A barrister whose bestselling auto-biography recorded her memories of being abused by her mother faced her parent in the High Court yesterday.

Constance Briscoe is being sued for libel by Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell after claiming in her memoir, Ugly, that she was physically and mentally abused when she was a child.

Miss Briscoe, 50, claimed that her mother had routinely told her she was ugly and had twisted her breasts so hard that she later needed surgery to remove cysts. She also described alleged incidents when her mother cut her with a knife and her stepfather stubbed a cigarette out on her hand.

She claims in the book that taunts of “ugly duckling” during her childhood caused her to spend thousands of pounds on cosmetic surgery.

Lawyers acting for Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell, 73, described the “serious allegations of criminal acts, assaults, abuse, and neglect” as a “piece of fiction”.

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell, of Walworth, southeast London, is seeking damages and aggravated damages over the passages claiming that she beat and humiliated her daughter. Miss Briscoe and Hodder & Stoughton, her publisher, stand by the allegations.

In court yesterday Mr Justice Tugehnhat and the jury were each issued with a copy of the book.

William Panton, acting for Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell, said that parts of the book were untrue.

“It is not the suggestion that they are exaggerations of facts or incidents that happened during Miss Briscoe’s childhood,” he said. “The claimant’s case is that these incidents did not happen but are fiction.”

He said that medical evidence clashed with Miss Briscoe’s claim that she was 12 when she went to see a doctor about lumps in her breasts caused by her mother assaulting her. The lumps were removed when she was 15 and were caused by puberty, he said.

Mr Panton said that there was no evidence to support Miss Briscoe’s suggestion that she went alone to Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court when she was 12 to see her stepfather, Garfield Eastman, bound over in the sum of £200 after he stubbed out the cigarette on her hand.

He said that the only evidence of an incident involving magistrates was in 1975, when the author was 18. He said it was for Miss Briscoe to provide evidence of the allegations that she has made. He suggested that if she could not produce evidence to support her memories from when she was 12, then it cast doubt on earlier recollections.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• 6 reasons not to give gifts this Christmas
• Remembrance Day: All the lonely heroes