A survivor of the Manchester Arena attack is calling for greater legal protections from conspiracy theorists after a YouTuber with millions of viewers secretly filmed his family to try to prove they were “crisis actors”.
Martin Hibbert and his daughter Eve, now 22, were left with life-changing injuries by the blast, which killed 22 people and wounded hundreds more at an Ariana Grande concert in May 2017.
They were the closest people to the suicide bomber to survive but Eve suffered a severe brain injury and Hibbert, 48, was paralysed when his spinal cord was severed by shrapnel.
The father and daughter were awarded £45,000 in damages in October after suing a former TV producer turned conspiracy theorist who claimed in online films that the attack was staged.
In videos viewed tens of thousands of times, Richard Hall described the Arena bomb as a “well-organised and well-planned fake terrorist incident involving over 100 enlisted participants or actors” and that it involved “fabricated deaths”.
Hall, a former engineer and TV producer, had also spread conspiracy theories about the murders of Jo Cox and Jill Dando, the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, the Salisbury poisonings and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
His YouTube channel, which was shut down in October 2022, had 84,000 followers and his videos had more than 16m views, the high court in London was told this year.
The judge, Mrs Justice Steyn, condemned Hall’s conduct as “oppressive, unacceptable and of sufficient gravity to sustain criminal liability” after hearing how the YouTuber had covertly filmed Eve and her mother in September 2019 after tracking down the teenager in an effort to try to prove she was a “crisis actor”.