Popular UK-based mummy blogger and midwife Clemmie Hooper has come under fire after it was revealed that she is behind a fake account which has been abusing people, including black women, expectant mothers, other mummy bloggers and even her own husband, for at least the past eight months.
Last week, Hooper, who has over 670,000 followers on Instagram, admitted to being behind the fake account ‘Alice in Wanderlust’, after suspicions arose when both accounts were holidaying in St Lucia at the same time. As well as reportedly calling her own husband, a parenting blogger known as Father of Daughters, a “class-A twat” on the forum Tattle.life, Hooper is being accused of making racist comments, calling presenter and writer Candice Brathwaite “aggressive” and accusing her of bringing all arguments back to race.
“So Clemmie Hooper is the one who has been using fake accounts to write crap about Black female mummy bloggers because she felt threatened by their growing success,” actor and mum Kelechi Okafor wrote on Twitter, while others called for Hooper’s work to investigate her racist comments and take away her midwifery pin.
Addressing Hooper’s fake account on Instagram, blogger Laura Rutherford wrote: “To say I’m hurting is an understatement, What gives you the right to play with people’s mental health? 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?”
Hooper apologised on her Instagram story – something totally wiped from her account within 24 hours – writing that she created the fake account initially to stick up for herself and her family, but it “became all consuming and it grew bigger than I knew how to handle.” Her husband, Simon Hooper, who maintains he knew nothing about the fake account, posted that he is “angry and a bit sad.”