‘Ugly’ taunts drove barrister to have plastic surgery

A BARRISTER being sued by her mother over a memoir about childhood abuse has told a court she resorted to plastic surgery after enduring repeated taunts.

Constance Briscoe told the High Court she had plastic surgery to get rid of the ugliness which her mother taunted her about.

The 51-year-old part-time judge said that, as a student in Newcastle, she used her university grant to pay for operations on the bridge and bottom of her nose, her upper and lower lip and eventually her eyes.

“I had it because my mother had for a very long time called me ugly, and I was conscious of my looks and I wanted to get rid of the ugliness.”

Ms Briscoe said that she had bad acne when she was younger and, by the time she was 14, had to wear a wig to conceal hair loss.

“My mother would call me ugly, call me a dirty little whore, call me potato head, call me Miss Pissabed . . . and Scarface.”

Ms Briscoe is being sued for libel by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over allegations of sustained childhood cruelty and neglect made in her 2006 memoir, Ugly.

The 74-year-old mother of 11, who is also suing publisher Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, has denied her allegations and told Mr Justice Tugendhat and a London jury that her relationship with her daughter as a child was a loving one.

Ms Briscoe, of Crescent Grove, Clapham, south-west London, says the contents of the book are substantially true and not “a piece of fiction” as her mother claims.

She said that the unmanageable bedwetting which irritated her mother began “ever since I knew myself” and continued most nights until she was 14.

At first her mother tried to help but then started warning her that she would be beaten if she did not stop, she claims.

It progressed so that if she wet the bed, her mother would pull her out of bed by her knickers and beat her with a shoe, a belt a cane, or a “split-split stick”.

Ms Briscoe said, when she was nine, her mother had deliberately cut her on the inside of her arm with a knife in a row over the preparation of a chicken.

She also described how her mother had flown a remote control toy plane into her face, leaving open pink wounds on her cheek.

The hearing was adjourned until today.