 14-year-old brother James and used it to back up a story she’d concocted. She’d done it, apparently, in order to win some sympathy with her boyfriend, when she feared his affections were waning.
It led to Philip, a wholly innocent chef, being harassed in the street and shunned at the school gates. He is still fighting, two years later, to salvage his battered reputation.
Philip, speaking for the first time to the Mail, still struggles to articulate the true horror of what happened to him.
‘It’s frightening,’ he says. ‘We have no idea why she picked on us.’
It is Philip’s partner Kelly Fraser, 27, who describes their experience.
‘It was like our lives were a deck of cards and someone just threw the whole lot up in the air and that was our lives for two years,’ she says. ‘We have only just started to pick up the pieces now.’
It was only two weeks ago that Linsey, a single mother, appeared at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, where she admitted a charge of wasting police time.
And her punishment for a callous deceit that besmirched the names of two innocent young men? A risible 200 hours of community service and a social services supervision order.
Neither she, nor the police, have apologised to Philip or James.
The story has led many to ask, quite rightfully, how this could have happened. ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ is the general summary.
Well, it appears you could — if you’re Linsey Attridge, that is.
Philip describes himself as an ordinary ‘family guy’. He has a six-year-old daughter Erin and another baby on the way, and has never been in trouble with the law.
In fact, he has even applied to join the police force twice because he ‘likes helping people’.
He manages a rueful smile as he looks at the photograph that started it all: a close-up of the two brothers, the younger boy’s arm slung companionably over Philip’s shoulder, both staring directly at the camera. Two years ago, it was his profile photograph — the first image people see when visiting his Facebook page.
‘It was taken at a party,’ he says. ‘It was a wedding thing at my mum’s neighbour’s house.’
He had no inkling — and who would — that one night in August 2011, Attridge, sitting at her laptop, barely a mile away on the outskirts of Aberdeen, would alight on that photograph, as she trawled Facebook, looking for faces to fit a story that was in its entirety a figment of her imagination.
She’d claimed two men had broken into the home she shared with her boyfriend Nick Smith while he was away playing football.
The men, she said, subjected her to a brutal attack — she even punched herself in the face and ripped her clothing to make her tale more credible.
When, a few days later, two plain clothes police officers walked into the city centre cafe where Philip worked, he assumed they wanted some breakfast.
‘Then they shouted: “Philip McDonald”, and I said: “Yeah, that’s me,” and they said: “It’s CID, we want to speak to you”,’ he recalls.
Philip, totally unaware that he was in any trouble, was unperturbed. It was only when the detectives said there was an investigation that also involved his brother and that they needed to go to the police station that he began to panic.
‘They told me stuff in the car about the allegation of rape. I was completely shocked and burst into tears.’
Unknown to Philip, his brother, a student at a residential school for teenagers with behavioural problems, had been taken in handcuffs from his mother’s home half an hour earlier.
He recalls how frightened he was during the five hours in which he was questioned, fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA.
‘My life is clear, I’ve had no dealings with the police whatsoever,’ he says. ‘I was just panicking, panicking . . .
‘It was when they mentioned that it was such-and-such a day that I calmed down. I told them I was putting my daughter to sleep at that time. I had an alibi. Kelly’s family were there and everyone vouched for me, saying: “He was putting his daughter to bed.”
‘They finally released me at about half past two in the afternoon and said: “We will get back in touch with you.”
Kelly, who was alerted to the brothers’ arrest by their mother, picks up the story.
‘I just felt utterly sick when I heard what the allegation was. No one can know how that feels unless they have been there.
‘When something like that happens, your mind goes into overtime, you don’t know what to believe. He could have lost his job, his family.
‘It’s a good job I’ve been with Philip for so long and not just a few months. I just knew he wouldn’t have done that.’
Philip and Kelly, who met at school and started their family aged 18, wish they knew why a blonde-haired stranger they had never met — indeed they’ve still only seen her in photographs — dropped such a grenade into their lives.
It took two months for the fiction she had concocted to fall apart, during which time Linsey submitted herself to the rigours of forensic investigation — intimate physical examinations, tests for sexually transmitted diseases, the kind of scrutiny that women who have genuinely been raped endure because they want justice.
Throughout this process, Linsey sobbed, shook with fright and even made herself sick to hoodwink the female friend supporting her through her ‘ordeal’.
Out in the real world, Philip’s ordeal was much worse: ‘He got harassed in the street; even in the school grounds parents were looking him up and down,’ remembers Kelly. ‘It was just horrible. I’m sure people were looking at me thinking “What is she still doing with him?” ’
The whispering at the gates of their daughter’s school became so unbearable that they withdrew her, moving her to another school where the pupils and parents knew nothing of Philip’s arrest.
‘We could tell what people were thinking by the way they were looking at us,’ says Kelly.
‘That’s why we ended up putting her in another school. That was hard.’
‘Why would you do something like that? How many lives has she ruined? I wonder if she realises that it was a little girl’s life she ruined, too?’
