They did not have to lie about me once.
They just had to say I was private, which is true, and which I have been saying about myself for nineteen years.
And I put in a paragraph about how much I had raised for other people, which is also true, and which came from three real grants the foundation made in 2015 to three real people, whose photographs are on that website and who are perfectly well and who I have since spoken to.
It was a real charity. That is the part people find hardest.
For the first two years it was entirely real, and it helped eleven people, and then my sister worked out that nobody checks a charity with a sad story and a good logo.
They stole my identity when I was a child to buy my sister clothes.
And then they did it again, in 2014, at scale, in public, with a logo and a gala and a paragraph about my life — and ran it for eleven years.
PART 4
Then there is Tamsin.
Tamsin Reyes. Twenty-four. She was a barista and a part-time sports coach and she came off a moped in the January of 2023.
Her leg was saved. There was a window — about fourteen months — in which a particular reconstruction had a good chance of getting her walking properly again. That is the short version and it is not mine to give in full.
Her health insurance covered part of it. Not the rest.
She applied to that foundation in the March.
She was approved in the April. There is a letter in the file on foundation paper with the logo on it, congratulating her and setting out the amount.
The money never came.
She followed up three times. In the June, in the September, and in the January of 2024.
And in the February she got a refusal, citing a review of eligibility criteria.
By then the window had closed.
She has had two further operations. She uses a wheelchair. The current position is that she may get some walking back with a frame over the next few years and she may not.
