For nearly two weeks, far-right agitators and local racists fomented hate in a Surrey commuter town, driven by lies and disinformation about an alleged rape. But the only actual crimes committed involved individuals who joined the fraudulent anti-immigrant protests.
On Thursday, Surrey Police announced it was closing its investigation into reports of a rape outside a church in Epsom which had led to widespread public disorder. They said they could find no evidence of the crime being committed.
Frenzy of speculation
The force said after a “thorough investigation”, it became clear that a woman in her 20s had suffered an accidental head injury following a night out, leading her to make a confused report; the far-right that had been inciting a frenzy of speculation about the incident finally went silent.
Days before, crowds of people marched down a residential street in the upmarket town, with riot police on hand. Surrey Police said the protest “escalated to public disorder”, with eggs and beer cans being thrown, and one person appeared to try to climb on top of a police van.
Four people were arrested on suspicion of offences including criminal damage and assaulting an emergency worker.
Far right get involved
This had all begun after a report on Saturday, April 11, of a woman being raped near a church in the early hours of the morning after leaving a nightclub in Epsom. Following the incident, police put out a call for witnesses or dashcam footage.
And then the far-right got involved. It became a textbook case of far-right social media manipulation, race-baiting, and riot incitement, a strategy honed in the aftermath of the Southport murders in 2024.
Immediately, and without a shred of evidence, they launched an online campaign fueled by wild conspiracies claiming that the perpetrators were either asylum seekers, Muslims, or immigrants.
Record of incitement
It didn’t take long before Tommy Robinson’s sidekick, Danny Tommo, a convicted kidnapper, former drug dealer, and a ‘Raise the Colours’ grifter, arrived armed with a megaphone to whip up trouble, which duly followed.
Tommo is a man with a record for inciting rioting, and as Searchlight reported last week, he appeared in the town centre live-streaming, confronting riot police and telling assembled protesters that police “know exactly who it is.”
He knew no such thing.
Despite Surrey Police’s Assistant Chief Constable Sarah Grahame explicitly stating that there was “no evidence that asylum seekers or immigrants were involved”, the protesters drawn from all over the South East would only listen to agitators.
Mob attacks
Proving that the disorder was more about attacking migrants than any authentic concern for violence against women, the mob went on to attack a local hotel and a house where migrants were thought to be living.
Windows were broken, residents threatened, and the police were attacked as they made arrests. In fact, it was a residence for vulnerable adults.
But, true to form, the man who had whipped up the mob, Danny Tommo, was nowhere to be seen when trouble kicked off.
By Friday, the streets of Epsom resumed their suburban quiet. A local community group helped restore the house vandalised during the mob frenzy.
People asked whether Tommo should be charged with inciting disorder after ranting about the fictional “four monsters who gang raped a woman”.
But the shameless far-right social media accounts, the phony patriots and wannabe white nationalist influencers who had inflamed the trouble with clickbait about the “cancer of multiculturalism”, “indigenous British people”, and “your daughters being attacked”, would never admit that it was all a sleazy scam.
Some of them fell back upon a desperate “this would never have happened if the poice had been transparent about what they knew”.
In fact, the police had been transparent, making very clear, early on, that there was no evidence migrants or asylum-seekers had been involved.
The far-right response was to up the stakes, accusing them of a cover up, and then call another demonstration which led to violence.
They don’t care about the misery and fear they created; that’s their reason for being.
They have moved on, waiting and watching for the next community they will try to bring to a boiling point with their racist lies.
