A mummy blogger who was “trashed” by disgraced Clemmie Hooper has revealed the fellow influencer has since apologised for trolling her from a fake account.
Emma Hartridge, 32, said the embattled blogger admitted to calling Hartridge and her daddy blogger husband, Sam, a “desperate” version of Mrs Hooper and her husband.
Mrs Hooper, who was a midwife turned “mumfluencer” with 660,000 followers, was embroiled in an Instagram scandal recently when she unmasked herself as a troll.
Despite being known as Mother of Daughters, she was leading a secret double life under the username “Aliceinwanderlust” where she anonymously attacked other popular bloggers on the Tattle Life forum.
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Her targets included many of her so-called friends in the mummy influencers’ circuit including Mrs Hartridge — and even her own husband Simon Hooper, whose Father of Daughters account has more than one million followers.
“When I saw what Alice had said about me and Sam, I wanted to know the truth, so I sent Clemmie a message asking if Alice really was her,” Hartridge said, the Daily Mail reports.
“She admitted it was her and I was really shocked. She apologised to me and said she hadn’t meant any of the comments.”
Mrs Hopper made the decision to reveal her second online identity earlier this month after some Tattle Life users became suspicious she was behind the account.
Eyebrows were raised as the account regularly spoke derogatively of other mum influencers, while it had only glowing comments to say about the Mother of Daughters account.
After one of Aliceinwanderlust’s posts referenced her being on holidays in the Caribbean at the same time as Mrs Hooper piqued interest, the trolling account issued a blistering denial.
Defending her positive views of Mrs Hooper, screengrabs appeared to show Aliceinwanderlust slamming Father of Daughters, writing: “Her husband on the other hand is a class at (sic) t**t. I can’t believe she puts up with his nonsense.”
However when she finally confessed, Mrs Hooper said she created the fake online account out of desperation after reading negative comments about herself on the forum.
“Reading them made me feel extremely paranoid and affected me much more than I knew at the time,” she said.
“I decided without telling anyone else that I would make an anonymous account so that this group of people would believe I was one of them so that I could maybe change their opinions from the inside to defend my family and I.”
In her quest to build herself up, however, Hooper said the gossip game “became all-consuming.”
“When the users started to suspect it was me, I made the mistake of commenting about others. I regret it all and am deeply sorry — I know this has caused a lot of pain,” Mrs Hooper said.
“Engaging in this was a huge mistake. I take full responsibility for what’s happened and I am just so sorry for the hurt I have caused to everyone involved, including my friends and family.”
Mrs Hooper’s husband later issued his own statement on Instagram, writing that he was “in a crap position” as he could only “stay silent” to protect his wife or “comment on something I had no knowledge of”.
Mrs Hartridge, who has two sons and runs the account Mum of Mad Lads, however appears to have forgiven the blogger, urging followers to think about why Mrs Hooper did what she did.
“We all make mistakes,” she said. “Clemmie must have been in a dark place to do this. It’s easy to make Clemmie out to be a villain, but she has such a huge presence online — it must be a lot of pressure and that can have negative effects.”
She had previously slammed the revelation on her Instagram account, saying she was “disappointed” that someone among the circle had “trashed other Instagram people”.
“It hasn’t hurt me (takes a lot more than that), but it has bothered me,” Mrs Hartridge wrote. “The reason? It sets us all back. Women. Someone who professed to support her own kind. To be a champion for us. It’s let us down in a big way.”
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