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The Guardian - UK

National

Geneva Abdul

Former UCL academic to pay damages after harassing colleague for months

Erica Smith UCL Twitter Inc. United States University College London

University College London. — University College London. Photograph: peterspiro/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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.

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