Former UCL academic to pay damages after harassing colleague for months

Christopher Backhouse falsely portrayed Erica Smith as a sex worker and signed her up for far-right groups and fetish websites

A former academic at University College London must pay almost 50,000 in damages to a former colleague after falsely portraying her as a sex worker on social media as part of a months-long campaign of harassment.

Christopher Backhouse, a former research fellow at the department of physics and astronomy at UCL, has settled to pay 49,975 to Erica Smith, a physicist and a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University in the US.