Drunken Grenfell Tower lawyer arrested after late-night confrontation with her neighbour after all-day drinks is cleared of assault
A drunken human rights lawyer who was involved in the Grenfell Tower inquiry has been cleared of all charges after she was arrested for a late-night confrontation with a neighbour.
Scarlett Milligan, 32, was accused of assaulting Kemi Adebiyi, 48, after she enjoyed all-day birthday drinks with her fellow-barrister boyfriend Benjamin Waistell in May 2022.
The pair had been drinking locally in Wandsworth, London, but they had a row and Milligan found herself locked out of Mr Waistell's home in Cromford Road.
In footage shown at the hearing, Milligan could be heard shouting 'f***** c***' in the doorway of Ms Adebiyi's home as her boyfriend held her back.
The trial at Wimbledon Magistrates' Court collapsed when office manger Ms Adebiyi did not appear to give evidence, saying she was hospitalised with an insect bite.
Prosecutor Benn Maguire offered no evidence and BBP London Law School graduate Milligan was found not guilty of assaulting Ms Adebiyi.
Earlier this year a Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court jury cleared Milligan of the racially-aggravated assault of Ms Adebiyi.
The latest verdict concludes a three-year investigation and prosecution that also saw Mr Waistell, a Lincoln's Inn lawyer with XXIV Old Buildings, in the dock for alleged assault and criminal damage. He was cleared of the charges last year.
'The defendant [Milligan] is described as of 'impeccable character' in her application,' Mr Maguire told the court yesterday.
'May I show a recording of what happened that night? This is a recording of the defendant.'
Deputy District Judge David Bolton watched mobile phone footage recorded by Ms Adebiyi, first showing Waistell screaming at the complainant, followed by Milligan.
'The recording does show unattractive behaviour by Ms Milligan and it is accepted that no party behaved themselves well that night,' said Gudrun Young KC, defending.
'However, it does not seem fair or appropriate to play a small section of the footage to blacken Ms Milligan.
'It is inappropriate that it be played completely out of context.'
Milligan broke down in tears in the dock when the possibility of a trial in September was discussed, wailing: 'I can't do it.'
'She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, has memory loss and migraines and is signed-off work,' added the KC.
However, the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday pushed back at 32-year-old Scarlett Milligan's claim she is of 'impeccable character'.
Mr Maguire said: 'The purpose of showing this footage to the court is in response to the assertion that Ms Milligan is of 'impeccable character.'
'She is the person in the video with her hand going towards the complainant.'
Milligan was accused of grabbing Ms Adebiyi's neck, leaving no injury and Waistell was acquitted after arguing that he was rescuing his girlfriend from their neighbour's assault.
Trouble began when Ms Adebiyi's meditation was disturbed by Milligan lying in the road outside her ground-floor flat, making loud groaning noises.
She went outside and asked: 'Is she okay? She is making a lot of noise,' prompting Waistell to respond: 'You f*** off,' triggering an exchange of insults between the parties.
Milligan was recorded on a next-door neighbour's Ring doorbell shouting: 'Shut your door you ugly c***,' and: 'You f****** ugly twat,'
Throughout the recording Ms Adebiyi can be heard mockingly referring to the couple as 'Tarquin' and 'Karen,' suggesting Ms Milligan was feigning a mental health episode.
She is heard shouting: 'You think you can enter my home and attack me?
'This is typical white privilege. She's seeking attention, she's a typical Karen, an attention seeker.
'I came out to try and help and Karen began railing on me and then Tarquin decides to come over here and enter my home and rescue Karen.
'I am going to stream this. You're going to lose your jobs you f***ing racists.'
Ms Adebiyi dialled 999 and told the operator: 'I heard howling in the middle of the street. A man who looks like he plays rugby told me to f*** off.'
Five minutes later Waistell also called the police, saying: 'My girlfriend has been attacked. She (Adebiyi) came out because we were loud in the street and dragged her in the house and attacked her.
'I had to break the door down to get her out. She thinks my girlfriend is suicidal and that it's funny. My girlfriend is a little bit drunk.'
Ms Young submitted: 'We have reached the point where enough is enough and given the history of this case we urge caution accepting at face value the assertion the complainant can't attend due to ill health.
'She has a history of manufacturing injuries that do not exist and accuses people who are victims of her assaults. She is a manipulative individual.
'She told the police she had scratches from the assault, but they were very, very old. That is the sort of character we are dealing with, someone who lies to the police.
'She is more than capable of lying about injuries, lying to the police and fabricating injuries and manipulating the process.
'Ms Milligan is immediately heard screaming: "My head", and Mr Waistell enters and carries her out in his arms and she is covered in multiple bruises as a result of this incident.'
In her statement to police Milligan said: 'I was drinking throughout the day and by the evening I was drunk. I had an argument with Ben and he left the pub.
'I couldn't access Ben's address because of the bottom lock and I became very upset and was lying in the middle of the road crying.'
She said an 'abusive woman' confronted her saying: 'If you're going to kill yourself, get on with it.
'The lady continued to hurl abuse at me and she became more and more heated with her abuse.
'I ended up in her doorway and the next thing I remember is being pulled by the hair over the threshold of her address. The woman struck me and I was savagely kicked to the head, I think I lost consciousness.'
Deputy District Judge Bolton said: 'I am aware of the impact this has had on your client. It has been hanging over her for three years now and is a low-level assault, an allegation of grabbing at the neck without injury.
'This is extending the impact on the defendant and the application to adjourn the trial until September is refused.'
The verdict finally concluded a prosecution that saw three years of multiple court hearings; a failed application to dismiss the case; a two-day magistrates' court trial and a two-week Crown Court trial including sixteen hours of jury deliberations.
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If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. Indeed, when MI5 detected high levels of phone activity between senior IRA men the night before the robbery, they optimistically — naively — thought it meant an announcement was imminent on the decommissioning of IRA weapons, to break the political deadlock. When it was announced who the likely culprits were, Sinn Fein — the IRA's political wing — complained of a smear on republicans. But as Patterson points out, in one of the few passages where he sounds truly angry, this was a common tactic for Sinn Fein. He reminds us about the brutal murder of Robert McCartney after an argument in a Belfast bar in January 2005, when nobody in the pub — including the future Stormont minister Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Fein — would speak to the police about what happened. Instead, Hargey claimed that reports of IRA involvement in the murder were 'part of the onslaught by the media and governments and political parties to criminalise Sinn Fein and the republican movement'. 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And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
