Louise Daphne Mensch (née Bagshawe; born 28 June 1971) is a British blogger, novelist, and former Conservative Member of Parliament. In the 1990s she became known as a writer of chick lit novels under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe. She was elected Conservative MP for Corby at the 2010 UK general election. Mensch resigned as an MP in August 2012 to move to New York City to live with her second husband, American music manager Peter Mensch. She began working for News Corp in 2014, and co-launched its Heat Street website in February 2016. Since leaving Heat Street in December 2016, she has published primarily on her blog Patribotics, which she launched in January 2017, and her Twitter account. She left News Corp entirely in March 2017. Mensch and Heat Street have since courted controversy by promoting unverified claims, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories about the Trump administration and its ties to the Russian Federation. Among other allegations she has posted online, Mensch claimed that she had obtained evidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin had American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News who died of a heart attack in 2012, murdered so his job would go to his deputy, Steve Bannon. She has stated that the 2017 Istanbul nightclub shooting, which was perpetrated by Abdulkadir Masharipov on behalf of the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, was a Russian false flag operation with Russia posing as ISIL. She has stated that "Bannon and his team" were behind the 2017 Jewish Community Center bomb threats that were committed by two people, American Juan M. Thompson and Israeli-American Michael David Kadar, with no ties to Bannon. She has claimed Russian intelligence planted inflammatory emails implicating former U.S. Senator and 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on disgraced former U.S. House member Anthony Weiner's computer. Mensch has also, without evidence, accused numerous people, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, of being Russian "shills", "moles" and "agents of influence". Zack Beauchamp, a reporter for Vox who has written at length about Mensch, has said she was the equivalent of an Alex Jones of the left: "I would say the closest analog would be Infowars", he said. BuzzFeed called Mensch an "anti-Russian influence crusader" and one of a number of "anti-Trump public figures [who] share unreliable information". Early life Louise Daphne Bagshawe was born in