At 2pm on Sunday, a teenage boy walked into Theo’s, a cafe next to a park in Uxbridge, grabbed two bottles of Lucozade from the fridge and approached the till.

After handing over a handful of coins, he pulled a metal canister from his pocket and sprayed its contents into the face of the cafe’s female owner. Then he sprinted out of the door and disappeared.

Emergency services were called and paramedics spent an hour treating the terrified woman, a 27-year-old mother of one.

‘Her eyes immediately became red and swollen,’ recalls her partner, Erhan Sahin, 36. 

‘They washed them out with fluid. We don’t know what was in the can, but it smelled a bit like spray paint, and the stuff they used to treat her is the same as they use in acid attacks.’

Police took forensic samples away for testing and began searching the area for the mystery attacker, who had been wearing a black baseball cap.

Three hours later, they found a youth who matched his description and carried out an arrest. But then this already sinister series of events took a chilling turn.

As the suspect was being detained outside Theo’s, a man who identified himself as the boy’s father appeared. According to Erhan Sahin, he proceeded to make a bizarre effort to justify the attack.

‘The guy was pointing at the cafe and telling the police that the family who run this place are racists,’ Sahin tells me.

Pub Landlord Erhan Sahin, 36, is pictured at The Three Steps Pub in Cowley High Street

John Reilly – pictured – has in recent months named around 55 different establishments in his sights, largely in and around West London where he lives, for ‘discrimination’ claims

At 2pm on Sunday, a teenage boy walked into Theo’s, a cafe next to a park in Uxbridge, (pictured) grabbed two bottles of Lucozade from the fridge and approached the till

‘He kept saying, “look at the videos online!” and telling the cops, “these people got what they deserved, they are racists, it’s all over Facebook”.’

The incident – over which the Metropolitan Police tell me ‘a 14-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of assault occasioning actual bodily harm’ – marked the culmination of a deeply traumatic 18 months for Erhan and his partner, who remains so shaken that she has asked not to be named. 

It has not only seen their young family subjected to an appalling campaign of abuse, both via social media and in person, but now represents an existential threat to their livelihood.

‘We’ve had so many death threats, I must have ten different crime numbers from reporting them. My missus has been shouted at in the street. It’s been hell. They have targeted my disabled in-laws, and my four-year-old son. The level of hate, you wouldn’t believe.’

To understand what exactly has been going on, we must walk 500 yards up the road from Theo’s Cafe to the couple’s other business, a flat-roofed pub named The Three Steps. It was here, at around 6.40pm on October 18, 2023, that a man named John Reilly walked up to the bar.

Exactly what occurred next is – as we shall see – the subject of fierce debate. But everyone accepts that an argument ensued.

It culminated in Mr Reilly leaving the premises that night without being served a drink.

At this stage, we must stress there is no evidence Mr Reilly had personal involvement in, or knowledge of, Sunday’s suspected acid attack.

John Reilly walked up to the bar of the The Three Steps (pictured) at around 6.40pm on October 18, 2023

Neither has he ever incited violence against the victim.

But since the incident at The Three Steps, they have been involved in a long-running legal dispute.

Specifically, in early 2024, Sahin received a letter from a firm of solicitors named Howe & Co, who said they were representing Reilly.

It revealed that the bar-room incident had been recorded by their client who – crucially – is an Irish Traveller, a protected ethnicity under the 2010 Equality Act.

Reilly believed he’d been prevented from ordering a drink that night due to ‘direct discrimination because of race’ and was now seeking ‘exemplary damages’ after being ‘hurt, upset, embarrassed and humiliated’ due to ‘the degrading, humiliating and/or offensive environment created by the refusal to serve’. 

Furthermore, the letter alleged he’d been accompanied by four friends who are also Travellers. 

They wanted in the region of £3,000 each, by way of compensation. Oh, and an additional sum for legal costs.

Sahin doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around. 

And, importantly, he remembered things very differently.

On the night in question, he says The Three Steps FC, his pub’s Sunday League football team, was holding a social event. 

A buffet had been provided, and in order to discourage outsiders from walking in and helping themselves to a free meal (‘which has happened in the past’), visitors who were not regulars were asked to write their name and address on a ‘free membership form’ before receiving service at the bar.

On the night in question, Sahin says The Three Steps FC, his pub’s Sunday League football team, was holding a social event

Although such forms were offered to Reilly and his party, Sahin maintains they’d refused to fill them in and instead decided to leave. 

He is therefore disputing the discrimination claim. We’ll come back to the details of this ongoing legal dispute soon. But first, it’s worth pointing out that Sahin isn’t the only publican to have recently received letters from Howe & Co.

Quite the reverse, in fact.

As I revealed in August, the firm – whose founder Martin Howe represents Jeremy Corbyn – is behind a tidal wave of recent legal claims filed by groups of Travellers who allege they have been refused service by a pub, bar, or restaurant on the grounds of racism.

In many of the cases, circumstances are eerily similar: rather than simply asking for a drink, the group behaves unusually.

On some occasions, they’ll inform a bewildered barmaid of their ethnicity and say they’ve been turned away by other local establishments.

On others, they might ask if a very large group of friends can join later, or approach the pub’s regulars and start firing off provocative or hostile questions.

If a landlord or server expresses vague displeasure, an argument will ensue. Eventually the group will leave. Sometimes after being told to.

Travellers then typically wait at least six weeks before initiating legal action, by which point the pub will have been forced, under data protection protocols, to delete its CCTV footage of the incident, meaning the only record of the encounter is in the hands of the people suing them.

The exact number of discrimination cases currently being pursued in such a manner is unclear.

But one industry source has told me they know of between two and three hundred pubs which have in recent months received ‘letters of claim’ from a handful of firms representing Travellers, including Howe & Company and a London solicitors called Julia & Rana.

The total amount of compensation sought runs to millions.

Another told me that defending the lawsuits now represents ‘the biggest threat to the British hospitality industry’s finances since Covid’.

 Sahin, who has already spent £4,000 on legal fees, is also going to fight this one on principle

Last Thursday, no fewer than 50 of these cases were the subject of an extraordinary hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice.

On the defence benches lawyers from major pub chains Fullers, Greene King, JD Wetherspoon, Mitchells & Butler, and Stonegate group to restaurants Pizza Express, Zizzi and TGI Friday, joined dozens of local landlords (many representing themselves).

All 50 cases involved a handful of Traveller families, with one group, the Mongans, featuring 122 times. Its most prolific claimant, Brian Mongan, was behind 44 claims. Members of the McDonagh family featured 25 times and a third family, the McCarthys, were named 18 times.

John Reilly, who was involved in that incident at The Three Steps, was involved in three of the claims on that day’s court list. But they represent just a tiny fraction of the number of ‘discrimination’ claims he’s decided to pursue.

Indeed, in various videos uploaded to social media, Reilly has in recent months named around 55 different establishments in his sights, largely in and around West London where he lives. Six of them appear to be in Uxbridge which he visited (and where he was somehow refused service) within a few hours of his original visit to the Three Steps.

Reilly, a burly but eloquent man with a flamboyant beard, is a prolific user of Facebook.

And while we should again stress there is no evidence he has ever incited or endorsed any form of violence, some of his contributions to the social media network make uncomfortable viewing in light of Sunday’s suspected chemical attack.

To understand why, one need only look to a five-minute video Reilly uploaded last October to the Facebook page of The Gypsy Traveller League, a charity he founded, in the words of its official registration documents, to ‘foster good relations between individuals of different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds’.

The post, which lasts five minutes and 36 seconds, saw the 33-year-old make a series of remarkably provocative claims about his experience at The Three Steps a year earlier.

In particular, he told the charity’s 30,000 followers that it’s run by a ‘racist landlady’, referring to Sahin’s partner.

He then posted images of her personal Facebook page, along with the pages of her parents, who hail from Navan in Ireland, and pictures of the christening of Sahin’s child.

Reilly’s rant, which continued in this vein for several minutes and included disparaging remarks about Sahin, was uploaded on October 14, 2024. Sahin is pictured at his pub

There followed a deeply sinister rant in which Reilly alleged, without citing any evidence, that she has ‘a mindset of not liking Travellers, hating Travellers’, informed viewers that she also runs Theo’s Cafe in Uxbridge, and advises supporters to ‘act now’ against alleged discrimination.

‘You live in Uxbridge. Number 34,’ Reilly says in the video, which is (let us not forget) uploaded to the social media page of a registered charity. 

‘I’m not going to give out your address. I’m not that kind of person, but it’s frustrating, it’s really, really frustrating. Because of your arrogance, your cheekiness. You’ve opened up a cafe on Cowley Road called Theo Cafe, called after your beautiful child. You’ve called a cafe after your beautiful child. Do you not think this is wrong?’

Reilly’s rant, which continued in this vein for several minutes and included disparaging remarks about Sahin, was uploaded on October 14, 2024.

In the days that followed, the couple were subjected to an outpouring of abuse on social media and in real life.

They reported the worst of the threats to the police.

Still the hatred flowed. One online comment, posted below Reilly’s video by a Traveller named Paddy McDonagh, suggested members of the community ‘need to pay a little trip to all the local pubs that don’t deserve and give them free air con’.

It was accompanied by emojis showing a hammer, a window, and a man laughing.

While it’s unclear what Reilly thinks of that response – he did not respond to multiple requests for comment – the video identifying Sahin’s partner, her workplace, and their extended family remains on The Gypsy Traveller League’s website.

It sits alongside clips of the charity’s founder being invited to the European Parliament, where he last week attended a debate on ‘EU Roma strategy and tackling discrimination’.

Back in West London, Erhan Sahin believes Sunday’s attack on his partner was a direct result of the charity’s social media activity. ‘You had this court hearing on Thursday. Then the incident two days later, at a cafe that is named in the video,’ is how he puts it.

Sahin – who, incidentally, is of Turkish heritage – this week showed me CCTV footage of the attack, which is in the hands of police (his partner is expected to make a full recovery, though her eyes remain bloodshot).

He also passed on a transcript of the 2023 pub incident that sparked Reilly’s original claim, obtained during legal correspondence.

It appeared to largely support his version of events, showing Reilly and his party were asked to fill in membership forms before being served at The Three Steps.

They instead began arguing with the barmaid and ended up, in Reilly’s own words, ‘causing havoc’ and leaving. At no point does any member of pub staff so much as mention their ethnicity.

At this stage, it is of course important to stress each of the hundreds of discrimination cases currently being pursued against pubs and restaurants involves different circumstances, and must be decided on their own merits. Moreover, racial discrimination can be subtle as well as overt.

There can also be little doubt that Irish Travellers are at times treated incredibly poorly by the hospitality industry.

In one high-profile case, in 2017, Wetherspoons was ordered to pay £24,000 after a group attending a conference was denied entry to a London pub.

And last year, the holiday resort firm Pontins was found by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to have unlawfully discriminated against the community by, among other things, cancelling bookings by guests with Irish accents or surnames.

Outside court last week, I was approached by two young Travellers who are pursuing multiple claims. They insisted they were motivated not by a desire to enrich themselves by vexatious litigation, but instead to hit back at an industry which regards them as second-class citizens.

Pictured: Theo’s Cafe where a 27-year-old mother was the victim of an acid attack

‘How would you feel if you were treated as worse than scum, time and time again? It happens all the time. It’s racism and we’ve had enough,’ said one.

I also spoke to one of the lawyers representing them, who said that the motive for pursuing the huge number of current claims was largely political.

‘We are taking a stand,’ he told me. ‘The industry have had nine years since the Wetherspoons judgment to get their house in order and have still done nothing. It’s racial discrimination and it’s happening every day.’

One could, in other words, argue this ‘lawfare’ has honourable intentions. The problem, however, is that basic logic dictates that not every one of the hundreds of pub discrimination claims wending their way through the system will end up successful. Some may turn out to be entirely spurious.

In several of the cases in court last week, it was alleged that Travellers have sued the wrong person (for example targeting a brewery rather than a tenant who actually operates a pub), or had filed paperwork after the six-month time limit for launching discrimination claims.

One group of defendants was arguing for their cases to be struck out on the grounds that a group of Travellers has been ‘manufacturing claims’ and cannot have been refused service, under the legal definition, when they were in fact entering pubs with the intention of not being served.

Others were alleging ‘abuse of process’ or ‘fraud’ by different claimants.

The judge attempting to manage proceedings, a bookish man named Patrick Le Bas, struggled admirably with the whole thing, at one point joking: ‘I am doing the best I can to keep up to date.’ Further hearings were scheduled.

The cost of the whole thing meanwhile ratcheted ever upwards, to the dismay of hospitality industry bosses in the room.

Defending even unjustified claims can be cripplingly expensive and while large pub chains can afford to argue such cases in court, individual landlords, who are effectively very small businesses, do not have such deep pockets.

Indeed, it’s a regrettable feature of Britain’s civil court system that even winners can end up tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket.

‘We could win a case hands down, but end up having spend a fortune on costs,’ one landlord told me.

‘The person suing us will then claim to have no cash, and be told to pay back at a few quid per week. The fear is that it’s heads they win tails I lose.’

Erhan Sahin, who has already spent £4,000 on legal fees, is also going to fight this one on principle.

But if this row over racism in the pub industry really has spawned real-life violence, who knows where this troubling saga will end?