A woman who had a one-night-stand with a businessman she met in a nightclub has been ordered to pay him £25,000 after she launched a ‘horrific’ campaign of harassment and falsely accused him of raping her, MailOnline can reveal.
Cynthia Chia was ordered to pay the five-figure sum to energy trader Idowu Ogunkanmi, 44, for both harassment and libel, bringing to an end a bitter High Court court battle that she refused to engage with.
The court heard how Mr Ogunkanmi, who lives in Dubai but travels regularly for work, met Ms Chia in a London nightclub in 2015 but within months she began a ‘sustained, relentless and vindictive’ campaign of harassment that lasted almost nine years.
Mr Ogunkanmi has been awarded £25,000 in damages after the High Court judge ruled he had faced years of ‘harassment’ and ‘malicious intent’, while Ms Chia failed to turn up at court and was not represented.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, the father-of-three said: ‘When I met her she seemed perfectly normal. For someone to be that persistent for so long on a lie, I pray for her. There’s definitely something wrong with her, I don’t know what it is.
‘I met this person for less than 12 hours, that was it… to me that’s been the scariest part.’
Mr Ogunkanmi says he was left ‘traumatised’ and ‘shocked’ by the allegations, explaining: ‘I think she is a very hateful and troublesome person and she lied for so many years about something like that, reposting the same thing.
‘There were so many accusations: rape, stealing her kids, conniving with the Met Police, getting her pregnant. It was all just baseless accusations. The accusations were beyond belief. I only ever met her once in my life.
‘She probably thought I had a lot of money and was looking to extort me. Because I refused to be extorted, she started this hateful Instagram campaign on me and her friend.
‘It’s unbelievable that anyone could come up with these kind of things.’
Mr Ogunkami says he is relieved by the legal victory but believes he should have been awarded more ‘as it does not fully account for the depth of damage to my reputation and well-being’.
He also said social media companies have a greater role to play, adding: ‘Anyone can just go to the internet now or Instagram, create a fake post and say anything about anyone and Instagram will keep it there. I don’t understand it.
‘There are people who could have committed suicide. You could lose your job, you could lose your family just by someone out there creating these remarks about you.’
Court documents show the pair met when Mr Ogunkanmi asked one of Ms Chia’s friends, Prisca Okoye, to pass on his number to her.
They partied together at the Steam Bar in the Hilton Hotel, Paddington, west London, and proceeded to have a one-night-stand at his room later that night.
Mr Ogunkanmi then flew back to Dubai the following day and despite only meeting once, they stayed in contact.
However, by early 2016 their relationship exploded when Ms Chia accused him of having sex with Ms Okoye which they both denied.
It was at this point that Ms Chia then began to repeatedly confront Mr Ogunkanmi about allegedly having sex with her friend – including threatening to ‘destroy’ him and asking him to send her thousands of pounds.
Mr Ogunkanmi, who admits he continued to speak to her about other matters, says he transferred her £250 which he believed was to cover her phone bill.
However, the intimidating messages from Ms Chia then escalated with her threatening to tell his friends and repeatedly calling his workplace, sometimes more than 100 times a day, the court heard.
Distressed by the harassment, Mr Ogunkanmi returned to London in May 2016 to report Ms Chia to the Met Police.
She was arrested and quizzed over the allegations in June that year before being bailed on the condition that she did not contact him or contact his colleagues.
But just six weeks later, Ms Chia texted one of his colleagues, saying Mr Ogunkanmi ‘will spend the rest of his life in jail.’
However, this was only the start.
Mr Ogunkanmi’s world would come crashing down when Ms Chia then accused him of raping her in September 2016.
He returned to London for a voluntary police interview in October 2017 and was subsequently cleared when detectives told him that no further action would be taken over the rape allegation.
But by January 2018, she started to bombard him with calls again before setting up multiple Instagram profiles – with names including cindylicious11 and u_smell-nice-witch – where she would post defamatory statements, the court heard.
In the flurry of posts, she repeatedly accused him of being a ‘rapist’ and shared his name and photo publicly. She also alleged that he had paid police officers and medical staff to destroy evidence.
Launching a lawsuit against Ms Chia, he claimed that the impression of the posts from a member of the public would be that he was a ‘rapist’ and that he had paid authorities to ‘alter or destroy the evidence in the course of a criminal investigation against him.’
Ms Chia continued to share defamatory posts on Instagram over several years between January 2018 and at least December 2021.
On December 31 2021 where she shared a photo of his face and claimed he had ‘drugged, raped and impregnated’ her.
In September 2022, the harassment continued on Twitter, now X, where she repeated the allegation that he was a rapist.
She then made an Instagram account with the username rapist_trying_to_avoid_justice where she again shared photos of his face and published eight defamatory posts.
Amid the bombardment of false allegations, she also claimed he had abused her child, tagging the Met Police, Dubai Police and National Crime Agency.
Mr Ogunkanmi sued her for defamation amid her online claims that he was a rapist, drugged her, bribed police officers and medical staff to destroy evidence, conspired to pervert the course of justice and abused her child.
He said the impact ‘would have on his reputation are obviously so severe as to pass the threshold of serious harm on their face’.
His lawyer, Mr Symes, submitted that his client should have been awarded £120,000 for the harassment and defamation – however the judge ruled Ms Chia would only be ordered to pay £25,000.
Mr Ogunkanmi also sued Ms Chia over harassment following her repeated calls to him and his workplace as well as threatening damaging messages to his family and friends.
Ms Chia did not appear in court and was not represented. Deputy High Court Judge Susie Alegre said she ‘has not engaged at all with the proceedings’, which resulted in a default judgment being ordered.
The judge therefore only had to rule the amount of damages to award against Ms Chia and whether any injunctive relief was required against her.
Deputy High Court Judge Susie Alegre ruled: ‘It is important for general damages in a defamation action to vindicate the Claimant’s good name and it should be clear, from this judgment, that there is no truth at all in the defamatory posts.
‘The fact that the Mr Ogunkanmi had a consensual sexual encounter with Ms Chia does not reflect ‘a kernel of truth’ and in no way justifies the horrific campaign of harassment, abuse and defamation that he has been subjected to for over nine years.
‘The posts were clearly malicious which may be considered an aggravating factor and one for which a degree of compensation is due for injury to feelings.
‘In light of all the circumstances of this case, weighing up the gravity of the allegations, the backdrop of years of harassment, malicious intent and a failure to engage on the part of the Defendant against the very meagre evidence of harm, particularly in this jurisdiction, and the limited distribution of the libel, I award a global figure of £25,000 in damages for both the harassment and the libel.’
The court also heard that ‘arising out of her obsession with Mr Ogunkanmi, she has ‘physically attacked Ms Okoye several times in public’.
Ms Chia was convicted of common assault in February and sentenced to 10 weeks in prison with a restraining order for five years.
The judge also ruled that injunctive relief was ‘justified’ to protect Mr Ogunkanmi’s reputation and his right to a private life.
The judge added: ‘It is clear that such injunctive relief is a necessary and proportionate measure to put a stop to the ongoing attacks on the Claimant.’
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