A horror accident left me brain damaged, then private investigators started following me and now I’m ruined
Kirsty Williams-Henry had not become aware of how joyful her life had been in the past until after a series of unfortunate occurrences were brought to her attention. “Awesome” friends, a well-paid profession that she liked, and a partner that she adored were all things that the 27-year-old possessed at the time.
“I was very respected in what I did,” adds Kirsty, who hails from Port Talbot on the other hand. The amount of money I was making allowed me to take vacations four or five times a year, and I would go to a variety of places during those trips. On the weekends, I would often hang out with my pals. “And then, all of a sudden, everything came to a halt because I was unable to do anything.”
When Kirsty was at Aberavon Pier with her family on the evening of July 21, 2018, she slipped over the edge of the pier and fell four to five meters into the rocks below. This event marked the beginning of the dividing line in her life. After suffering skull fractures and brain damage, Kirsty was unconscious for a period of three weeks and went through waves of awareness. According to her, the consequences finally led to her abandoning her work at Admiral Insurance, where she had been on track to earn up to £110,000 per year, according to a judge who would later find out about the situation.
Despite the fact that she is now 33 years old, Kirsty has not talked to WalesOnline about the tragedy itself. The second disaster that she has experienced in her life is the source of her inspiration. Additionally, she had filed a claim for damages in the amount of £2.3 million against the proprietor of the pier, Associated British Ports (ABP), a massive operator that operates 21 ports all over the United Kingdom and generated income of £707 million in the previous year. Mr. Justice Ritchie, the judge who presided over the case, did come to the conclusion that Kirsty had suffered a “moderately severe” brain injury. If he had decided to grant her damages, he would have given her over 600,000 pounds. However, he decided to reject her claim because he believed that she was a “breathtakingly dishonest” in her statements.
Kirsty informed us that the judge’s remarks were so hurtful that she has not yet read his verdict in its entirety. This was said in an intense and sometimes tearful conversation that took place four months after the event. The verdict, which was 99 pages long, found that Kirsty had lied about her health while she was participating in activities such as “regular spa weekends, foreign holidays including foreign hen nights, beach holidays, pop and rock concerts, pub crawls, cinema nights, sing-along nights, hen nights in the UK, weddings, trips to London to see exhibitions, and visits to curry houses and steak houses.” The verdict was extremely damning.
Now, after the judge’s remarks made headlines, Kirsty has reacted for the first time, providing a detailed explanation of her thoughts. It was a matter of her “pretending to have a life” that she made those fateful postings on Facebook, according to her story. She has said that she is having a very difficult time paying her expenses, and she has vehemently refuted the judge’s assertion that she lied in order to get assistance. She has also discussed the effect that the ruling had on her mother, who was fired from her nursing position after the court found her to be involved in the “lies,” as well as her concerns over the influence that the case would have on other people who have survived brain injuries.
What the court referred to as “humble circumstances” was the environment in which Kirsty spent her childhood on a council estate in Port Talbot. The court was informed that she had an IQ of 103, which is considered to be ordinary, but that she put in a lot of effort in school and eventually earned a first-class degree in computer sciences from Mid Glamorgan University. She started working with Admiral and swiftly worked her way up to the position of senior business analyst from the beginning. The judge referred to her as “very driven” and made the statement that she “gained most of her self-esteem” as a result of her hard work. She was “grossly critical” of senior management, and the judge said that this would have “held her advancement back somewhat.” Despite the fact that her performance assessments were usually extremely positive, she was always highly critical of them.
As the court heard, Kirsty had purchased a home with a “quite large” mortgage by the time she was 24 years old. The home was located only ten minutes’ walk away from Aberavon beach. After reading about a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to witness bioluminescent plankton in the ocean, she took her family to the pier on the evening of her accident. They had heard about the opportunity in the news. Kirsty suffered a fracture to her skull on the rocks when she went over the edge as she was walking in the dark. She then saw a therapist for eight days to get intense treatment. A shattered ankle and pelvis were among the injuries that the judge acknowledged she had sustained, along with “extensive” damage to two of her cerebral lobes. However, he said that her IQ was unaffected by the injuries.
According to Kirsty, the injuries had a significant impact on both her capacity to function and the connections she had with other people. “Kirsty, would you please tell me if you have brushed your teeth and put on some clothes? Someone needs to tell me.” In the past, if there was a new piece of technology that was implemented at work, I was the first one to utilize it. At this point, I am unable to acquire any knowledge. Simply said, the exhaustion is simply… All of these things are too stimulating for me. My companion vanished without id. It was impossible for my friend groups to cope with me. The excessive amount of stimulation caused me to get so enraged, and as a result, they just stopped communicating with me.
Kirsty continued to work at Admiral for a period of four years, but she claims that she was “in denial” throughout this time and “trying to be old Kirsty” — a word that she uses quite often during our discussion — until she ultimately decided to leave the company in 2022. When she reached that stage, she claims that she had the sensation of being a “vegetable” and that she had been falling with tiredness after each shift. In addition, she claims that she was experiencing persistent discomfort in both her hip and her ankle. While this was going on, she had retained the services of Hugh James, a leading legal practice in Cardiff, to sue the owner of the pier, ABP, for damages totaling £2.3 million.
Kirsty admitted to the court that she had consumed alcohol before to her fall; however, she claimed that she had only had one pint of beer. It was also brought to his attention that the safety rails on the pier had been removed many years previously. The liability was resolved in her favor by a margin of two-thirds. However, according to the judge, Kirsty was on track to ultimately be promoted to a post that would pay between £77,458 and £110,250 per year. At the time of the fall, her annual salary was £34,000. However, she was on track to eventually be promoted to this role. He said that if she had been truthful about her injuries, he would have allowed her to get a total of £596,704 in damages award. In its place, he did not award anything. He remarked, “I know it looks like a large sum of money to deprive a genuinely injured person of,” but he added that there was a need to “stamp out dishonesty” in personal injury claims. He said this because he believed that dishonesty was a symptom of the problem.
By following Kirsty, two investigators who were employed by ABP were able to collect a significant amount of evidence. Their footage “gave the lie” to her claims about her injuries, the judge said. For example, they filmed her driving long distances from London to Wales and from Wales to Liverpool, sometimes walking without a stick, carrying trays of food, bending to the ground, lifting suitcases, parking “with ease,” and shopping with her mother for 105 minutes. All of these activities were documented on their footage. The court said that Kirsty had “appeared more disabled” when she went for expert exams with a stick around the same time. The judge dismissed her statement of “good days and bad days” as an explanation for her disability.
Another source of contention for Kirsty was the content of her social media postings, which revealed that she had been vacationing in Benidorm, Zante, and Cyprus, as well as attending concerts with Pink, Lizzo, and two performances by the Spice Girls. The court questioned the reason why she had informed the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) that she had “hypersensitivity to noise” in light of this information. The court also noted that there were photographs of her reclining on sun loungers and Facebook postings discussing her sunburn, both of which were inconsistent with her assertions that she could “no longer tolerate elevated temperature.”
When we bring this up to Kirsty, she responds by stating that it is an exaggeration of the truth. Prior to the trial, ABP had provided Kirsty with interim payments totaling 75,000 pounds, which contributed to the funding of private rehabilitation. “For all of these events, the doctors were working with me,” she explains further. Just as I would need three or four days before the Pink performance and three or four days after the event to recuperate, I would need three or four days. The medical professionals were all about me, taking notes on how I had suffered both before and after all of these occurrences. She is certain that “everyone knew” about her intentions, and that the observations made by her physicians demonstrated how open she was.
Kirsty was found to have lied to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) when she said that she required a wheelchair whenever she “went anywhere outside” with her mother or to medical visits. One more time, Kirsty refers to this as a distortion. She claims that her mobility has “evolved” since the fall, despite the fact that it was “horrendous” in the months that followed the incident. “My left leg has been giving me discomfort for a while now. In my hip, I suffer from persistent discomfort. Therefore, if I am aware that I will have to walk a considerable distance, such as at airports, I will make use of the accessibility (wheelchair) since I am aware that by the time we reach the gate, I will be in excruciating pain. A year prior to the case, I informed my rehabilitation team that I had reached a point where I could walk 1.8 miles without the need of any assistance. The improvement that I was making was something that I was willingly doing.
Kirsty was criticized by the court for driving a manual automobile, despite the fact that she had said that she had “great difficulty” driving a manual car and had purchased an automated Motability vehicle with help from the state. However, Kirsty is certain that driving in manual mode does, in fact, cause her ankle discomfort, and that the only reason she did so was because she was giving her cousin a driving lesson. My cousin was in the process of learning how to drive when I made the decision to convert my own vehicle to an automatic because of how difficult it was. Because I was the one who drove that automobile the most of the time while I was teaching her how to drive, I decided to get an insurance policy for it. Because there is where I am most likely to get into trouble, I never drove farther than my immediate vicinity. It causes me to get exhausted, disoriented, and bewildered. That is the point to consider. When it comes to the courts, everything is clear and unambiguous. It is a sign that you are not having any difficulties if you are able to drive even once.
A large deal of information was provided in the ruling about the covert monitoring of Kirsty’s actions, including her technique when she was bowling at a bowling alley. The court said that she was lying when she stated that the only bowling frame she had ever used was a metal frame. Kirsty, on the other hand, said, “The picture that they brought up in court was of my aunt.” No, it was not me. I have a small weakness on my left side, but the issue is that my grasp is not strong enough to endure. That is the difficulty. However, it seemed as if he was essentially denying everything that I had stated.
Is Kirsty willing to acknowledge that lies were said at any point in time? “Not once,” she answers, displaying no signs of emotion. “From the very beginning, I had been consistent in all that I had stated. He was able to harm my reputation and make it so that I don’t want to leave my front door because it was simply distributed everywhere [in news coverage about the court case]. This is something that I am unable to comprehend. At this moment, she is crying her eyes out. throughout the time that Kirsty is regaining her composure, her mother Christel Williams, who was there with her throughout the interview, provides you with some background information.
Catastrophizing is something that Christel believes she does because of the illness that she has. “Some people believe that may be seen as evidence of dishonesty. This is a significant issue in regard to brain injuries. Our inquiry is whether or whether this is consistent with the judge’s criticism that Kirsty said that she had a bone spur in her left ankle, despite the fact that an expert had informed her that she did not have one. It is “no,” Kirsty responds. The ankle specialist at Morriston Hospital confirmed that I did, in fact, have a bone spur at the time of my visit. They explained to me in a very direct manner, “It appears that you have bony spurs here, and that might be the reason why it is locking.” In light of this, I repeated this to a number of different medical professionals since that is what I was informed.
The next claim that we will discuss is the judge’s assertion that Kirsty lied in her application for life insurance. “She could not explain why two months after drinking five pints on a night out she wrote that she never drank alcohol,” stated the judge who decided the case. The response that Kirsty gives is, “I don’t think I’ve ever said that I was sober from the moment I had the accident.” She does this by shaking her head. The first year, I was attempting to be Kirsty when I was younger. One of my goals was to go out with some of my pals. I gave up drinking after a year of trying, and I went a long time without drinking after that.
Kirsty is of the opinion that her social media gives the image of a lifestyle that is far more hedonistic than what she really lived. Due to the fact that I have a Facebook account and I act as if I had a life, people believe that this is all there is to it. There is no truth to social media. Everyone on social media is attempting to present themselves in the most positive light possible. When I fell, I was 27 years old. In the past, I used to go on vacations, I used to go out drinking with my coworkers, and I used to hang out with my friends on the weekends. And then all of a sudden, everything came to a complete halt since I was unable to respond in any way. As a result, there were Facebook postings in which I would say things like, “Oh, I’m in my birthday.” For example, when I went to watch a Wales game at a local pub-restaurant, I would post something like that.
After that, she continues, her voice catching as she says, “I still try to make people believe that I am the same as I was before… Still, I want to have pleasure in life. The activities that my family and friends do are still things that I wish to do. For some reason, I decided to take a vacation. However, this does not imply that I did not fight and endure pain during the whole process.
In spite of the fact that a number of medical professionals had suggested that Kirsty need care and treatment for the rest of her life, Mr. Justice Ritchie discovered that they had been swayed by Kirsty’s fraudulent behavior. It was said by the court that she had made a “excellent recovery” from her injuries. The judge also mentioned the views of two specialists who believed that Kirsty had to be encouraged to return to work.
Kirsty is certain that she is not in a place to be able to work. She states that her private physicians have such a high level of confidence in her that they have continued to provide her with free twice-weekly rehabilitation sessions even when the Affordable therapy Act (ABP) ceased covering the therapy. And despite the fact that the court found that she attempted to “defraud” the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), she claims that the government agency has not expressed any concerns and has continued to provide her with PIP (Personal Independence Payment).
The court did not compel Kirsty to return the 75,000 pounds that she had received in interim payments because he believed that doing so would result in her being homeless, without a job, and in a condition of desperation. In addition, Kirsty claims that her attorneys at Huw James have made the decision to forego her legal fees because they consider that she has been treated unfairly. She has still been profoundly affected by the fact that she was unable to get the prospective reward. According to her, “I am unable to pay my own bills.” It has become necessary for my mother to sell her home in order to provide for both of us.
The money would have been the deciding factor in whether or not I would have been able to create anything of myself, or if I would have succumbed to despair and died at an early age. I have a house that is dangerous, the number of times that I fall when I am in the shower is outrageous, and I really need some adjustments. The dream that I had of perhaps establishing a life for myself has just been shattered on account of him. If you Google my name, you will find that I am referred to as a fake and a liar for pages and pages. Who is going to even consider hiring me at this point, when I have all of these health issues that force me to be unable to keep up with the pace of the work?
Not only Kirsty was accused of lying, but other others were as well. In addition, the judge said that Christel had been “completely dishonest” and had “sought to mislead” the court over the skills of her daughter. Christel, who had been working as a nurse with St. John Ambulance for eight years, has refuted this assertion. She left her position when the organization expressed its displeasure with the judge’s decision. To quote Kirsty, “She is a nurse of the highest caliber.” As soon as the verdict was handed down, St. John’s immediately suspended her. It was then that she made the decision to declare, “If you are not going to support me when all I’ve done is support my daughter, then I quit.”
