On August 25, 2020, a police constable sent a 400-word email to senior officers in the Royal Marines. It would ultimately cost the taxpayer more than 300,000 — and four years of turmoil for one man.
The subject of her email was Elliot Kebbie, a former Leeds United footballer turned special forces commando. The constable accused him of threatening his former partner and insinuated that Kebbie, 30, was not the serving marine he claimed to be.
West Yorkshire police had not charged or spoken to Kebbie. Yet the force was asking the Marines to instigate an internal investigation against him on the basis of unfounded claims made by his former partner.
Kebbie, 30, who can be identified for the first time after a judge lifted an anonymity order relating to his work in the military, told The Times: “They were trying to make out that I was this mad Walter Mitty figure, someone living in a fantasy world and not an actual marine.”
After years of grinding legal action, he has won a landmark defamation case against West Yorkshire police — the first force in England to be found to have committed the highest level of defamation.
Kebbie, who is black, said he believed the disdain and suspicion with which he had been treated by West Yorkshire police had been informed by racial prejudice, which sooner viewed him as a “black fantasist abusing a white woman” than the man he said he was.
“It became very clear to me that they were jumping to conclusions before they’d even spoken to me or met me...
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