“” – Laura Bailey
A surprising number of emails, WhatsApp messages, and documents vanished from my devices in the summer of 2023.
I first noticed while putting together evidence of what had happened over the past few years. I was under criminal investigation after all, and I kept finding holes where I knew something existed. At first, I dismissed it. Maybe I’d remembered a WhatsApp as an email, but it kept happening until I started to feel like I was going crazy.
Pieces of my reality no longer existed.
Eventually, I couldn’t ignore what had happened right in front of me.
I can’t prove Laura deleted them, but she had unfettered access to all my phones, cloud backups, even my laptop. And somehow, the missing files all share a common theme: they either incriminated her or embarrassed her family.
The pattern isn’t subtle. The things that disappeared fell into two neat piles: evidence against her later legal claims, and messages where she called her parents idiots.
Right before she pulled them into her campaign to have me arrested, she had to tidy up the record, a bit of historical housekeeping before presenting her new character arc.
Since she worked so hard to erase those stories, I think it’s only fair that I start telling them again. What follows is the first of many.
Tenerife 2020
In the early days of Covid, anyone with a passing grasp of exponential curves could see lockdowns coming.
Laura and I did the boring, adult thing. We cancelled holidays, set up remote work, and made sure our staff had what they needed before everything shut down.
Her parents took a different approach.
Debra and Brian decided it was the perfect moment to fly to Tenerife. This was weeks after we’d closed our office. They knew restrictions were about to drop, their own son, working for the Foreign Office in China, was sending warnings in real time. It didn’t matter. Off they went, armed with sunblock and denial.
The day they landed, the news broke: get home now or risk being stranded.
They laughed at us when we called. “Oh, how terrible! We might have to stay in a luxury hotel in paradise! Wouldn’t that be horrible?” We pleaded with them to get into the closest taxi, and we’d book them flights home before everything closed down.
Twelve hours later, they were locked in their suite, forbidden to leave even for the pool. By the next morning they’d gone from smug to suffering.
Suddenly it was inhumane. Having to order off the room-service menu was an international crisis.
I remember Brian being particularly miffed that the embassy wasn’t immediately chartering a jet to rescue them. It’s like Brian thought his OBE was a marker of actual importance in the grand order of things, not just a stuffy bought for a loyal lapdog.
Laura was livid at the time. Not sympathetic, not even polite about it. I still remember her ranting that they acted like overgrown toddlers who smashed the vase and expected applause for noticing the mess. That was 2020.
By 2023, those messages had vanished from my accounts, the ones where she mocked their tantrums and called them “morons with a minibar.” She couldn’t have her co-conspirators reading that when she needed their signatures on the new story.
If there’s a family motto for the Gunn-Bailey clan, it’s: make the mess, delete the evidence, demand applause.
The only thing that ever really gets cleaned up is the record.