When Miranda Grell won a surprise local election victory for Labour in an 'unwinnable' seat she was tipped as a future high-flyer.
The 29-year-old councillor, a researcher for London's deputy mayor who once campaigned alongside Foreign Secretary David Miliband, overturned a large majority to win from the Liberal Democrats a ward they had held for 25 years.
But yesterday, Grell was in court accused of mounting an extraordinary smear campaign against her rival, telling voters that he was a gay paedophile who had a teenage boyfriend from Thailand.
While canvassing on doorsteps in Leyton, East London, she allegedly asked householders if they knew that 56-year-old Lib Dem councillor Barry Smith was a homosexual and told them he had a preference for underage boys.
On the first day of Grell's trial at Waltham Forest Magistrates' Court yesterday, Mr Smith broke down as he described a dramatic change in how the public responded to him in the run up to the local elections in May last year.
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smith and grell
Lib Dem Barry Smith accuses Councillor Miranda Grell of slurring him
He said he went from being a popular figure in the community he had served as a councillor for four years, to a virtual pariah.
He admitted being gay and having been in a 'fully committed' relationship with a 38-year-old Malaysian man for the past 13 years.
But he said he had deliberately kept his private life a secret from colleagues and the general public for fear of being judged.
As election day approached he 'sensed a change of mood on the doorstep.'
He said: 'A couple of times I was spoken to roughly. "Yes, we know all about you," some poeple said.
'And there were times when doors just got slammed in my face.'
Mr Smith - a high profile councillor who sat on the Cabinet of Waltham Forest Borough Council - said he was shocked to come fourth in the election, having previously had a majority of more than 600 votes. Grell won the ward by 28 votes.
In the following months he said he was subjected to homophobic abuse on the streets near his home and installed a security gate on his front door for fear of attack.
In one incident he was called a 'f****** paedo' by a group of youths and on another occasion a man in his early thirties spat at him and called him a 'kiddie f*****.'
He first suspected the smear campaign when a voter, mother of two Naomi Robinson, revealed that Grell had told her on three occasions that he was gay and had a 16-year-old Thai boyfriend.
Mr Smith broke down as he said: 'I was in a state of shock. I thought it was bad enough that homophobia was being used against me, but i suppose the fact that I'm gay is true.
'But when I heard there was a possible suggestion of peadophilia, some things cannot be described and I just wanted to get out of there.'
Mr Smith, who said he had since moved to the North of England, encouraged Miss Robinson and her partner to make a complaint to a council organisation called Alert which documents incidents of alleged hate crimes.
The issue was taken to the police last October and several further witnesses came forward accusing Grell of making similar smears.
Grell was charged in March with four offences under Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, which forbids making false statements against a political rival's character.
Grell denies all charges, claiming that Mr Smith encouraged Lib Dem supporters to invent the allegations because of his disappointment at losing his seat.
Grell, who is single and whose parents came to England in 1973 from the Caribbean island of Dominica, has a first class honours degree in European studies with modern languages from the University of Manchester and a master's in industrial relations from the London School of Economics.
She works as a research officer for London's Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron and previously worked as a senior policy advisor to the Trades Union Congress(TUC) and a trainee speechwriter to Anna Diamantopoulou, the former European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs.
The trial, expected to last three days, continues.
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