Clemmie Hooper’s husband breaks silence on trolling scandal amid calls to ban her from midwifery
He said he was feeling "angry and a bit sad" about the revelations
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Your support makes all the difference.Simon Hooper, known on Instagram as “Father of Daughters”, has broken his silence following the revelation that his wife Clemmie Hooper has been involved in a trolling scandal for the past eight months.
On Thursday, Clemmie (also known as mother of daughters) confessed she was the person behind an anonymous account, “AliceInWanderlust”, which had written bullying and “racist” comments on the Tattle Life forum about fellow mothers.
Some of the comments even targeted her own friends and husband, calling him a “class A t**t”.
The parenting blogger from Kent, who has 660,000 Instagram followers, said on her Instagram Story she had written the comments in a bid to deflect growing suspicions she was behind the false profile.
After three days of silence, 35-year-old Simon, who has four daughters with Clemmie, addressed the scandal in an Instagram post.
He told his 1 million followers on Sunday: “Frankly, I’m in a crap position as I only really have 2 options 1). to stay silent to protect my wife & knowing that if I do, the silence will be deafening or 2). to comment on something I had no knowledge of. It’s not a fun place to be."
He said he was feeling "angry and a bit sad" about the revelations. “I can’t condone or fully understand why Clemmie did what she did. Make no mistake about it – she made some bad choices – I just wish she could have spoken to me about this before it all got too much.”
Simon said he wasn’t there to defend his wife’s actions or provide excuses for what had unfolded because he had “none” to give.
“What I do know is that online actions have real world consequences – this has impacted our family and it will take some time to recover,” he added.
Fellow parenting bloggers had begun to suspect Hooper was behind the posts when her family went on holiday to St Lucia and the account was posting from the same location.
Some said Hooper had “dared” to post bullying comments online while simultaneously providing them with friendly support in real life.
Laura Rutherford, who blogs under “that_mummy_smile”, wrote in an Instagram post: “For so long I’ve had to grin and bear the derogatory comments, the angst of what people think of me, where the malice has come from. You’ve looked me in the eye and asked me how I’m doing when I’ve been at my lowest. How dare you?”
Other Twitter users including Kelechi Okafor, an actress and activist, have said that Hooper – who is a practicing midwife at Kings College hospital, London – should be stripped of her job because of her comments about bloggers like Candice Brathwaite.
In a screenshot circulated on Twitter, "AliceInWanderlust" wrote: "Candice is often really aggressive and always brings it back to race, privilege and class because she knows no one will argue with that. It feels like a weapon to silence people's opinions."
Okafor said: “She wrote the most vile things,” adding, “proper racist crap. She brought my name into it at one point after I announced my pregnancy. Devilish.
“She is a midwife at the hospital I gave birth at. Now let’s look again at the stats that in the UK black women are five more times likely to die during childbirth (and soon after) in comparison to white women. When women like this are midwives…”
She continued: “Clemmie Hooper needs to have her pin taken away from her by the midwifery council.”
The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) issued a statement via their Twitter account on Monday saying: "We've had some messages over the weekend regarding one individuals online conduct as reported in the media [sic].
"Please be assured we have passed all these messages onto the relevant teams here at the NMC."
Hooper has not responded to calls about being removed from her job. She said on Thursday: “I decided without telling anyone else that I would make an anonymous account so that this group of people would believe I was one of them so that I could maybe change their opinions from the inside to defend my family and I.
“Reading them made me feel extremely paranoid and affected me much more than I knew at the time.”
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