A Labour councillor has been subjected to a vitriolic online "hate campaign" run by anonymous bloggers and a failed Conservative candidate.
TerryWatch is a site dedicated to ridiculing Terry Kelly, councillor for Paisley North West, and has recently published allegations of an inappropriate relationship between the 60-year-old and his daughter. It also ran a doctored image of his daughter which superimposed sex toys on to a picture of her at her 30th birthday party, an event that doubled as a fundraiser for leukaemia, the disease that killed Kelly's son.
The site is mostly written by anonymous bloggers, but the Sunday Herald has discovered that one contributor, called RfS or Right For Scotland, is a man called Ron Kane, who lost his bid to become the Conservative councillor for North Renfrew ward in 2007.
Kelly, who is councillor for Paisley North West and has won three elections in a row, said: "It's squalid stuff. If there was any real way of stopping TerryWatch then I would ask for it to be done, but at the end of the day, no matter how right-wing and poisonous people are, I would never do that to them.
"I don't think it's arguing: it's personal abuse and they are trying to get to me through my daughter. I wonder what some of these people would be doing if they didn't have the internet. It really is hate - hate crimes, in fact."
After TerryWatch began its campaign last year, Kelly received a barrage of mail from around the world, some from an extremist racist organisation. One member regularly sent him newspaper clippings of crime stories involving black men, with violent slogans written beneath.
The police investigated for a year but came to no conclusions.
Kelly added: "The letters would say Councillor Kelly you n****r loving bastard, we thought you would be interested in this article'. This filth came regularly for a year, from places like Holland and Russia. I was worried about my family."
Kelly is no stranger to controversy and has hit the headlines with some of his ill-thought out proclamations which, among other things, claimed women were "thick". His enemies see these blunders as justification for their assault.
One said: " Smear campaign? Hardly. It's more akin to poking a toad with a stick."
The most vicious of all the bloggers and the man who posted the doctored photographs calls himself Shotgun and is a famous right-wing blogger.
Beneath one faked photo, which is entitled Terry "Herr Fritzl" Kelly, he asked: "Does Terry have a cellar? Could it be that in Paisley there is a case of father and daughter having unnatural relations?"
Kane, the Conservative activist, was keen to distance himself from the more extreme elements on the site and claimed he did not know who Shotgun or any other of the writers were.
His battle with Kelly started after his rugby club failed to get land to build a new pitch - a decision Kelly was involved in and subsequently blogged about.
Under the name RfS he was one of the first contributors to TerryWatch. Even though said that the some of the site's "gratuitous personal attacks were beyond the pale", Kane wrote several entries after the photos were put up, claiming that he did so because TerryWatch received more hits than his own blog and would give his writing greater attention.
He said: "For Terry to paint himself entirely as the victim in this is somewhat disingenuous.
"He has called me several names, implied I am a paedophile and subhuman. To be perfectly honest, I do not agree with the personal vicious attacks on him, because I believe that lowers me, somehow, to his level."
However, he said he would not contribute to TerryWatch again.
The Conservative Party distanced itself from the site. A spokesman said: "The Conservative Party is not associated with this site and considers it to be vile and unacceptable. Mr Kane has made it clear he does not know Shotgun and has severed all links with this blog."
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