Victoria Culf with her husband
A Christian artist was reported to the police and banned from her own exhibition because of her gender-critical beliefs.
Victoria Culf also claims a council worker wrongly accused her of being under police investigation when she was not.
Mrs Culf launched legal action against Watford borough council last year on nine grounds, including breach of contract, discrimination and harassment.
The 44-year-old, who has been an artist for 20 years, had been setting up her independently funded exhibition at Watford Museum when she became engaged in a conversation with a council worker about transgender issues.
While making a cup of tea, the council official revealed that her child was “socially transitioning” and that they had tried to get puberty blockers from the Tavistock gender identity clinic.
Mrs Culf claims to have politely said that owing to her Christian beliefs and her experience working with children and young people, she believed transitioning to be harmful.
The artist claims to have also said the Tavistock clinic should be shut down, reasoning that “children are too young to properly assess risk”.
“I wouldn’t be being true to myself if I agreed with you,” she claims to have said.
Harassment allegations
While Mrs Culf believed the conversation to have ended “calmly and amicably”, she later received a call from the council informing her of “harassment” allegations and decreeing that she must give 24 hours’ notice before entering her exhibition.
According to court documents, Mrs Culf’s accuser wrote to Paul Stacey, the council’s associate director of environment and communities, in the aftermath of the conversation, claiming the police had “recorded it as an incident”.
The police logbook, however, revealed that the police told her accuser they were not recording it as an incident or investigating it and described what she had said as “free speech”.
The council worker is said to have nevertheless emailed her boss at the council to say: “The Hate Crime Officer called me. It has been logged as an incident.” The employee is also accused of inventing a crime number.
The Christian Legal Centre, which is advising Mrs Culf, will argue that pressure from the council official and the council led to Mrs Culf being excluded from a community art project run by BEEE Creative, her artwork being damaged during the exhibition and ultimately the termination of her contract.
Commenting on the latest disclosure of evidence, Mrs Culf said: “I genuinely feared a knock at the door or a call asking me to explain myself, or worse.
“I now know this was a pack of lies, designed to intimidate me. It’s deeply troubling that my accuser misled the council, and yet they were all too willing to go along with it without impartially investigating it for themselves.”