Southport’s Latest Twist

Reporter Charlie Astor-Bentley breaks her two-month-long silence.

In a disturbing twist to the already grim story, journalist Charlie Astor-Bentley has spoken publicly for the first time in nearly two months—revealing her X (formerly Twitter) account was hacked and her viral thread on Southport child-murderer Axel Rudakubana’s sentencing was deleted.

This was no ordinary thread.

Bentley had live-posted courtroom details as Rudakubana, the man responsible for one of the most horrifying massacres in modern British history, was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 52 years.

Her reporting was sharp, unsparing, and damning—not just of Rudakubana, but of the UK institutions that repeatedly failed to stop him.

Then it vanished.

Pinned to the top of her profile and seen by 50 million people in three days, the thread was one of the clearest, most complete accounts of what had unfolded during the hearings and on that tragic summer day in Southport.

It detailed the truly grim nature of the murders, how Rudakubana had slipped through the cracks of the criminal justice system, and how officials scrambled to obscure their trail.

Bentley’s disappearance from the public eye sparked a wave of speculation. Some feared she had been physically targeted. Others believed she had been pressured into silence.

Such fears weren’t baseless.

When political blog Guido Fawkes dared to question why Rudakubana’s hearings had been delayed last October, our authorities reportedly stepped in—directly pressuring the outlet to pull the piece.

That wasn’t the only clampdown.

Not long after, Labour’s Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, issued an extraordinary gag order banning MPs from mentioning the Southport massacre in Parliament, despite parliamentary privilege protecting such speech from legal interference.

This, of course, came before the arrest of political commentator Bernie Spofforth—detained after she speculated online that the then-unnamed suspect was a first-generation immigrant who “came to the UK by boat and was on an MI6 watch list.” She prefaced the post with “If this is true”.

But this morning, Astor-Bentley returned online with a statement:

“I do not know who did this to me, or what caused X to withhold my account from me for almost two months. But there is one thing of which I am certain: Whoever did this did not want the hideous truth about the Southport Massacre in the public domain…”

She reported being locked out of her account shortly after the post began to gain international attention. Not only was the thread deleted, but her pinned tweet was removed and her entire feed scrubbed of the content related to the proceedings.

The most chilling part? This all happened just as readers began to notice what legacy media had largely ignored: Rudakubana’s links to anti-white extremism materials—connections some now believe may have helped fuel the attack.

Police reportedly found disturbing material on Rudakubana’s laptops, including content on Nazi Germany, ethnic violence in Sri Lanka, Somali clan cleansing, the Rwandan genocide, torture victims, and beheadings—alongside cartoons glorifying violence.

Some of the material carried clear anti-Anglo tones, centred on the oppression of Black and “indigenous” people by white Europeans.

Bentley had also aired testimony she had been told of Rudakubana’s reported rhetoric in school.

He was known to speak of “Britain needing a genocide like Rwanda.” At 15, after a local football match, he also openly declared the need for a “white genocide.”

And just as she began revealing all of these details on X, her access was abruptly cut off—not for days, not for weeks, but two months.

The loss of the thread meant the erasure of a key record—one that held public servants, police, and policy-makers to account—just as pressure on those institutions was reaching a peak.

Bentley has not named suspects. But she made clear that this wasn’t a technical glitch. Someone, somewhere, wanted her silenced.

In another twist, the viral thread suddenly reappeared this afternoon—untouched—after national attention had climaxed, international interest had peaked, and the mainstream had moved on, the narrative seemingly locked in place.

You can follow Charlie on X here and subscribe to her Substack here.

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