There needs to be, I have decided, a subdivision of categories within the proliferation of offerings under the genre of true crime documentary. Foremost among them needs to be one called What Happens When Only Women Are in Danger. This, admittedly, would cover a large proportion of the genre, but then I would like some action on the issue of the sociocultural, legal and police dismissal of – and contempt for – women’s vulnerabilities, experiences and harms, up to and including murder. Maybe the repeated use of such a descriptor would be no bad thing.
Into this category would fall Can I Tell You a Secret?, the latest true crime offering from the leader of the pack, Netflix – and the first it has made with Louis Theroux’s Mindhouse production company and in association with the Guardian. It is the story of the cyberstalker Matthew Hardy, who terrorised multiple women over many years. The case was first covered in depth in G2 by Sirin Kale – then via a six-part Guardian podcast series – in 2022, the year Hardy received the longest sentence handed down in the UK for online stalking: nine years.
The two-part documentary concentrates on three of the many women whom Hardy targeted. Abby, Zoe and Lia (whose 700 pages of meticulous records of his poisonous communications with her and her friends, family and colleagues would eventually help enable charges against him) were all attractive, happy and confident young women with strong online presences when they started receiving messages from a confiding stranger, apparently female, whose gambit was often the line that gives the series its title. Generally, within a few exchanges, Abby et al would grow suspicious, investigate the profile of the messager and withdraw from communication. This is when the harassment would begin, using fake profiles and posing as the women to send sexual content to the fathers of their friends, for example, or posing as people the women had met on holiday in order to message their boyfriends, start rumours and sow division. Meanwhile, the “direct” contact between Hardy and his targets became increasingly vicious and threatening.
The women went to their various local police forces and – it almost goes without saying by now – were fobbed off, told that no crime had been committed and given the impression they had brought it on themselves. (Zoe had the temerity to have some modelling shots on her social media platforms.) Eventually, one officer – PC Kevin Anderson – took the matter seriously, started investigating and found Hardy had been cyberstalking women for just about as long as he had been on the internet, since his lonely, awkward days as a teenager who had undiagnosed autism (a condition that would later see his sentence reduced by a year). Another woman, Amy, had been receiving up to 60 calls a day from him 10 years ago as part of an 18-month campaign. She had managed to get a restraining order against him. It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
The documentary does an excellent job of marshalling the salient facts and pivotal points of a large, sprawling case involving multiple people and even more identities, evoking the size and shape of Hardy’s devastating work, the extent of his infiltration of people’s minds and lives, and the curtailment of their freedom that he caused. It does so without making him the star of the show (as so many of these documentaries end up doing, however good their intentions). A good rule of thumb is that if you can remember the perpetrator’s face better than the victims’ after the credits roll, something is wrong. I can barely bring Hardy’s to mind.
Many of his written communications with his victims are dramatised by an actor via terrifying voice distortion equipment. The ease and unstoppability of their transmission – so quick, so effortless, so untrammelled – is represented by telegraph wires lighting up above houses. It sounds gimmicky; perhaps it will seem so to some. But to my mind it is the perfect evocation of an insidious terror, known to some men but all women. It is induced not just by the threat of violence (so often then physically realised), but also by the awful psychological harm already being done. It is provoked by the knowledge that you are powerless against someone who hates you and your kind – and the knowledge that such people are enabled not just by society, but also by a technology that no one seems to have any interest in learning how to control.
• Can I Tell You a Secret? is on Netflix.
