Why DID the Daily Mail print a made-up article about a cocaine-taking mum?

“‘Come upstairs with me’, she beckoned conspiratorially to me and the other mums. ‘I’ve got some treats for us’,” she wrote.

“I imagined coffee or possibly a small glass of fizz. But once in the kitchen she poured huge glasses of chilled wine. Then she opened a cupboard and retrieved a plate filled with lines of cocaine and a rolled-up £20 note, issuing a breezy invitation to help ourselves with no more fuss than it had been a tray of cupcakes.”

‘Melton’ wrote how she “had become blasé about seeing coke at grown-up gatherings. But this was the first time I’d ever seen it at a kids’ party.” On this occasion, she did not make her excuses and leave.

All good, grown-up fun – unless you are actually called Anna Melton, run a successful public relations firm and were somewhat flabbergasted to find your not-exactly-common name attached to an article you didn’t write about something you’d never done.

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“I’m not a reader of the publication but my elderly mother and her friends are, and it was they who alerted me to this.” she wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “My mother [was] both horrified – ‘I didn’t know you took drugs!’ (I don’t), and incredulous ‘I didn’t think you would want to write for the Daily Mail’ (I don’t. She knows me too well!).

“I was mildly amused. Then I read it (and a subsequent letter to the editor). Not only had my name been used, but it also incorporated biographical details closely matching my real life: a 30-year career in PR, a husband working in IT, children in their mid and late teens.

“Could there be another Anna Melton? I instantly Googled her. Nope. Not in PR or journalism.  In fact, the online PR hub, Muck Rack is convinced there is just one and [it] had aligned this ‘quality’ piece of journalism to my profile on the site – in other words its own AI had read and connected it to me before I even knew about it.”

When she approached the Mail, the paper removed Melton’s name from the byline online and replaced it with ‘Anonymous’. It was a “complete and unfortunate coincidence”, they told her.

Next, she filed a complaint with the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). It concluded that because a small disclaimer at the bottom of the article stated “all names have been changed,” and her name appeared in inverted commas in a letter to the editor, there was no breach of the Editors’ Code.

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Now, after nearly a year of fighting her case, finally on July 17 the Mail printed a legally agreed clarification saying: “On 14 August 2025, we published an article entitled ‘Why are so many mothers (me included) taking cocaine at children’s house parties?’, which was by-lined ‘by Anna Melton’.

“For the avoidance of doubt, that byline was a fictitious name and the article was not written by the Anna Melton who is a director of ‘In the Works PR’ in Derbyshire. We are happy to confirm that this is the case and we apologise for the distress and embarrassment caused.”

Melto has also received a financial payout which she cannot disclose but has described as “generous”. She said: “I’ll be doing something to thank my legal team and then making a donation to YHA’s No Child Left Behind appeal, which allows children to join school trips when they couldn’t otherwise afford it.”

All’s well that ends well, then – except for the question: what on earth happened? 

Melton wonders if there was the possible influence of AI in writing the article, perhaps using a tool which had scraped details from her occasional Derbyshire Times columns. The Mail has denied this, with the Daily Mail and General Trust saying: “Of course the Daily Mail did not use AI to produce this article. It was reported and written by an experienced journalist, and was based on an interview with a verified source. The source’s name and other personal details were changed to protect her identity, as explicitly stated in the article.

“It was entirely coincidental that some biographical details contained in the article bore similarities to an individual of the same name. When we became aware of this coincidence, the article was amended.”