Harassment trial of Ashfield Council deputy leader 'will not be decided on politics', court hears
‘Horrific suggestions about what people might do’ were sparked when images of a caravan the deputy leader of Ashfield Council had parked outside his neighbour's house were posted on social media, a court heard.
“That's how Hollis has made people in Sutton feel,” Coun Tom Hollis’s neighbour replied on the first day of a three-day trial for harassment without violence.
“You were building the fire,” Errol Ballentyne, Hollis’s barrister, told her, accusing her of posting the image for ‘political capital' to derail Hollis’s career.
She replied: “I think it was already built and burned by the time I got there.”
Her husband said Hollis called his wife a ‘malicious b****’ over their back garden fence, because she reported him to police for breaching Covid rules.
He said Hollis invited him for a fight at the front of the house, hurled insults and accused him of being a paedophile.
The man said: “I think he was trying to make me retaliate and try to attack him. We’ve had to move house and take (our daughter) out of school.”
The trial, at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court, heard how his wife filmed Hollis ‘screaming and squealing’ during a 999 call, in which he pretended he was being chased by her husband with a knife, on Windmill Close, Huthwaite, on May 16, 2020.
Mr Ballentyne suggested she did not pan the camera around, because her husband was behind her in the alley between their houses.
Hollis, Ashfield Independents’ Ashfield Council member for Huthwaite & Brierley and Nottinghamshire Council member for Sutton West, denies two counts of harassment without violence.
Mark Fielding, prosecuting, said: “If it hadn’t been filmed, his neighbour would have been carted away based on a malicious, concocted 999 call.”
Hollis’s neighbour’s wife described her contact with Lee Anderson, Conservative MP for Ashfield, as ‘minimal’ and couldn't remember how, or if, she voted in last year's local elections.
Mr Ballentyne said: “My case is they were motivated to get Hollis out of office.”
However, District Judge Leo Pyle said: “This case will not be decided on politics or political persuasion, one way or another.”
The court heard Hollis, aged 29, now of Yew Tree Drive, Huthwaite, wrote his neighbours a letter on official council paper seeking to settle their differences, which they found ‘intimidating’.
The trial continues.