The run up sounds really worrying. If this had happened to someone less tough, savvy, well-connected and experienced than Wings it could have had a terrible effect. Lengthy quote follows:
Watson has made numerous ludicrous, vexatious complaints to various police forces about me – a particularly memorable one being when he reported me last September for “perverting the course of justice” because I’d tweeted a link to a fundraiser for someone being persecuted by another transactivist – as well as trying to extort tens of thousands of pounds from me with threats.
Yesterday, though, he finally found some police officers gullible enough to listen.
The first I heard of it was in mid-April this year, when I was away catsitting and got a phonecall one morning from a woman claiming to be an officer of “Bath Police”, which immediately made me suspicious because the local force is called Avon & Somerset. The woman explained that she was investigating a complaint of harassment against me and wanted me to come in for a voluntary interview, although she said that if I declined I’d be arrested.
I said I’d need to verify who she was first, so asked her to send details by email or text so I could be sure she was the police and arrange things with my solicitor. She agreed, but then hours turned into days turned into weeks and I heard nothing, so I assumed it had been some sort of twisted “prank” by Watson or one of his associates like “Sophia” Brooks or “Freda” Wallace, who notoriously love to troll gender-critical people.
Then in the middle of last month I got another phonecall from an unfamiliar number, this time at 1.30am. It was someone else claiming to be a police officer – this time a male – demanding that I submit to being arrested and hauled off to Keynsham Police Centre about 10 miles away, right there and then, in the middle of the night. He was most insistent that it couldn’t wait for a less absurd time.
Once again I said I’d have to verify his identity first, and a short while later sent me an email. I was still in the process of checking it when people started ringing and battering on my door (I didn’t know who, you can’t see who’s at the front door from inside my house), at what was by now 2.15am.
Fortunately a couple of fellow Watson targets were still up at this unsociable hour, some of whom were lawyers and former police officers, and by happy chance so was my crime-fighting associate Roddy Dunlop KC, as he happened to be several time-zones away that week, where it was still a civilised hour.
Fortified by wise counsel from such experts, I ignored the hammering on the door until it went away, and immediately contacted the Free Speech Union (pretty much the last bastion of civil liberties in the UK – please join up if you can, you never know when you might need them), who by later that day had set me up with a solicitor, Daniel Berke, with extensive experience of dealing with malicious transactivists.