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Teacher sues Mail on Sunday over suicide story

By Sarah Limbrick

A Wirral teacher has launched a legal battle for libel damages over a story in the Mail on Sunday.

Wendy Ainscow is suing publishers Associated Newspapers over the story, which was published last October.

She claims the story, headed: ‘They said I was so violent and deranged my parents attempted suicide by walking into the sea together. But it was all lies invented by my mother … and now TV has fallen for them too.”, was defamatory.

She says that after the story was published, she tried to kill herself by drowning off the Spanish island of La Gomera.

She said that the paper had already written about how she had entered into a suicide pact with her husband, which ended in his death and her narrow escape from death, she says. Ainscow is also seeking aggravated damages, accusing the paper of showing disregard for her life, feelings, and reputation.

Ainscow says the story gravely damaged her reputation, and caused her considerable hurt and embarrassment.

The three-page story meant that she was an emotionally abusive mother, who has used threats of suicide as a way of controlling her daughter in the same way that other mothers might threaten to turn off the television, and tried to brainwash her daughter into falsely believing that she had serious mental health problems, she claims.

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