Chelsea striker Sam Kerr has said she feared for her life after a taxi journey and felt ignored by Met Police officers dealing with the situation, a court has heard.
The Australian football star is on trial charged with causing racially aggravated harassment to a police officer following the incident in southwest London in the early hours of 30 January 2023.
The officer involved, PC Stephen Lovell, first saw Kerr that night as she crawled through a smashed taxi window outside Twickenham Police Station, Kingston Crown Court heard.
The taxi driver had driven Kerr and her partner, West Ham midfielder Kristie Mewis, to the station and complained they had refused to pay clean-up costs after one of them was sick and that they had also smashed the vehicle’s rear window.
But the women told officers he had been “acting in a crazy way” by driving very fast, repeatedly stopping and speeding up again, locking them in the car, and refusing to let them go for about 15 minutes.
The court heard a “heated” discussion then ensued at the station and Kerr allegedly became “abusive and insulting” towards PC Lovell, calling him “stupid and white”.
Kerr has said she accepts making the comments but denies they amount to racially aggravated harassment.
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In a police interview the following day, Kerr, told the officer in charge that “I shouldn’t have been so front-footed” but “in that moment I was feeling very, very threatened because of one: how I was being treated, and two: for my life in that car”.
“I was in a taxi and I did vomit outside the window, and in that moment onwards the taxi driver became very aggressive and [was] driving very dangerous, and had us both very, very scared,” she said.
“I actually… pressed the emergency thing on my phone and spoke to someone and he [the driver] would not return us, drop us off – we wanted to pay whatever it was. He said [to police] we weren’t going to pay but that is not true at all.
“He would not drive us to our location and he was just driving us around and around very, very dangerously. He literally was so dangerous and so scary and he had us both very, very afraid.”
She also said she had not felt they were believed when they arrived at the police station and were told to “just behave”.
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The footballer told officers she had contacted emergency services about the driver but PC Lovell said there was no record of that, the court heard.
Police did not request copies of the emergency service calls at that time, and the taxi driver was never arrested or interviewed.
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His last involvement with officers was to facilitate the women paying him for damage to his car.
Speed cameras that may have captured his vehicle were not checked, no ANPR records were searched, nor was cell site data for his devices.
Police asked if he had any recording device in his vehicle, and he told them that he did not but the officers did not check the cab for such a device.
The trial continues.
