Part One of my potted biography of the so-called 'journalist', Sonia Poulton will follow in a few moments.
I should say in advance that in these first few parts which will appear daily over the next week or so, I have used no other sources than Sonia Poulton herself. I shall give the complete list of references at the end of this first series of posts.
Even though all the reference material was written by Poulton herself there are a few oddities. Dates can be rather confusing but some of these are becoming clearer. For example, Poulton in one piece of writing even forgot which year she met the most significant partner she has had to date.
After that, I will add a section or two with more controversial material sourced from other people who have had dealings with Poulton.
Any corrections from anyone (including Poulton) will, if accompanied by some kind of reliable reference be dealt with as promptly as possible.
I would like to thank Stop the Myths and Tigerloaf for allowing this to be reproduced here. Please note, members, I am locking this thread as I do not want any comments posted until AFTER we have the whole dissection recorded. Sykes
Last edited by Sykes on Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:16 am; edited 3 times in total
“Since I was a young child, I have been confident that there is another life after this one. How do I know? I have regular contact with it, and have done for as long as I can remember.
I accept the cynics will label me as deranged, but they’ve never seen tables tip over of their own volition, glass tumblers move around untouched and a CD holder lift off the floor and hang in the air for several seconds."
Poulton’s mother, Elizabeth, “Bet” Ann Duggan was born in Llangollen, Wales in 1926 so we are told by her daughter though there doesn’t seem to be any registration of anyone of that name being born even in the same county in that year or any other for that matter. Perhaps she was born there and registered elsewhere?. Further research will no doubt reveal the relevant record.
Anyway whilst Poulton was very young her mother practised as a medium. People flocked to the house when Poulton was a child to have their palms or tea leaves read or, best of all, to take part in one of the many séances which Elizabeth Poulton (nee Duggan) organised.
Poulton tells us all about them because she used to attend even from a very, very young age.
On one occasion the spirit of Elizabeth’s first husband, Bernard Poulton senior, joined in.
Poulton tells us:
“I was there and he spelt out who he was and that he wanted to talk with Mum. He had died of cancer 14 years before, leaving Mum, my two brothers and my sister.
Mum asked him what it was like “where he was” and he quickly spelt out, “Like a lovely garden.”
A sense of great well-being enveloped those of us present, my brother Gerald and his friend Johnny, my sister’s fiancé Andre and me and Mum. But the next moment the mood changed.
Bernard senior had more to impart and our fingers followed his energy in the glass as it spelt out
‘Y O U W I L L B E J O I N I N G M E S O O N’
Before that day was over. Mum was dead.
She died of polycystic kidneys on an autumn day, two months into my 11th year.”
That was the second parent to leave Sonia Poulton behind, though in this case her Mum had no choice.
It had been different with her father, eight years earlier. She has related the story a number of times of him coming into the room where she was playing on the lime green carpet in their little house in the Cotswolds. David Vincent Traynor gave Poulton a small gift, kissed her head and at the age of three left her, her mother and his three step children behind as he walked out the door never to see his daughter again.
Poulton’s family background is anything but simple. Both her mother and father had been married prior to their marriage together. Both had children by their previous marriages.
Poulton’s step sister, Helen (older by 13 years), Bernard junior (older by 11 years) and Gerald (older by 7 years) were the children of her mother’s second husband, Bernard senior (he of the ominous prediction from the Ouija Board). His death had left Poulton’s mother to bring up her then three children alone. Poulton’s father also had children by a previous marriage up in Yorkshire (a home he returned to immediately after abandoning) Betty and her now four children, Sonia having been born to them.
Now Poulton in an article on the 23rd of August, 2006 claimed to have recently celebrated her 42nd birthday which would put her birth in 1964 or thereabouts. So far, and I have only been compiling this biography this afternoon whilst on a train journey north, I haven’t found a record in the Cirencester area for any Sonia Poulton, Traynor or Duggan but again, a further search will probably turn up the relevant record.
Daughter of Donald Vincent Traynor and Betty Poulton/Duggan so I also did a search for a marriage record for the couple.
There aren’t many Donald V Traynors listed and yes I did find a record in Cirencester for Elizabeth Poulton and Donald V Traynor marrying in the second quarter of 1967, when according to Poulton herself she would have been three. Was the marriage celebrated just as the relationship broke up or is there some mistake here?
And coincidentally there is another marriage listed in Cirencester of a Donald V Traynor to, this time, a Betty E Potter and that marriage was also in the second quarter of 1967. I wonder could that be some reference to Sonia's mum's first marriage? Time will tell.
The only other marriages listed for any Donald V Traynor both occurred in the Leeds area where we learn from Poulton that her father both came from and went back to. One was in 1944 and the other in 1955. It looks very much like her father may also (like her mother) have been married twice before. At least his birth certificate is easy to recognise – he was born in Leeds in 1919. At least one of his earlier marriages will figure later in the story as it gives a fascinating insight into the way Poulton's own situation gave her a very different perspective to the one she assumes others she now attacks hold. Yes, a little bit of a mystery there but all will come clear.
Leaving aside for the moment the precise date of birth for Poulton and whether it came before the marriage of her parents or that marriage occurred just as they broke up, lets have a look at what happened to Sonia and her three step siblings down in Cirencester when Donald left them behind.
Mum wasn’t slow to find a new man. This time Colin appeared in the family home. He stayed around for three or four years but also left by the time little Sonia was seven years old. She never bonded with him.
Then her mother’s illness became more serious. And at the age of 11 the four children were effectively left as orphans, mother having died and father having walked out.
Social services were a possibility for Sonia but she was in fact lucky in a way because her sister (older by 13 years) had got married at the age of 18 and had been married for some time when their mother died. She took Sonia in to her home. After that, things got really complicated in the life of budding 'journalist', Sonia Poulton.
Sonia Poulton as a child.
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If anyone wonders why I call Poulton a 'so-called journalist', it is evidence such as this complete insanity which persuades me that she really isn't the real thing.
What did she think she was achieving, dragging a chap called Tony to the residence of David Cameron just so that she could ask a couple of cops utterly inane questions such as what Cameron's opinion might be on various issues such as the one that Tony is suffering? She even addresses one comment to Cameron himself as if he would somehow be watching dross such as this video.
It wasn't even on the level of a publicity stunt like some of Brand's recent activities because Poulton's action didn't even get any publicity. And it certainly wasn't what any normal person would call journalism either.
It is such a crass bit of questioning that I would expect a first year journalism student to be laughed at if he or she presented it in class as a piece of course work. It certainly wouldn't get good marks for either relevance, interview skills, public reaction, research (she didn't even know if Cameron was at home) or anything else for that matter.
This silly little twit rant caught my eye a short while ago.
Thank you, Sonia Poulton, you really are the gift that keeps on giving aren't you. Only moments after I posted my reason for calling Poulton a 'so-called journalist' I spot yet another perfect example of her lack of professionalism.
No evidence of odd claims. Just a garbled attempt to discredit without any foundation. And she appears to have completely the wrong target in her sights as usual. There is no threat to her from this forum that I have ever seen, none whatsoever. It appears once again that she doesn't have a clue what is going on and is just lashing out wildly.
Not journalism, but silliness on twitter and another reason why she doesn't deserve the title journalist.
Mmm - now what was I doing. Oh, yes reading Poulton's own words about her dysfuncional family and personality.
More later.
I have just discovered who exactly #Drew is. And I was right. The twit rant is a muddled smear. I wonder if even Poulton now realises how stupid it is?
For her information and I am sure that Admin will back me up, this Drew has nothing whatsoever to do with this forum and never has had anything to do with this forum. Why Poulton chose to put STM in that twit only she knows but it can only have been stupidity on her part or a deliberate attempt to smear.
Well, it has failed. It was entirely Poulton's own choice to become part and parcel of the Icke Blog TV fiasco and having done so she might well (if she had opened her eyes) been aware that the place and the organisation supporting Icke was and is likely to be the breeding ground for a bunch of out and out nutters. Apparently her experience as part of the Blog phenomenon that was Icke TV has come back and bitten her on the backside and instead of standing up and realising her own stupidity she is, as per usual, lashing out with smears and innuendo.
If Poulton thinks this Drew is connected to this forum lets see her put up the evidence. As usual though, she has none. She can't put up evidence that does not exist can she?
She will simply carry on regardless as if nothing has happened. But those who have open eyes will see that she has once again failed to deliver.
tigerloaf » Thu Nov 06, 2014 11:37 pm I thought this snippet from the beginning of one of her more idiotic videos really hit the nose on the head.
I hadn't viewed the four minute video from which this snippet is taken till about half an hour ago. Since then I have looked at a few TV programmes (real ones - not four-minute youtube pretendy programmes) in which actual journalists appear. Not one of the shows has begun with the presenter begging us to Google his or her name to find out about them.
I guess only people who are not really journalists have to do this kind of thing.
If I get a chance I shall comment more fully on the appalling content of the rest of the video.
Bizarrely, Poulton tells us that the years after her father walking out on the family were happy, a happy home in the Cotswolds where mother and daughter spent a great deal of time singing duets and generally enjoying life.
Yet so many of her articles tell us of the pain, the fear and the growing psychological problems she was suffering.
Is it any wonder that she was beginning to suffer psychological problems when her mother enjoyed her company in séances which terrified her. One particular séance she describes as genuinely fear inducing.“…when I was only eight. Our three-bedroom semidetached home, in a cul de sac in the Cotswolds, was opposite an old manor building which was being transformed into flats.
During the building work, Mum acquired a round antique oak table and one evening she prepared it for a seance. Within moments of the tumbler being returned to the table, it seemed to be filling with an unseen force and began vibrating.
Swiftly the tumbler moved around the letters and then came to an abrupt halt after frenziedly zigzagging round the table.
The obscene message it spelt out, and the accompanying dark, menacing aura that filled the room, caused Mum to stop the seance immediately and return the table.
At that moment I understood the concepts of fear and evil…”
She says that she now realises just how irresponsible her mother actually was, that she would as a mother never put her own child through such a trauma. She knows the damage it did to her and would not see that damage done to others.
And she knows how that damage manifested itself in her life. It gave her a different viewpoint.
She had no childhood illusions about marriage, she had no dreams of the wedding dress and being walked down the aisle with flowers and a country church. She knew even at that young age that relationships were problematic. She had no interest at all in such fripperies as Barbie dolls or similar toys while at primary school. She was focused elsewhere.
She had friends but she also had a reputation even that young which brought her the sobriquet which she seems proud of now, “Bossy Sossy”. One has to wonder what kind of child gets a nickname which implies they are bossy at such a tender age and what they did to deserve it.
Even the normal games of childhood looked very different to Sonia Poulton. Which of us has never played the kind of game that makes us try to beat the bus to the bus stop or the car up the driveway when small? About the same time as her mother was hospitalized for the first time over the illness which would eventually kill her Poulton was becoming seriously obsessive over such ‘games’. She absolutely had to beat that bus or something awful would happen. That something awful, she believed would be the death of her mother.. Indeed her little obsessions developed progressively into full blown OCD.
By the time her mother did die just a month after Poulton started at secondary school, the obsessions had become extreme. The death was a serious blow to the young girl just at the start of one of the most confusing episodes of her life. She tells us:
"I have raged at the injustice. My father had walked out for ever when I was three so why did my mother leave when I needed her for those tricky pubescent years? I questioned how she could abandon me, as if she had some say in the matter. My anger was often directed at the doctors for “failing” to save her. Surely more could have been done?"
While she might have blamed the doctors verbally, she also deep down believed the blame lay within her. And that belief led to her spiral into appalling personal decline. Poulton openly admits to being a “nightmare adolescent”. In fact she says the death of her mother put her on a downward spiral that was to last a full twenty years. A full twenty years of her life which were driven by her demons.
Within a year or so of her mother’s death the OCD became dominant, dark thoughts flooded her mind, self-harm became a valid option for her. Many of her biographical snippets in the papers reveal details of how her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder dominated her life.
She suffered voices in her head that demanded she should do things over and over. That she should put on and take off her jacket time after time, repetitively wash herself, wash other things over and over again, line things up perfectly so they all faced the same way, check doors and windows were closed up to 30 times. Lengthy night time prayers had to be repeated if a word or name was forgotten. The voices were insistent. Again something awful would happen if she didn’t obey. This time it was her guardians who would suffer and die.
Then her elder sister split from her husband so only one guardian was left. Was that a kind of punishment for Poulton not having done what the voices demanded?
Around the age of 12 she was shoplifting. She became bulimic (sometimes she says this was around age 13 and sometimes around age 15). Nobody seemed to be noticing so she went a stage further and before she was fourteen she tells us that she had made two attempts on her own life using tablets to try to end it all. On both occasions she was found in time. She is open, though, that her suicide attempts were not genuine. She says that as with a majority of such attempts hers was simply a scream for help.
It would appear that she got only the most basic help. She was kept alive but nothing else was done for her. This was as bad an adolescence as can be imagined. From smoking by the age of 13 she was soon drinking, truanting on a regular basis by signing in at registration and then simply walking out, drinking heavily “secretly downing bottles of Bacardi and Coke at weekends”. Cigarettes and bottles of spirits couldn’t come cheap unless stolen so I wonder where she got the funds to act this way?
To add to the list of woes of this seriously troubled teenager would appear to be about as evil as could be imagined. But somebody did precisely that.
Poulton doesn’t tell us why it happened, but has related the story often enough for us to know it had a major impact on her. What happened? She was forced by someone to give up her dog. She had to walk it to the kennels and at the age of 15 give it away.
"At 15 I was forced to give away my mongrel bitch, Honey. That dark autumn morning, when I walked her to the kennels and out of my life, left me heartbroken and I vowed never to replace her."
Could life get much worse for Poulton? Apparently it could.
Sonia Poulton has taken the cause of Brenda Leyland (the Sweepyface online abuser) to her heart. She is making a video to try to prove that this person who spent years posting abusive messages online was driven to her death by a mainstream journalist doing his job properly, attempting to get the abuser to explain her actions. We all know that Leyland (aka Sweepyface the online abuser) refused to be interviewed on camera. She was too busy to explain what she described as her entitlement to abuse others.
She was trolling (the definition is not fixed - see below), abusing, lying, gleefully rejoicing whenever she believed that she had been particularly nasty. Everybody who has actually bothered to read the full timeline of Brenda Leyland knows these details about her. Even anti-McCanns were appalled by the lies and abuse that this woman was belching out, just look at the interaction with Morais for proof of that.
Poulton produced a full four and a half minute rant about Leyland being demonised, telling us she was entitled to do her "questioning" online. It is another example of the paucity of talent which Poulton demonstrates every time she either writes or does a video blog. After giving us a lengthy reminder who she is (because so few people know presumably), Poulton tells us that Leyland has been hounded to death for questioning. Either Poulton is a fool who is talking without bothering to have read and understood the full timeline of Leyland or she is a liar. Nobody, having read the full timeline of the online abuser Sweepyface (aka Leyland) could possibly believe that all she was doing was questioning.
Then she comes up with an interesting statement. She claims that her own name, yes 'Sonia Poulton', has been handed over to the Met Police as part of the dossier. How would she know that? Have the police contacted her I wonder?
(Just as an aside. Anyone wanting to have a go at analysing facial gestures should have a look at the video at 1.22 where the face pulling by Poulton must tell people something about her attitudes.)
She then shrieks that she has never believed the 'official version' of events in the McCann case whatever she might mean by the 'official version'. Then she goes into conspiracy mode explaining that you have to search for the truth and heavy censorship is preventing people from being aware of the truth.
From censorship mode she moves into warp drive, warping the perfectly sensible statement of Gerry McCann that trolls should be made examples of, into her own twisted understanding of that as being "anyone who refuses to accept the 'official version of events'". She is completely twisting the definition of the word "troll" to suit her own purpose, ie an attack on Gerry McCann. The woman is simply inventing that. She is wildly guessing what was in the mind of Gerry McCann. Not only that she is twisting the phrase "official version of events" to mean a "McCann version of events" because the actual official version is clear. We can read it in those factual files which she says are hidden. It tells us that there was no evidence of any crime against the McCanns.
She then spews more venomous phrases about the McCanns and their Tapas friends being neglectful going on (another warping of reality) "drinking nights out".
She then lies about not seeking to demonise the McCanns. Just go back to 1.22 and look at her face as she speaks of the McCanns if you think she is being truthful. The face tells the real truth.
Then she makes a very crucial admission. She has no idea what happened to Madeleine McCann. She doesn't have a clue.
But ignoring the fact that neither she nor anybody else commentating on the case knows what went on, she then repeats that the McCann version of events don't add up as if she had another more factual version to compare it to. I've heard this so often but when push comes to shove if you keep listening you realise that it is nothing but an empty phrase. As with others, Poulton simply repeats this phrase and doesn't give any indication as to what precisely doesn't in her view add up.
What really doesn't add up is why she repeats so often what is clearly either her stupid lack of research and knowledge or her lie about Brenda Leyland merely questioning. Poulton is either pretending not to have seen the abuse, lies and libel on the Sweepyface timeline or has failed to do the research and is talking without understanding. Perhaps she should phone Morais if she needs help in getting to grips with all those tweets, because Morais was fully aware of the abusive nature of Leyland.
And having either lied or shown her own ignorance where does Poulton next end up? Why, back in the land of conspiracy nonsense. One of the tweets Poulton has got round to reading (no doubt because it is one of the favourites of the #McCann netherworld where Poulton seems to pick up a lot of her 'facts' is the one where she talks of dying in mysterious circumstances.
Somehow Poulton equates asking Sweepyface to explain herself as Censorship. Somehow Poulton seems to miss the very point of Brunt doorstepping Leyland. That point was bloody obvious. He wanted an interview with her. How does Poulton warp reality so far as to state that asking Leyland to go on air and give an interview where she could explain her trolling as being Censorship? Every time these anti-McCanns open their mouths or put fingers to keyboards they show that the world they live in doesn't conform to reality.
This strange woman then tells us that her pitches of articles which criticise the "official version of events" to editors have come to nothing. That she has been Censored. I have another suggestion as to why those articles have been spiked before they even got written. That is because the published and well-known views of Poulton on the subject simply are not based on fact, are instead based on flawed 'research', online myth and warped reading of the genuine files. When I watched her so-called interview with the doddery, bouncing, old woman called Rosalinda Hutton I was utterly appalled at the dire lack of understanding of the facts of the case shown by both the interviewer and to be honest even more the interviewee. Had any editor been aware of this kind of previous effort from Poulton then it would hardly be surprising that he cold shouldered her.
We then get a pity me piece about the McCanns having sued newspapers for lying about them. She seems to think that when newspapers call the parents neglectful or killers or whatever without it being true then they should simply accept this. Once again she really doesn't seem to live in the real world. Poulton is clearly extremely bitter about the fact that the McCanns have got people supporting them and giving them the chance to have the lies removed from the papers. Personally, I think people trying to do the right thing should be applauded even if they happen to have a lot of money.
At least Poulton is beginning to understand that her MSM work has seized up. She gives us a typically warped reason for that though. She suggests it is because she is a great troof seeker and has spoken up. The saner among the population realise it is because of her dalliance with the lunatics of Icke Blog TV, because of her screechy and hilarious interviews with nutters such as Revolutionary Rosalinda, Bonkers Birch and the Harlow Halfwit, Buffoon Bennett, the legal lackbrain. In my view her becoming known for her association with nutters, being known for her stupid questioning of policemen for information about the Prime Ministers views on subjects, screeching through megaphones in the Royal Parks and on other demonstrations like a demented banshee are more likely to have influenced the editors to ditch her.
Oh and some might say her dalliance with a gun-toting, criminal does her no favours either in the eyes of those editors who are ignoring her desperate pleas for attention.
But, you might now be asking why did I use the title about HYPOCRISY for this post?
Well, there is a good reason. I came across this article by Sonia Poulton written before she was given the elbow by the MSM.
In this article she abhors online abusers. I have to wonder why she now almost sanctifies the actions of the online abuser, Brenda Leyland. And I can only think it is because she is a hypocrite who is perfectly able to ignore the fact that the actions of Leyland were abhorrent and that her lies could have easily driven a young witness in the case to suicide, in order to use the woman in her vile attacks on the McCanns.
Read the article and decide yourselves. And don't be sidetracked by semantics or attempts to find a fixed definition for the word "troll". We have already seen Poulton warp the meaning of the word to suit herself in the video above. Let us just remember that both Leyland (aka Sweepyface) and those posting to Nicola Brookes were posting abuse and attempting to hurt those they were posting about. To me that is what trolling is. Any online attempt to abuse and hurt others through your activity.
A blow to cyber bullies
THE name Nicola Brookes may not mean much to you right now but it soon could. The actions of this unassuming forty something mother may change the internet, and how some people use it, for ever.
By: Sonia Poulton Published: Sun, June 17, 2012
I have experienced trolls for years and can relate to the misery their typed venom can cause.
In an unprecedented move, Ms Brookes has secured a legal order from the High Court forcing social network behemoth Facebook to disclose information surrounding the identity of individuals who made her life hell.
In an unrelenting two-year onslaught, Nicola, from Brighton, East Sussex, was branded a p.a.e.dophile, a prostitute and drug dealer. Her four abusers, apparently working as a team, cloned her Facebook account and used it to send horrific messages, apparently from her, to other users.
Her nightmare began after she innocuously commented on the Facebook page of The X Factor and opened herself up to anonymous “internet trolls”: the most contemporary of bullies.
As a journalist, I have experienced trolls for years and can relate to the misery their typed venom can cause. Many people assume their influence can be switched off at the touch of a button.
There are cases of troll victims committing suicide and the relentless attacks can leave people emotionally drained and with their mental and physical health affected
Not so.
There are cases of troll victims committing suicide and the relentless attacks can leave people emotionally drained and with their mental and physical health affected.
My trolls are people I don’t know but who think they know me through my work. They contact my website and bait me on social network sites by accusing me of all manner of unspeakable things.
Only last week, a Twitter troll claimed I was responsible for someone’s death.
Aside from how personally distressing such a charge is, and not least because I had previously comforted the deceased, it is horrendous for the loved ones of the dead woman.
It is a common misconception that trolls are exclusively vicious and offensive. There are those, for instance, whose aim is simply to eat away at your time. They repeat themselves ad infinitum, cleverly drawing you into their web. They frequently target several people at once and spend hours sending the same messages to different people.
“Time thief trolls” are fairly easy to dispense with. Generally, by ignoring them they are denied the very thing they crave but those on a quest to bring misery to vulnerable people can be breath-taking in their persistence.
These deranged beings trawl the net for support sites of those who are bereaved, sick or disabled.
It is not uncommon for trolls to deface pictures of their victims and post them all over the net.
While there have been one or two high-profile prosecutions of “internet hate speech”, including student Liam Stacey, who was jailed for 56 days following his racist Twitter outbursts during the on-pitch heart attack of footballer Fabrice Muamba, it has proved more difficult to pursue those who anonymously post their invective.
One sorry case to my knowledge involved a 14-year-old disabled boy targeted by Facebook trolls for over a year. A fake page was set up in his name and comments were posted daily, purportedly from the teenager, that were racist, homophobic, misogynistic and showed a clear hatred of disabled people. Despite over 100 people complaining to Facebook, and the boy’s parents contacting the police, nothing was done.
The law, in this case, is an ass.
Is it not enough that these parents had to cope with the challenges that raising a disabled child brings, they also endured the savaging, and subsequent protection, of their perpetrators.
Generally, my approach to trolls is to ignore them, while keeping in mind that they are, above all else, to be pitied. Undoubtedly, they need help. It’s clearly not reasonable or healthy behaviour to obsess so much about other people, especially those we don’t know.
PEOPLE who lead full and productive lives do not become trolls but those who are dissatisfied, and who have mental health issues, often do. Last week, critics expressed their fears about Ms Brookes’s partial victory. They worry that the power to name and shame trolls, including the possibility of prosecution, will lead to censorship and damage free speech.
I disagree. Freedom of speech should not include the freedom to bully and spread lies. Perhaps by exposing trolls it will serve as a warning that our society is no longer prepared to tolerate abuse.
For the reality is this: just because internet attacks are nameless and faceless it does not make them harmless.
tigerloaf » Fri Nov 07, 2014 11:03 pm So many aspects of that article from three years ago show clearly how Sonia Poulton has simply ignored her original views and show just how far she has lowered her supposed standards so that she can pursue (in cahoots with the very worst kind of trolls she was then writing about) the very demonising of the McCanns which she claims not to be taking part in.
The way in which Sonia Poulton has completely turned her back on the victims of trolls and become their champion, their compatriot, their collaborator and their supporter is quite shocking.
Assuming that she was being honest and sincere in her original article because she often sounds to me as if she is all over the place.
Does anyone know why she thinks is in this dossier of threats against the McCann family? Has she said? It may be that there something I have missed because she certainly isn't someone who would have instantly have come to my mind if I had been asked to list aggressive or sinister McCann haters. Not at the time this news all broke anyway.
In fact, I would go so far as to stick my neck out and say that from everything I have seen of her (pre Sky news report) commentary and activities, if Poulton was included in this dossier, then IMO, it would make a complete nonsense of it because much though I find her irritating, I have never seen her post or say anything threatening or abusive about the McCanns. Misinformation - yes absolutely but only in a kind of goonish/conspiraloony kind of way. "Scepticism" - yes she definitely expressed that, but it was based on the misinformation she was sucking up from the goons and eejits she is pally with and that certainly is not against the law. But I saw absolutely nothing from her worthy of being reported to police.
Having said that, her current participation in blatant vigilantism and her unquestioning support of some of the very worst abusers and sickos is a different matter. Some of the people she is currently defending definitely do deserve to be locked up - and for all the reasons she described in her article about her own internet trolls.
But as I said, maybe I have just missed something she has done. As Tiger says, if she "knows" she is in this dossier, then perhaps it is because police have already spoken to her?
IT'S 9pm and the tension backstage is palpable. Out front in the Philadelphia concert hall, fans are growing agitated. The show’s compere has just narrowly avoided being hit by a bottle hurled from the audience.
A few feet from me is a multi-million selling American rap artist who has just been attacked. A group of young men stormed into his dressing room and sprayed mace in his face before making their escape.
The rapper is running around blindly in circles, screaming and tearing at his eyes. I grab a towel and attempt to wipe the mace away. Unable to see me, he thinks I am another attacker and yells with such aggression that I leap away in fear.
It is November 1995 – welcome to my world as a music journalist.
When I think back to my childhood, it’s no surprise I ended up in my chosen career. My father was a jazz drummer and my mother, of Welsh/Irish stock, sang endlessly around the house. From a young age I remember my mum standing me on the kitchen sideboard and encouraging me to belt out show tunes.
Unlike my primary school peers I had no interest in Barbie dolls and preferred to shriek at the TV when my idols, the Bay City Rollers, appeared. I adored writing poetry and would frequently describe my life in rhyme.
Perhaps it was inevitable that I should find myself some 15 years later reporting at a rap concert on the East Coast of America.
My work, according to my more responsible friends, was very glamorous. While they were building nest eggs and worrying about mortgage rates, I was jetting to New York, staying in five-star hotels and frequently being met from JFK airport in a limo – all expenses paid, naturally.
I sipped iced tea at P Diddy’s Manhattan apartment, shared drunken, philosophical musings with Jamiroquai’s Jay Kay and had my glass replenished by David Bowie.
Alcohol was as imperative to my work as my trusty Dictaphone. Everyone I knew drank – a lot. And I was no different. Often I would stay up all night, lurching from one drinking establishment to another in London’s West End only to roll into magazine meetings the next morning still drunk from the night before.
A persistent truant during her school days, oddly Poulton states that she managed to stay at school till she was 18. Presumably somebody must have persuaded the school that this persistent truant should be allowed to move into the sixth form and take A levels.
For some reason, though Poulton has described just about every facet of her life in glorious detail, she has never mentioned what kind of grades she left school with, which business college she ended up in and what precisely she was doing between the ages of 18 (around 1982), the age at which she left home and began to live in London, and 23/24 (around 1987/ at which point her own autobiography tells us that she had become a music journalist.
What we know of Poulton during the 80s is that she was a drunk, that she was still battling the voices in her head which were controlling her actions, her OCD, her emotional strains over her father abandoning her and her mother dying,
We know that sometime around the age of 21, three years after arriving in London, she had her first real boyfriend, Ronnie; previous relationships having never been gone beyond peck-type kissing, She tells us that the relationship lasted about a year but ended when she could not forgive him for a “clinch” with a younger, pretty blonde called Helga, a clinch which she witnessed. He begged her for forgiveness but she decided she could not trust him and walked out.
And for ten years after that breakup she bounced from relationships (some sexual, some not), sometimes more than one boyfriend at a time, sometimes not. Her friends called her the one “who always has a man”. She describes her inability to function as an individual, her need for adoration from men to make her “feel loved and wanted”.
Unfortunately for her she seemed to be picking boyfriends who she describes as “possessive and controlling”. One was so appalling in her view, so full of his own self-importance that he refused to help push her brother’s car because he might ruin his shoes in the snow which was on the ground. No doubt she soon walked out on that character.
And another was a criminal She only found out when a friend of hers phoned and shrieked down the telephone one night that he was on Crimewatch robbing a bank. Luckily for her that one disappeared. I hope she isn’t reverting to type after all these years. I hear that the ‘partner’ (be it business or romantic) she is now enamoured of is none other than Lee Ryan, the criminal who won millions on the lottery. His gun-toting photos are a sight to behold.
Her excuse for dating these types was her belief “that s.e.x was the ultimate act of intimacy and sharing; to me it was a guarantee of commitment or a special bond”.
She was dating musicians, artists, actors and criminals. Many of them were “resting” for the time she was dating them and she was subsidising their lives with her earning power.
But of that earning power there is no real evidence. There are references written by Poulton and nothing more.
Her “official” biography (penned by her and completely ignoring the period 1982 – 87) says:
From 1987 - 1997 Sonia was a music journalist contributing to titles including Q Magazine, Muzik, The Guardian Guide and The London Evening Standard. Her assignments included a tour of the War Child Exhibition with David Bowie and touring America and Europe with multi-million selling bands. She was one of the last journalists to tour with rap artist, The Notorious B.I.G. before his murder in 1997.
Nothing else exists online – no reference to the War Child trip with David Bowie where she tells us that he poured her a drink.
It is strange, for example that no reference anywhere exists to the five year stint she tells us she spent doing a weekly broadcast on Kiss FM about the music scene. Not a single comment about the weekly show seems to exist anywhere. Not a lot of influence then we must presume.
The earliest articles I’ve found are from November 1995 to January 1997 from Muzik. There are seven of them available. Whether any more were ever written is not clear. They are from the period when she was championing Gangsta rap and its decidedly seedy view of life and its glorification of violence. One of her main motives for championing this music “was that Rap music and its inherent edginess spoke to my desire to live dangerously.”
The most striking comment that Poulton makes over and over about her twenties is that she would often end the evenings in a drunken stupor. Sometimes she is writing about her life as in the music world where the drink was de rigeur.
But sometimes the drinking is blamed on another aspect of her life. Those dark nights are blamed on the demons. At the age of 24 her brother had let slip that her father had returned to Leeds after walking out on the family when she had been three. She decided to find him and found him in the phone book.
Her first phone call with him was long but her only memories of it seem to be that she told him about her mother’s death and he said, inadequately in Poulton’s opinion, that he was sorry and that though he had loved her they just couldn’t get along.
Contact with her father was not the success she had possibly hoped for. At first she was overjoyed. She told him how much he had hurt her and he said he hadn’t made contact because he was worried that it would cause problems with her mother and she accepted that.
But Poulton, even having made contact refused to meet him. He didn’t live up, she tells us, to the cosy fantasy she had imagined. He lived alone, had children from a previous relationship. Poulton felt that he lacked commitment and responsibility and, she tells us, it wasn’t long before she began to be very critical of him.
“It deeply irritated me that this was what I had found after waiting all these years.”
Apparently he drank heavily and would phone at all hours of the day and night. Poulton didn’t answer or got her flatmate to say that she was out. When he “threatened” to visit her in London she became terrified. The thought suffocated her. Even though she had made contact with him she had decided she wasn’t ready for them to “become a cosy father-daughter unit.”
I felt that my father — with his anger and drunkenness — would merely become a burden to me.
For the next decade I carried on as usual — Miss Jovial, the life of the party.
But, in truth, I was a lost and broken soul.
My self-esteem was in tatters due to the pain of growing up without the guidance or support of both of my parents, and the discovery that my father was less-than-perfect had added to my woes.
All my years of dreaming about finding him and us becoming a happy family had come to nothing. I had a series of unhealthy relationships (several of them were verbally and physically abusive) and I relied on alcohol, nicotine and food to dull the pain that coursed through me.
Most days I drank myself into a stupor in the hope of forgetting, no matter how temporary, my unhappiness.
None of it worked. It was clear that I was on a course of self-destruction.
at which point her own autobiography tells us that she had become a music journalist.