Hate-crime victim targeted by bullies

A WOMAN has told how she was attacked in an Oldham pub while awaiting radical new surgery for a life-threatening facial disfigurement.

Chantelle Richardson, who revealed on TV that she has been bullied most of her life, was punched in the nose by drunken Rachel Rooney in The Weaver’s Arms in Shaw last year. The blow could have caused a fatal haemorrhage.

Rooney was jailed for eight months for the attack by a court last week.

Chantelle was waiting for surgery to remove an AWM (arteriovenous malformation), a growth of arteries and blood vessels on her nose.

A bag had been inserted into her forehead to stretch her skin so that it could be used to resurface what was left of her nose after the AVM was cut out.

Around the same time she was being filmed for the Channel 4 documentary, Katie: My Beautiful Friends, which was shown last night.

She told presenter Katie Piper, who was herself disfigured in an acid attack, how hard she found it to go out. She added: “I went out with my friends and this girl, she came over and started shouting and said, ‘have you got a mask on, what’s wrong with your face?’

“She actually hit me and my nose started bleeding.

“I don’t think I will be going near people that have drank alcohol again. They always pick on the weakest person.”

Chantelle said she has been bullied almost her whole life because of a facial birthmark which spread across the centre of her face.

But it wasn’t until she was 14 that doctors realised that her disfigurement was in fact AVM.

Chantelle, who ran and played netball for Greater Manchester while at high school, said: “I would rather die than go back to high school . . . they would just call me red nose and Rudolph, silly names, fat face.

“I had people threatening me. Big groups of girls circling round me and saying things.”

At the time of filming she was living with her corporal husband on an RAF base in Lincolnshire, but their marriage was under pressure.

The series will follow Chantelle’s progress. No one knows how much of her face the growth has claimed and, until the surgery is over, how she will look. It is possible she could lose her whole nose.