A woman who was filmed parading in fantasy body paint in front of a festival crowd after claiming she needed a stick to get around has been jailed and handed a £135,000 court bill for her “lies”.
Kae Burnell-Chambers, 44, claimed that a blunder by NHS doctors had led to nerve damage which left her struggling to walk, get out of a car, or even dress herself, and sued for over £3 million in compensation.
But a video unveiled at the High Court instead showed the model and artist posing and strutting whilst painted as a fantasy warrior, along with other body paint models at the Kustom Culture Blast Off festival in 2019.
The video was filmed months before she launched her damages bid over the delayed diagnosis of her cauda equina syndrome – a condition involving damage to nerves at the end of the spinal cord.
Whilst the condition was genuine, she later admitted to exaggerating her symptoms after social media videos emerged, revealing she had been working as an artist and parading as a model despite claiming severe disability.
She was then dragged to court by the NHS, with Mrs Justice Tipples sentencing her to six months’ imprisonment for contempt of court over the “lies” she told to “grossly inflate” her damages claim – and handing her a £135,000 bill for the case.
Sending the tearful mum down to begin her sentence, the judge blasted Burnell-Chambers for her “lies” and said the video footage showing her modelling when she claimed to be severely disabled was “devastating”.
“The truth was that you made a good recovery from that condition over time and you deliberately chose to lie about symptoms in order to make a very substantial dishonest claim for compensation,” she said.
Cauda equina syndrome is a crippling condition which occurs when the bundle of nerves below the end of the spinal cord, known as the cauda equina, is damaged.
Signs and symptoms include low back pain, numbness and pain that radiates down the leg, but early diagnosis and treatment can lead to long-term effects being much reduced.
Sadie Crapper, barrister for Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust, told the High Court at an earlier hearing that after a delay in treating her condition in 2016, Burnell-Chambers, a fine art graduate from Lincs, launched a bid for damages in 2019.
She attended medico-legal appointments complaining of “a whole array of disabilities,” saying she needed help to dress and to get out of the car – and when she went to see a doctor had “displayed a laboured gait and used a stick,” the barrister said.
However, she went on to drop her claim in 2022 after social media videos and surveillance footage showed that the picture of her disabilities she had been presenting to support her claim was “fundamentally dishonest,” said Ms Crapper.
A core part of the NHS case was based on a series of social media videos showing her working as a body paint artist and model at a series of conventions and festivals around the UK.
A video from the Kustom Kulture Blast Off in August 2019 showed “her having her body extensively painted and then parading in a show where she walks freely and dances without need for a walking aid,” the barrister said.
“By no later than 2017, she had recovered well enough to make a return to body painting,” she told the judge.
“She has at all times known she participated in these conventions, undertook this painting and modelling, and could walk as she did on the footage now available.”
She said it was the NHS Trust’s case that Burnell-Chambers had “fraudulently exaggerated her symptoms for the purposes of her clinical negligence claim”.
Burnell-Chambers admitted that her condition varies and her mobility is almost normal on good days, and that she had been exaggerating when she saw the medical-legal expert doctor.
“She admitted she had been fundamentally dishonest,” but nevertheless has real “ongoing disabilities,” her barrister Ben Bradley KC told the court.
Burnell-Chambers signed an admission that she had “deliberately changed my presentation” and that in doing so had “deliberately interfered with the administration of justice”.
When she saw some experts in the claim, she deliberately attempted to demonstrate what she perceived her function was at its worst, without telling the experts that was what she was doing.
Sentencing her for contempt of court today, Mrs Justice Tipples said: “You deliberately exaggerated and lied about your disability in order to present a picture that you had a serious and ongoing disability caused by the Trust and to grossly inflate your claim for damages on a very substantial scale.”
Refusing to suspend the sentence, she added: “In my view, those factors and the other mitigation are all outweighed by the very serious nature of your contempt, which is so serious that the only appropriate punishment can only be achieved by immediate imprisonment.”
The judge also ordered Burnell-Chambers – who is on benefits and of “limited means” – to pay £135,000 towards the NHS Trust’s lawyers’ bills.
