Believing The Unbelievable...

Another one of those cases that feminists tell us are very, very rare:

A 'dangerous fantasist' who wasted £316,000 of public money by falsely claiming to have been raped, kidnapped and blackmailed was jailed for four years yesterday.

Police spent 7,000 hours investigating bizarre allegations made over six months in 2006 by Michaela Britton, a court heard.

Amazing! I wonder what were the total man-hours spent on burglary and criminal damage allegations in the same period?

Her 'whopping lies' included claiming she was being blackmailed for £10,000 over a pornographic video stolen from her home which was made with an ex-boyfriend said to be a Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist officer.

Chelmsford Crown Court heard that police wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds investigating her complaints.

Britton, a senior loss adjuster, also claimed her line manager at Churchill Insurance in Romford put a gun to her head after she spurned his advances.

And no doubt he was subjected to arrest, DNA sampling, and all the other indignities heaped upon anyone unlucky enough to fall into the aggro range of a demented female. Still, let’s concentrate on the money, that seems to have been the real concern of the courts...

Eventually, detectives became suspicious of Britton and began tracking her movements by installing CCTV outside her partner, Mick Murray's, house in Chelmsford, Essex, where she often visited.

I wonder what made them suspicious?

Judge David Turner told her at Chelmsford Crown Court: 'You are a dangerous fantasist.

'Your conduct has been pathological and profoundly and protractedly wasteful of police resources.'

Not to mention the poor accused men, but hey, omlettes, eggs, and all that...

As for what finally made them suspicious, maybe it was this:

The court heard how Britton had a previous conviction from 1990 for obtaining property by deception when 61 offences were taken into account.