A saleswoman who forged a doctor’s note about cancer treatment and fabricated evidence of sexual assaults during failed employment tribunal claims has been jailed.
Louise Gallagher, 50, submitted bogus evidence while bringing a sex discrimination case against distribution company Bunzl.
She also pursued a separate unfair dismissal claim against healthcare products supplier Essity.
In both cases, Gallagher presented false material intended to support allegations that she had been sexually assaulted.
Her claims included altering a genuine Transport for London (TfL) email and insisting that CCTV existed showing a colleague sexually assaulting her at Waterloo station.
She also lied directly to a judge and invented a witness for police, Wood Green Crown Court heard.
Gallagher also submitted a forged doctor’s sick note, claiming she had been signed off work for two years while receiving cancer treatment as her employment tribunal case against Bunzl began to falter.
At Wood Green Crown Court, Judge Timothy Godfrey sentenced Gallagher to four years and eight months in prison after she admitted three counts of perverting the course of justice.
Louise Gallagher, 50, submitted fabricated evidence while suing distribution company Bunzl for sex discrimination. She also brought a separate unfair dismissal claim against healthcare products supplier Essity.
“It was a prolonged, blatant, and egregious course of conduct, liable to undermine public justice,” the judge said.
“Your conduct was sophisticated and planned, including lying to a tribunal judge on oath.”
The court heard that Gallagher was already a convicted fraudster. In 2015, she was convicted of stealing £4,500 from employers before submitting doctored bank statements and a fake HMRC letter in an attempt to conceal the missing money.
She was also convicted in 2014 after using bank details stolen from a woman’s handbag at an event to buy £1,822 worth of equestrian equipment.
The court heard on Friday that Gallagher continues to maintain that the sexual assault and harassment allegations in her claims against Bunzl and Essity were genuine. She says she submitted the false evidence because she was “desperate to be believed”.
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped additional charges alleging that Gallagher had invented the sexual assault claims, telling the court that it did not consider the evidence strong enough to meet the criminal test for prosecution.
During her tribunal case against Bunzl in 2020 and 2021, Gallagher repeatedly claimed that TfL held CCTV footage showing her being sexually assaulted by a colleague at Waterloo station.
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She altered a genuine TfL email to support the claim and continued to tell a judge that the CCTV existed, even after TfL confirmed that no such footage was available.
Gallagher was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison after admitting three counts of perverting the course of justice.
After that deception was exposed, Gallagher submitted the forged doctor’s note in an attempt to delay the tribunal proceedings.
Between 2022 and 2023, she also invented a witness connected to a sexual assault allegation in her tribunal case against Essity.
Gallagher gave a bogus statement to police, posing as the invented witness over email, leading to the man she had accused being questioned under caution.
But police grew suspicious, and they discovered that Gallagher had created the supposed witness’s email account and activated the phone after making the sexual assault claim.
The court heard Gallagher was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020 but the GP whose name was on the fake sick note said she had not written it.
The handwritten letter created by Gallagher read: ‘The claimant is very sick with breast cancer which has spread to other parts of the body so needs years of treatments and some of the tumours can’t be operated on until the treatments shrink them.
‘Her health must come first and she is currently fighting for her life and this is why we have asked for this case to be postponed for two years.’
Gallagher’s claim was thrown out, and she was ordered to pay £8,000 to cover Bunzl’s legal costs.
Gallagher’s claim of sexual harassment against Essity was only made in response to her being put under investigation for falsifying documents and being dishonest.
That claim was eventually struck out when a judge concluded she had ‘repeatedly provided false evidence during the course of these Employment Tribunal proceedings’.
The two companies told the court on Friday that they had been forced to spend tens of thousands of pounds defending Gallagher’s claims, and devoted significant resources to investigating the evidence which turned out to be bogus.
At her sentencing hearing, Gallagher produced a character reference from her manager at cleaning company Samsic UK, calling her a ‘valued and trusted employee’.
Gallagher, of Marlborough in Wiltshire, pleaded guilty to three counts of perverting the course of justice.
The judge said she will serve one-third of her prison term before being automatically released.