Fleming: Died at the end of 2023
The partner of a deceased solicitor has received a suspended sentence for contempt of court after breaching injunctions designed to stop her online harassment of his executors, three of whom are solicitors themselves.
His Honour Judge James Tindal said [1] the combination of Sophie Fleming’s “intensive personal abuse and vilification” of the executors and staff at Brendan Fleming Limited (BFL) “over and again, together with the effect on the administration of justice, means that a fine would not be a sufficient penalty for any of the breaches”.
HHJ Tindal, sitting as a High Court judge, also condemned one Facebook post by Ms Fleming earlier this year for the “absurd and grotesquely insulting allusion between myself and the notorious paedophile Jimmy Saville”.
The judge was referring to the final line of the post, quoted in full in his judgment, which read: “When are these idiots going to wake up and realise that their fraud scheme failed in February 2024? None of their illicit tactics or their applications to Jimmy can fix it.”
HHJ Tindal said the “only mitigation” Ms Fleming had was “what I am prepared to accept is her genuine – but utterly wrong-headed – belief that she is acting in the interests of her children to protect their inheritance, even though time and again I have tried to explain to her that her conduct is actually harming her children’s inheritance”.
He added: “After two years of dealing with this case, I conclude there is simply no reasoning with Ms Fleming.”
Back in a 2024 ruling [2], HHJ Tindal described Brendan Fleming as “larger than life, perhaps one of the most recognisable and well-respected solicitors in Birmingham’s legal community for 40 years”.
When he died at the age of 75 on New Year’s Eve 2023, he left an estate worth around £8m, including BFL, a specialist family law firm then valued at £2.4m.
In August 2024, HHJ Tindal continued an injunction banning Ms Fleming from harassing Mr Fleming’s first two executors, Rebecca Ward, a director at BFL, and Richard Wood, a financial adviser, and appointed their temporary replacements as interim administrators, Fiona Lawrence and Michelle Rose, both partners at Bristol law firm VWV.
In November 2024, he found that Ms Fleming’s allegations of fraud and corruption by the first two executors were “wholly without substance” and that Ms Fleming had breached the injunction.
A year later, he made a further anti-harassment injunction in favour of Ms Lawrence and Ms Rose, who faced “similar online harassment by spurious allegations of fraud and professional misconduct”.
All four brought committal proceedings against her at the latest hearing. Ms Fleming neither appeared nor was represented at the last or the latest hearing.
She had continued to breach the injunction; examples included one picturing Ms Lawrence and Ms Rose with the words “probate fraud” and another reading: “Relying on Mr Tindal’s Ultra Vires Orders to help yourself to Estate Funds is THEFT”.
HHJ Tindal said an aggravating feature of Ms Fleming’s conduce was the impact on Ms Lawrence and Ms Rose’s junior colleagues at VWV, and on Mr Wood’s and Ms Ward’s colleagues too.
“Indeed, Ms Fleming’s harassment of Ms Ward and her current and Mr Fleming’s former colleagues at his firm is particularly bizarre as her own children (but not herself, to her evident frustration) have an interest in it under his will.
“Ms Fleming has been prepared recklessly to attack and undermine Mr Fleming’s legacy, as shown by her social media post I read seeking to dissuade parents facing public law proceedings about their children from instructing the firm. I can only imagine the dismay Mr Fleming would have felt about that conduct had he lived.”
For the breaches of injunctions relating to the first two claimants, HHJ Tindal imposed a prison sentence of 28 days, suspended for two years. For the breaches relating to the second two claimants, he imposed a prison sentence of seven days, suspended for a year.
He admitted to having “no confidence that Ms Fleming will ever come to see the error of her conduct, or indeed that any court order can ever effectively secure future compliance”.
The judge said: “It is possible she may realise that if she carries on with her harassment, the court is going to be left with no other option but to activate the custodial sentence and to issue a warrant for her arrest… It is just possible that may have some deterrent ‘Sword of Damocles’ effect…
“I sincerely hope that concludes my own involvement in this most challenging case. However, that depends on whether Ms Fleming finally complies with the injunctions.”