Hartley Dooda Legal Dooda WORSENS

To demonstrate that reality is never far away, not even for fully paid-up members of the media class, a little local difficulty has befallen self-promoting TalkRADIO host Julia Hartley Brewer, and not so long after she had enjoyed yet another well-publicised holiday, but was not thumbing her nose at those less fortunate than Herself Personally Now, oh no.

Her difficulty concerns the continuing fallout from a previous swipe at Julia Patterson, who you can tell as she’s a doctor. Ms Hartley Dooda had claimed “Dr Julia Patterson sells face masks at a huge profit on her website”, but, as Dr Patterson does not personally profit from the face coverings sold by Every Doctor UK, this was potentially actionable.

As a result, Dr Patterson took legal advice. So did Ms Hartley Dooda say sorry? As if you need to ask: there has, it seems, been no apology, but instead, a worrying development in the campaign which may develop not necessarily to the TalkRADIO host’s advantage. It seems Dr Patterson was in receipt of a text message. And then another text message.

She has now told that “On 28th December, Dr Julia Grace Patterson received a text message from someone claiming to be Julia Hartley-Brewer, following her tweet containing factually inaccurate information about our mask … Dr Patterson has never shared her phone number with Julia Hartley-Brewer. Her employer, talkRADIO, has Dr Patterson’s phone number on record for legitimate journalistic purposes”. There was more.

“If this text message was from Hartley-Brewer, it is likely that she has accessed it inappropriately in breach of GDPR laws. We are taking this up with talkRADIO, Hartley-Brewer’s employer. We have contacted talkRADIO for details of their Data Protection team and have heard nothing. We are contacting them again now. If we don’t hear back by the end of tomorrow, we will go straight to the ICO”. A point of order here, though.

Ms Hartley Dooda is self-employed, and to this end she has her own limited company going by the title of Lady J Productions Limited, of which the sole director is herself (details available via Companies House HERE). This does not excuse any potential abuse of data protection law, though. It may even make matters worse.

Back with Dr Patterson, it appears that by yesterday there was no response from TalkRADIO: “Receiving lots of messages asking the details of the text message from someone alleging to be Julia Hartley-Brewer. If we do not hear from talkRADIO by the end of tomorrow, we will be publishing our letter to ICO which will include the text message content in full”. And this morning it transpired that we can make that two text messages.

“I received another text message yesterday from the phone number alleging to be Julia Hartley-Brewer. On the advice of our barrister I am not responding to any of these communications. If we do not hear back from talkRADIO by the end of today we will send a letter to ICO detailing all of the text message content, and will publish this”.

Either someone is trolling Dr Patterson while impersonating Julia Hartley Dooda, or the messages really have come from Herself, in which case she needs to stop and, as they are wont to say on Merseyside, give her head a shake. And say sorry. Soon.

For everyone else, a rather more straightforward task beckons: get the popcorn in.

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