A 50-year-old woman has been jailed for more than four and a half years after forging a cancer letter and inventing a bogus witness while pursuing employment tribunal claims against two of her former employers.
Louise Gallagher, a sales worker from Marlborough in Wiltshire, was sentenced to four years and eight months at Wood Green Crown Court in Haringey on Friday (9 October) after admitting three counts of perverting the course of justice.
The court heard that Gallagher faked a handwritten note purporting to come from her GP, in which she claimed to be seriously ill with breast cancer that had spread to other parts of her body, describing herself as “fighting for her life”. The note asked for her case to be postponed for two years so she could undergo treatment.
Gallagher had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020, but the GP named on the note told investigators she had not written it.
The forged letter emerged during Gallagher’s sex discrimination claim against distribution company Bunzl, which she pursued through the employment tribunal in 2020 and 2021.
In that case, she claimed Transport for London held CCTV footage showing her being sexually assaulted by a colleague at Waterloo station. She altered a genuine email from TfL to support the claim and continued to insist to a judge that the footage existed, even after TfL confirmed that it did not.
When the deception came to light, she produced the fake GP note in an attempt to have the proceedings delayed.
Her claim against Bunzl was dismissed, and she was ordered to pay £8,000 towards the company’s legal costs.
Gallagher then brought a separate unfair dismissal claim against health products supplier Essity in 2022 and 2023, during which she invented a witness to an alleged sexual assault and set up an email account in his name.
Posing as the fictional witness, she sent a bogus statement to police, which led to the man she had accused being questioned under caution. Officers grew suspicious and discovered that Gallagher had created the email account and activated the phone only after making the allegation.
The Essity claim was eventually struck out after a judge concluded she had “repeatedly provided false evidence during the course of these Employment Tribunal proceedings”.
The court heard that Gallagher maintained her allegations of sexual assault and harassment against employees of both companies were genuine, claiming she had fabricated the evidence out of “desperation to be believed”.
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped further charges alleging she had invented the assault allegations themselves, telling the court the evidence did not meet the criminal threshold for bringing those charges.
Both companies told the court they had spent tens of thousands of pounds defending the claims, as well as significant resources investigating evidence that turned out to be bogus.
Sentencing her, Judge Timothy Godfrey described her behaviour as a “prolonged, blatant, and egregious course of conduct, liable to undermine public justice”, adding: “Your conduct was sophisticated and planned, including lying to a tribunal judge on oath.”
The judge noted that Gallagher, already a convicted fraudster, would serve one third of her sentence before being automatically released.
In 2015 she was convicted of stealing £4,500 from her employers, then submitting altered bank statements and a fake letter from HMRC to cover up the missing money. The previous year she had been convicted of buying £1,822 worth of equestrian equipment using bank details stolen from a woman’s handbag at an event.
At the sentencing hearing, Gallagher produced a character reference from her manager at cleaning firm Samsic UK, who described her as a “valued and trusted employee”.
