In this hilarious encounter, an angry British writer traced a teenager to another country and smashed her head with a full bottle of wine for writing a bad review on his book online.
Richard Brittain
A 28-year-old British writer who became a little known for his 2006 victory on the quiz show Countdown, tracked down a Scottish teenager who wrote a negative review of his self-published novel on Amazon and shattered a bottle of wine on the back of her head.
Richard Brittain was irked after he posted an unfinished version of his book, The World Rose, on Wattpad, an app where amateur writers post their stories for reviews, only for him to get a one-star review lambasting his novel by Paige Rolland, a Scottish teenager.
Brittain, incensed at the one-star review, apparently tracked down Rolland’s Facebook page, discovering that she lived in Scotland and worked at an Asda supermarket. He allegedly traveled 500 miles from London and found her at the store, crouching to stock a low shelf of cereal boxes. He hit her from behind with a full bottle of wine, leaving her unconscious and with a gash on her head.
Here is a part of Paige Rolland's review that made Richard smash her head with a full bottle of wine, leaving her unconscious:
"As a reader, I’m bored out of my skull and severely disappointed in what I might have paid for. As a writer (albeit an amateur one) I’m appalled that anyone would think this was worthy of money.
"Not only does it begin with 'once upon a time' which you could argue is perfect as this is a fairytale (and it doesn’t work, it’s incredibly pretentious), but it’s filled with many writing no-nos. Way too much telling, pretentious prose, and a main character that I already hate.
"Ella is the perfect princess (true to fairytales, so we can at least give him a little credit despite how painfully annoying this is coupled with a complete lack of real personality shining through)."
According to the Daily Mail, this isn’t even the first time Brittain has been accused of stalking a woman online. The perfect princess of his novel, Ella Tundra, was apparently based on a woman he targeted, a creepy courtship he described in a blog post called, “The Benevolent Stalker.”
Richard Brittain pleaded guilty to the 2014 assault in a Scottish court Monday, as he waited for his sentence.