‘THERE WAS THIS ENTIRE PART of Mum that I never knew about,” Ben Leyland says. Brenda Leyland was a stylish, well-spoken and rather private woman who lived in a picturesque village in Leicestershire. He knew she told stories, and that some of them may have been on the tall side. He also knew that she spent a lot of time on her laptop and was increasingly living online. What he didn’t know was that his mother had become a Twitter troll who spent the final years of her life relentlessly attacking the parents of Madeleine McCann, the girl who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 at the age of three and hasn’t been seen since.
In 2014, Brenda was approached by a Sky News journalist who asked her why she was trolling the McCanns on Twitter. She was about to get into a car with her friend to visit a garden centre, and declined to comment. The journalist then told her that she had been reported to Scotland Yard and her tweets were being investigated as part of a larger campaign of abuse against the McCanns. “Well, that’s fair enough,” she said calmly. But Brenda’s face gave her away. Her eyes blinked and her cheek twitched anxiously. Four days later, on 4 October 2014, Brenda killed herself.
Her trolling and subsequent suicide resulted in a number of newspaper stories: about the toxic culture of Twitter; the danger of people hiding behind avatars and fake names on social media; the biliousness of Brenda’s attack on the McCanns; and the tragedy of her death. What could have led a woman to post hundreds of tweets attacking a couple she had never met, and why did she think there was nothing left to live for when she was caught out?
Ben, 38, has not talked to a newspaper about his mother before. But, nearly a decade on, he believes there are lessons to be learned from her story – lessons that have been crucial to his own survival. Ben, who graduated from Oxford University with a degree in theology, is a recovering drug addict who works as a life coach in Los Angeles for people with mental health and addiction problems.
Although he recognises there was much he didn’t know about his mother, in other ways they were painfully close. “When she died, she took me out too,” he says. “It was a suicide bomb. I never had a separate identity from Mum.” Over the past seven years, he has done detective work, trying to piece together Brenda’s life. Only by understanding her has he been able to understand himself, he says. But it’s not been easy. So much of her life was a fiction, and he’s still trying to disentangle the truth from the make-believe.
After Brenda’s death, Ben gave up his job and devoted himself to his own destruction. He had been working in corporate law for seven years, and the
