Lucy Allan, the Conservative MP for Telford, has been urged to resign after seemingly being caught out adding a “death threat” to the end of an email she received from a constituent.
Evolve Politics reports that Adam Waitling, 27, who was writing using the pseudonym “Rusty Shackleford,” emailed Mrs Allan regarding the vote to bomb Syria.
Mrs Allan posted an excerpt of the email to Facebook, but Shackleford claims that she deliberately doctored the post to include the words “unless you die” at the end to make it appear as if he had sent her a death threat.
After being confronted online, Mrs Allan deleted the post and then claimed that the three extra words were from another email and the post was an “example” of the comments she had received.
Mr Waitling, in an interview with The Daily Mail, said “Despite changing my Facebook name, I am a genuine Telford constituent and I have lived here all my life. And just because I emailed under a different name, why does that make it OK to add a death threat to my email?
“I would never say the words she attributed to my initial email. I do not understand why she would take the comments she may or may not have received from someone else and add them to my email when she put it on her Facebook.
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“I just don’t understand why that gives her the right to add three words to my email. This is not selective editing, this is adding things I did not say.”
Mr Waitling also called for Mrs Allan to “resign,” adding “it is a serious thing for an MP to do to someone, to misrepresent an email from a constituent so grossly.”
Mrs Allan said she shared the email from Adam Watling in a bid to stop normalising online abuse. And, according to the BBC, she responded to allegations that she had doctored the email by saying.
“I posted actual comments made to me on the same day, although not in the same email. Comments were added to the post as they came in. I posted them to show examples of the type of unacceptable online abuse that comes in most days and that most people tolerate silently.
“The comments were not posted to discredit any individual. ‘Rusty’ could have been anyone, or a wholly fictional person. he chose to identify himself and came forward with a surname. At that point I took the post down.”
She said there had now been a campaign against her, and the police were investigating. The Facebook posts have since been deleted.
