I’m leaving work when I see it, his bike. Chained to a railing outside the front of my office like handcuffs. I scan the streets jumpily, expecting to see him staring at me, waiting, but High Street Kensington is full of people. My breathing is raggedy, as it often is now, from anxiety and some fear. We were once in love — or something I thought was love, anyway — but when someone won’t leave you alone, when they call non-stop and message 100 times a day, you expect them to always be right behind you. Tiny things, like unexpected announcements on trains or someone running past you can stop your heart. I ran to my tube and walked the whole length of the platform to check he wasn’t behind me and about to board it. On a train you were trapped.
One in seven people over the age of 16 have been the victim of stalking at least once, and it won’t surprise anyone to hear that women and the young are most affected (according to the Office of National Statistics in 2024). But this week a little more power moved to the victim thanks to Nicola Thorp and MPs Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry.
Nicola Thorp, a broadcaster and ex Coronation Street actor, was in court this week to hear the sentencing of her online stalker, Ravinderjit Dhillon, 31, who opened 30 social media accounts in order to anonymously abuse her between 2018 and 2020. Calling himself the “grim reaper”, Dhillion, sent “horrendous” rape threats, death threats and threatened her family, said Thorp on TalkTV, where she co-presents a show. “He was committed and that terrified me,” she said of the two-year campaign of hate.
Worst was that she had no idea who he was — and police would not tell her. That meant that “he became everybody”, she explained; “they couldn’t even tell me if he was someone I worked with, or an ex-partner.” It wasn’t until Dhillon, who even more threateningly lived in London, the same city she did, appeared in court that she was able to learn his identity.
The result was that she even more terrified during the ordeal because he could have been the man sitting next to her on the bus, or the person handing her coffee or any man anytime, anywhere. How could she try to protect herself from someone when she had no idea who he was? Terrifying. He’s sent vile pictures of his genitals which in the end is how he was caught.
But thanks to her campaign, the government has changed the rules so that victims of stalking are given more power. New sanctions announced by the Home Office include the right to know who is harassing you on the internet if they are using an anonymous account and Stalking Protection Orders are being more widely available for victims.
Why should it be down to any woman to privatise her social media, or not have it full-stop, for risk of stalking? That rings of the Sarah Everard message
What police do if these are broken is another issue. A friend of mine whose ex-boyfriend began stalking her when she broke up with him was still fielding harassing calls from him up to two years later. Every time she alerted the police, and every time they did nothing. “They’re f***ing lucky he’s not killed me yet,” she told me once, completely hardened to it but expecting this to be the only reality the police would take seriously.
Modern technology has obviously only added to the problem, because people like Nicola Thorp’s vile harasser can access all sorts of information via social media — and why should it be down to any woman to privatise her social media, or not have it full-stop, for risk of stalking? That rings of the Sarah Everard message. The emphasis then should not have been on women not to walk home alone but on the men not to kidnap, rape and kill us if we did.
For anyone working in the public eye or in the media, like Thorp and myself, social media is part of our work life whether we like it or not and the police should be making it as safe a place as possible to exist. Having been stalked online and in person, I can tell you that online stalking is just as frightening, even when I knew my stalkers — and even loved them once.
The first ex, whose bike was sometimes chained menacingly outside my office, had emailed my new boss under the guise of a work query to ask if I’d started yet. Luckily, she had the foresight to forward it straight to me, but it was only a matter of time before he’d appear, I knew, and that made starting a new job in a new office extremely difficult. By then he was blocked on my personal email but guessed my new work address and sent emotionally blackmaily messages to that one during my first days begging to see me.
He’d been turning up at my new flat as well as my office and I’d begged my landlady to tell him I was out whilst I hid behind the curtains in the front room, listening. He’d been out that night and was drunk, probably, and I’d had 45 missed calls in a row. Every time the phone stopped ringing, it started again. In some ways it felt safer to have him unblocked, so I could try to predict when he might turn up somewhere I was and leave, but that meant I had to see all the messages coming in and it was horrible. They begged, swore, blackmailed, complimented, criticised, and accused me of all sorts of things. He wouldn’t let me go, he said. Delusionally, he was telling himself this was a love story and thought he was “fighting” for me — the one he should be with. “You’re the love of my life,” he claimed. The extremity of it was scary — it was “I can’t live without you”, “all or nothing”, stuff. But I’d chosen “nothing” and he still wanted “all”.
Because my landlady was a smoker and often accidentally left the backdoor by my bedroom open all night, I’d started sleeping with a screwdriver in my bed in case he arrived in the middle of the night. I often woke from a nightmare that he was standing at the end of my bed. The whole thing was so surreal I felt like I was living someone else’s life.
The other experience, about four years later, was different but equally threatening and oppressive. I’d been with this guy for under a year and he’d practically proposed (grandmothers ring until the real one was bought). What I hadn’t understood at the time was that I was in a coercive control situation. He’d started — once I was locked in and we were living together — by checking my phone, reading all my messages and trying to ban me from talking to a handful of people he accused me of “cheating on him” with. Some were exes, some literally just friends he’d blown out of proportion. They were men and women. His jealousy raged.
What I didn’t know was that he had also hacked into my email and had it on his own laptop. Privately, he was reading everything I sent and received, then using it to trace my movements when we together and even more so when I finally extracted myself from the relationship. I wrote an anonymous piece about abusive relationships and got a barrage of texts about earning “blood money” — he was in my email and reading about the work I was being commissioned. When he could see from the tone of my emails to friends (I guess) that I was beginning to do better several months after escaping him, he told me he’d kill himself if I didn’t take him back, faked an overdose and when I called an ambulance and sent it to his house, opened the door and was completely fine. I remember profusely apologising to the paramedic who called me back to tell me this and she gave me a very unexpected response of shocked laughter. I’d come to believe everything was my fault and she wanted me to know that this was not me, this was a very bad guy indeed.
The thing these guys fail to realise is that not leaving someone alone, not taking “no” for an answer, is never romantic, it’s just stalking
I had nothing to apologise for. It took a while to realise how I was being kept tabs on but I guess I’d been too trusting in the relationship — still am in relationships now — and don’t exactly hide my devices when entering a password. I changed all passwords and took my phone to an Apple shop and asked them to double check there weren’t any tracking or location services enabled. That made me feel some relief but when you’re being stalked online you expect the person to turn up in your real life when you block them from everything. It took a while for me to shake that feeling and sometimes I still double-take if someone looks like him but am glad to be able to remember that I’m in a different city and it’s less and less likely.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that both men were older than me. They expected me, as the younger one to be falling at their feet and when I didn’t that was a problem for their fragile and narcissistic male egos. It was hell for a while, but it stopped eventually. The thing these guys fail to realise is that not leaving someone alone, not taking “no” for an answer, is never romantic, it’s just stalking. And luckily, it’s now a little bit easier to get it exposed and behind bars.
