When Emma Raducanu burst into the history books on a balmy September afternoon in New York last year, she seemed on top of the world. The first British woman to win a Grand Slam since 1977, and the only singles qualifier to do so in the Open era, she has since gone on to achieve certified national heroine status, become a brand ambassador for the likes of Tiffany & Co and Dior, and has a net worth of approximately £4 million. A life that most 19-year-olds could only dream of.
Today, however, Bromley magistrates court heard another side to this fairytale. After Raducanu’s US Open victory, a 35-year-old Amrit Magar began to develop an obsession for the tennis star. An obsession that led him, in November last year, to walk 23 miles across London to her family home to leave her a handwritten declaration of love. The former delivery driver visited Raducanu’s house on three separate occasions between November and December, once even stealing a shoe from her front porch as a “souvenir”.
While preparing for the Australian Open last month, Raducanu told Melbourne police: “I feel like my freedom has been taken away. I feel on edge and worried this could happen again. I don’t feel safe in my own home.”
The details of her ordeal are as heartbreaking as they are chilling. But they are just the latest in a spate of similar cases of high-profile women suffering at the hands of male stalkers. Last year alone, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Willow Smith, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Louise Minchin, Denise Welch and Stephanie Davis to name a few, were all pursued by men who became obsessed with them online.
And while high-profile women may be more susceptible to this particular brand of criminal, stalking is by no means confined to the realm of celebrity. That’s something the family of 23-year-old Gracie Spinks knows all too well.
In the early hours of 18 June last year, Gracie was tending to her horse, Paddy, at the Blue Lodge Farm in Duckmanton, northeast Derbyshire. Moments later, she received a fatal stab wound to the neck. Michael Sellers, whom she had previously accused of stalking her, is suspected to have killed her before killing himself in an apparent murder-suicide.
A quick Google search for “woman stalked” offers page after page of horror stories like this one, particularly from the last two years. During the pandemic, the combination of time spent at home and online caused stalking reports to skyrocket. In 2020, more than 80,000 incidents of stalking were recorded in England and Wales according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – up from the 27,156 incidents reported the year prior.
The epidemic of violence against women has been a topic of pain and outrage over the last year, but although conversations are finally being had the approach is often reactive rather than proactive. Questions about rape prosecutions and longer sentences for rapists are all important, but what about preventing rapes? What about taking women like Gracie seriously when the first signs of violence, such as stalking, occur?
Thankfully, I have never been stalked. Yet, like so many other women, a spectre of paranoia hangs over my head. So, we behave like we have, as if right at this moment we are in imminent danger. Walking home in the dark my head is down. Earphones out. Keys gripped hard between fingers. Obsessively looking over my shoulder, avoiding gaps in hedges, entrances to alleyways, walking in the middle of the road. The fear when a man looks a little too long, or a car begins to slow down of “is this it? Is this the moment?”
This ritualised and embodied fear is not a normal state of affairs. It is not a sign of healthy gender relations. It is a sign of a deep rot within society which must be rooted out.
