Anti-migrant campaigners in Hull physically threw a rape survivor off the platform when she tried to tell the crowd she had been sexually abused not by an immigrant but by ‘multiple white men’.
The incident happened in Hull last Saturday at an event organised by veteran anti-migrant campaigner John Francis Gillling.
This is what she said before she was silenced:
“I am a victim of grooming. I was groomed when I was 11 years old. And I am disgusted with all of you here. I’m disgusted with all of you because it was not an immigrant. It was multiple, multiple…white men…white men…”
You can hear what she said here.
At that point the microphone was snatched from her hand by John Francis Gilling, and a thug grabbed her round the waist, dragged her towards the back of the stage and pushed her away.
Members of the crowd can he heard shouting at her to “Fuck off” while Gilling says “We gave her a chance.”
Gilling, a former member of Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League, was the principal organiser of a demonstration in the city after the Southport murders last year under the banner of Hull Patriotic Protesters.
That event degenerated into rioting where a mosque was attacked and riot police had to be deployed to protect a hotel housing migrants.
After the August riots, Gilling made news by meeting with a member of the mosque which had been attacked, a man who had lived in the country for 25 years, and apologising for what had happened.
Two months later he was charged with racially aggravated harassment and using threatening words or behaviour the previous October. He pleaded not guilty to both offences. The case has not yet come to court.
In April last year Gilling ran as an independent candidate for the Orchard Park ward in the local elections.
It is now being reported that the woman who spoke on Saturday has been deluged with abuse from right wingers since the incident.
The far right are now trying to excuse their behaviour by claiming that she was ‘planted’ by anti-racists.
Video of the incident is circulating online but Searchlight is not posting it because the woman has a lifelong right to anonymity as a victim of a sexual offence, and it’s not at all clear that, just by speaking at that meeting while she is clearly upset, she has expressly waived it. She may not have fully appreciated that she was being filmed.
