Lucy Connolly, a British housewife who was handed a hefty prison sentence for sending a Tweet, is in talks with the Trump administration and is taking legal advice to sue over the circumstances of her incarceration, she said after being released from prison.
A British woman who was handed a 31-month prison sentence for publishing a message on the X/Twitter platform in the wake of the Southport child slayings has been released from jail and has described what she calls deliberate mistreatment characterised by prison governors being “leaned on” in accordance with her de facto status as a political prisoner.
42-year-old mother Lucy Connolly was released from prison on Thursday. She spoke to Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, who police have also harassed for writing things online, and broadcaster Dan Wootton to describe her experience and next steps. Stating she believes the government selected her to set an example to discourage further discontent, Connolly decried “two-tier justice”, telling Pearson she “absolutely” thinks she was “Keir Starmer’s political prisoner” and that she was coerced out of getting a fair trial.
While it has already been reported that the government of U.S. President Donald Trump, which has repeatedly expressed grave concern over the state of freedom of speech in European nations, including the UK, has shown interest in her case, Connolly said she will be meeting with “a senior representative” of the Trump team this week for talks.
Connolly also told the Telegraph that she is now taking legal advice on suing the police for having misrepresented her before her trial and even prejudicing her trial by putting out what she claims are untrue statements. She said: “I definitely think that is something I will be looking into, I don’t want to say too much because I want to seek legal advice on that, but I think the police were dishonest on what they released and what they said about me, and I’ll be holding them to account for that”.
There was also the question of whether she would now enter politics, specifically if she would stand for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK against the Labour government that signed off on her prosecution. Connolly responded with a smile: “Who knows, I never thought I’d go to prison, so you never know what will happen in the future”.
Describing how she came to plead guilty last year, Connolly said she had been denied bail and was kept in prison pending trial for publishing a message on X, despite it being a non-violent offence and her posing no flight risk, leaving her feeling desperate to get back to her young daughter. Connolly’s son died in 2011 in a case that was later proven — after a long campaign by Connolly to get justice for the infant — to have followed serious “failings” by the NHS, which she said left her vulnerable to taking any advice that claimed the ability to get her back to her family sooner.
She told Wootton: “They made it clear I wasn’t going to get bail… [I was] not really understanding how the system works… a solicitor advised me to [plead] guilty to get credit, to get time off… he also told me I’d be eligible for a tag, I wasn’t, from the conversation we’d had it was if I go guilty, I’ll be home by Christmas”.
Connolly said she was told that if she didn’t plead guilty, she’d be facing five to seven years behind bars. “It was made quite clear to me I was going to prison,” she said, and added that she was advised that if she pleaded guilty, she would be treated more leniently. However, Connolly described the judge “throwing the book” at her and that when he started speaking, it was like his words were coming “straight out of Starmer’s mouth”.
This treatment didn’t end at the courthouse, she claimed, saying once in Prison she was denied privileges that she usually would be entitled to, like being able to go on day-release to see her family, and that her appeal for early release was denied. The impression she got from prison staff and legal representatives was that those who had power over her life while inside prison were bending to pressure “coming from higher up… I do feel the governors were being leaned on”.
Connolly said that she is still suffering from the aftermath of one instance where prison guards got physical with her. She related: “They can really hurt you if they want to, and they’d decided that day that they’d really hurt me… and the more I screamed, the more they hurt me… it was completely unnecessary”.
The experience has left the Northamptonshire native questioning some key assumptions about life in modern Britain. On the Police, Connolly said her position that “we’ve always been brought up [to believe] the police are there to help you, not to stitch you up” has been shaken.
As to the Prime Minister, Connolly said: “With Keir Starmer I think he needs to practice what he preaches, he’s a human rights lawyer so maybe he needs to look back at what human rights are, what freedom of speech means, and what the laws are in this country if he’s so bothered about sticking to the law, making the law work, and not undermining the law. And I’d like to say to him that if he invested as much effort and money into housing, mental health, rehab, as he did to putting the likes of me in prison, the prisons would be empty”.
To the mainstream media for repeatedly calling her a racist and going after her husband, Connolly said: “I will never forgive the mainstream media… I was in there for ‘misinformation’ and yet that’s exactly what they were doing”.
In response to Connolly’s case, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK have floated the idea of introducing a ‘Lucy’s Law’, where if the public thought a court had got a sentence grossly wrong, they could petition the government to review it. The Free Speech Union, which supported Connolly through her ordeal, warns that up to 30 people a day are arrested for “petty offences” such as retweets and cartoons online.
FSU founder Lord Young described the case as a “national scandal” and called for Britons to have American-style First Amendment protections. He wrote this week: “What Lucy has suffered at the hands of the British state is a clear case of injustice. She has become Exhibit A for those of us raising the alarm about the assault on free speech in Starmer’s Britain. And if it’s any consolation, that alarm is now being heard across the world, from the White House to Quinta de Olivos.”
