Melissa Rein Lively admitted in court that she assaulted a woman by pulling her hair at Bond Street station in London on 11 October, and the assault by beating charge against her was withdrawn after she accepted a conditional caution. She was ordered to pay £910 in compensation, which was paid to the victim on Tuesday afternoon.
The case turned on a brief but ugly encounter on the Underground platform, where a woman said she was walking to the station with her sister and two children when Rein Lively and her partner, Philipp Ostermann, appeared to be kissing and seemed intoxicated. Prosecutors said Rein Lively stumbled into the pushchair before the woman pushed back, and that Ostermann then shouted, “You bloody Indians, watch where you're going, you shouldn't be here.” One of the women replied that Rein Lively had fallen over her sister’s pushchair and told him to stop being racist, after which Rein Lively grabbed one of the sisters by the hair and tugged it forcefully.
At Westminster Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, Lyndon Harris said the admission to the conduct alleged against Rein Lively amounts to an offence. Rein Lively, 40, was not present for the hearing. Her acceptance of the conditional caution meant the assault case against her was taken out of the courtroom, even as the same incident keeps her partner in the dock on separate allegations.
That is where the case splits. Ostermann, a 37-year-old German national and associate director at Munich-based private equity company Aequita, denied two racially aggravated public order offences and one further public order offence and was released on conditional bail. The friction in the case is plain: Rein Lively has resolved her part of the matter, but the allegations tied to the language said to have been used that night still have to be tested at trial.
Rein Lively is the founder of America First Public Relations, which describes itself as an anti-woke PR firm, and the case has drawn attention because it puts a public-facing American influencer in a London courtroom over conduct on a Tube station platform. Ostermann is due to appear at City of London Magistrates' Court on 17 November for trial, and that hearing will determine whether the account of what was said at Bond Street station becomes a conviction or remains only the record of a disputed night out.
