A woman who became entangled in a Met Police scandal after discovering she had once been engaged to an undercover cop has described how two years of her life were a 'complete lie'.
Donna McLean's life was turned upside down when she discovered the man she had been in a relationship with for two years and was was engaged to was an undercover police officer.
The mum-of-two, who grew up in Scotland and now lives in Kent, first met her partner Carlo at an anti-war protest in September 2002 after the war against Iraq was announced.
Carlo had been working as a steward at the demo and was also friends with Donna's 'trusted' social circle.
The pair struck up a relationship and it moved quickly.
Donna and her new partner began living together in her London Maida Vale flat after six weeks and were engaged three months later.
She believed she had met her 'soulmate'.
But the relationship turned sour when Donna didn't hear anything for a couple of weeks.
The couple continued the relationship for another six months but no longer lived together before he eventually broke up with her in an email sent to her work.
She said: "It was all lies. He's got a separate family somewhere else, actually not that far away, just outside London.
"I had no idea. He was very much part of my family. He'd met my family in Scotland twice before we got engaged, he'd been up to Glasgow and Ayrshire twice before then."
It wouldn't be until a decade after the relationship ended that the truth about Carlo emerged, in July 2015.
Donna told Lorraine: "I'd heard he'd moved back to Italy at a birthday party from a wider group of friends. I thought he'd had an awful experience and a psychological breakdown and gone back to Italy.
"And then in July 2015 I got a message completely out of the blue from one of the old friends in that circle on Facebook saying 'can we talk about Carlo?"
While the question came as a shock, Donna had already become aware of the spy cops scandal through the book Undercover by Paul Lewis and Rob Evans.
Speaking on ITV's Lorraine programme, she said: "The hairs on the back of my neck went up a bit because it was so similar to these women but what I couldn't understand was these women were prominent activists, whereas I worked in mental health."
Donna decided to press charges and was paid damages and received a full apology from the Met police in March 2021 after her court case lasted five years.
Donna is convinced she became Carlo's target due to her connections with left-wing friends and trade union activists.
The brave Scot has now released a new book, called ' Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police'.
She revealed the book was 'hugely cathartic' to write as she pieced together fragments of memories.
She added: "Writing the book definitely helped me. For two years of my life was a complete lie so I needed to process that and work out how it affected what happened afterwards, and it became a book by accident almost."
