AN ARCHITECT was struck off after accusing a male neighbour of “gender violence” as she claimed he used his car as a “phallic symbol”.
Karin Elliott made a long-running string of false and misleading allegations of racism and threatening behaviour against her neighbours, a tribunal heard.
Elliott was previously fined in 2021 for accusing neighbours in Norfolk of building “Nazi concentration camps” after they knocked down a garden wall to build a carport.
Elliott, who had run several university courses, started the long-running dispute between her and three neighbours when she made a planning application for CCTV.
She wanted to mount the CCTV on her £720,000 grade II-listed property she bought with her partner in 2016.
In the letter to residents in February 2024 asking for help with the application, she made some questionable claims about her neighbours found to be false.
She had claimed they had threatened her with a hammer, and attempted to build a President Trump-style wall for immigrants.
She wrote about one neighbour: “He threatened to hit one of us over the head with a hammer at one stage, after he was asked to desist.
“He had been starting to build a wall on our property illegally on a Sunday, following Trump’s declaration that he would ‘build a big wall’ to keep out immigrants. It is very upsetting. We are Irish/American and French.”
She also accused another neighbour of loudly singing “Tragedy” by the BeeGees from their balcony after Elliott’s father had died.
One series of false allegations to Norwich city council included a neighbour’s use of a chainsaw – which she considered to be racial harassment.
She allegedly believed that from “a psychoanalytic perspective,” her neighbour parking the “phallic symbol” of his white Nissan Navara pick-up truck across her driveway represented gender violence.
The tribunal found this claim “underscored how tenuously she constructed serious accusations against other people, and how casually she dispensed them”.
She also claimed her neighbours had “smashed down several of our historic walls, chopped down many of our historic trees, and built on our property, all without our consent”.
During her letter she further wrote: “We hope that the CCTV might deter them all from further trespassing and further destroying our listed garden, and from any further gender violence and racial harassment.”
During cross-examination in the hearing, she admitted: “I think I’d give this letter a serious editing if I did it again.”
Elliott’s partner, Francois Girardin, admitted none of the neighbours has said “anything directly racist”.
He did claim, however, that the couple implied racial discrimination by cheering for England during a sport event and flying the occasional Union Flag.
One neighbour on the end of the claims told the tribunal Elliott was an “absolute disgrace to her profession”.
The neighbour also felt that they could not spend time in their garden due to the couple constantly staring at them.
She also told them: “The Nazis didn’t get away with it and neither will you.”
The Architects Registration Board struck the architect off for a minimum of two years.
They labelled her guilty this month of unacceptable professional conduct because of her inappropriate communications.
