It is hard to remember when it began. Years ago now. At first he was an inveterate “liker” on Twitter, and soon this gathered into comments. After a while came a request to follow him back; there was a work-related matter he needed to discuss.
I’m going to call him Peter. It is not his name. In those early days, I could tell very little about Peter from his profile, but he seemed harmless enough; just another of the familiar strangers I had often encountered on social media over the years.
I followed. He sent me a direct message. The “work-related matter” was tenuous – something about the radio programmes I had made. Later, I would look back at this moment and wonder why I didn’t shut it down then, why I wasn’t more distant or dismissive. Instead, I felt the need to be nice, and so I thanked him and hoped that might be the end of it. It was not.
Now that he had access to my direct messages, Peter would often message me. It felt mildly annoying, rather than a blockable offence. Sometimes I would reply, politely, as I would to most people who contact me. A lot of the time, I didn’t. I was never quite sure how to handle this kind of interaction.
After all, there were many others who did the same – writing to me on Twitter (now known as X) and Instagram and Facebook, and to my work email, and sometimes in longform letters. I write a lot about music, and so people would often send me records and homemade compilations, and strike up conversations with me at gigs; sometimes, standing there in the crowd, it would take a while to realise that this wasn’t someone I had ever met before.
I am by no means famous, but the small amount of recognition that accompanies a career in writing and broadcasting can mean that readers and listeners form a certain attachment to you. It’s a peculiar feeling. A heavy thing, sometimes. At other moments it can feel beautiful and moving – people contact you because something you have written has connected with them, or helped them; perhaps you have articulated something when they have struggled to find the words.
I try to thank everyone who contacts me, I am always grateful that anyone has read my work or listened to something I have made. But sometimes the attachment formed is startling. Sometimes it grows intrusive.
These days, the notion of parasocial relationships is widely discussed, though back when Peter first contacted me I had not heard of the term. Still, I recognised the sensation. For most of my career, I have been aware of the way that readers can form an impression of you via the things you have written, and how in the space between your words and yourself, a great deal of projection and expectation can bloom. In the case of Peter, that projection became unmanageable.
* * *
When I moved to Kent a few years ago, it was not far from where Peter lived. He showed up at local gigs I mentioned on social media, and at events where I was DJing. This wasn’t strange in itself, except he was always there alone, and when he spoke to me it was in a tone that suggested we had a longstanding friendship.
One summer, he came on his own to a festival in Devon where I was on the programme. On the Saturday afternoon, as I sat by myself on a hill preparing for an event, I watched as he walked across the field and up the hill and sat down beside me. Though hundreds of people milled below us, his presence unnerved me, and so I stood up and told him I had to meet my boyfriend.
I’ve always felt uneasy about the idea of mentioning a man to ward off another; I’ve believed myself to be a strong woman who should be able to protect herself. But on this particular Saturday afternoon, I hoped the reference to my relationship might deter him. It didn’t. Peter simply followed along as I walked back into the thick of the festival and disappeared backstage. My boyfriend laughed about it, and it seemed silly to let these little encounters bother me too much. The effect then was more uncomfortable than worrying; perhaps akin to someone standing a little too close to you in the supermarket queue.
Then came the pandemic. In Covid’s early months, I wrote an article that was unquestionably the most personal thing I had ever written, and that also happened to mention the breakdown of my relationship. For a good year or two after its publication, people wrote to me about that article. It was both extraordinary and completely overwhelming; strangers sharing their own stories, experiences, intimacies, in a way that felt profound.
For Peter, the article seemed an invitation; as if its personal revelations had drawn him closer. As lockdown rolled on, he began to message with greater fervency. Sometimes these messages were humdrum. Sometimes they were flirty. There were dreams, shared histories, stories of gifts he had bought for me. Sometimes they nodded to things I had mentioned on social media or in articles, and I had the feeling of being forensically studied. He would make references to places near my home, and on my daily walk I grew nervous in case he had pored over my Instagram long enough to identify which route I took across the fields and along the back lanes.
One day, he announced that he was going to start telling me stories from his life. They were long anecdotes, often involving women, and I gathered he was lonely. Still, I reasoned that lockdown isolation had done funny things to us all.
I tried to tell him, gently, that I was not the person to talk to, that perhaps he should find a therapist. I was not equipped to help him, I already had enough to carry. “But I like talking to you,” he said.
I stopped replying. Still he wrote.
As the messages piled up, I felt something between anger and despair. Most of all, I was frustrated with myself for not having established strong boundaries with this man at the outset, for being somehow too porous.
I had assumed that Peter was a benign presence, somewhat lost, and not terribly good at reading social cues. But every once in a while I would check myself: I did not actually know this man. I was making assumptions about him, just as he made assumptions about me. He might just as easily have a history of obsessive behaviour towards women. He might be violent. He might be an abusive husband. He might be none of the things he had told me he was.
Like many people I know, particularly women, I have had previous experiences of obsessive male behaviour – colleagues, exes, strangers. When I was younger, I had thought the best way to navigate this was, in effect, to remain constant and kind while their ardour burned itself out. But the older I got, the more weary I became of accommodating men’s feelings and entitlement. I grew tired of the way their fixation seemed to bleed into so many aspects of my life.
By this stage, Peter had followed many of my friends on social media, and would often wade into our exchanges, unbidden. “Is he one of your stalkers?” my friends would ask, privately. The term seemed dramatic, but when one friend mentioned the four warning signs of stalking detailed by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, I conceded that Peter’s behaviour fitted the description: fixated; obsessive; unwanted; repeated.
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust was set up in 1986, following the disappearance of a 25-year-old estate agent who went to meet a client and did not return. Its mission is to raise awareness of personal safety, and to reduce the risk and prevalence of abuse, aggression and violence, with a specific focus on stalking and harassment. Among its many projects is the National Stalking Helpline.
Their website describes stalking as “a pattern of fixated and obsessive behaviour which is intrusive and causes fear of violence or engenders alarm and distress in the victim”. The law states that it is illegal for a person to pursue a course of conduct, that is two or more incidents, that they know or ought to know amounts to stalking.
The number of reported stalking cases has tripled since 2019-20, in part due to a change in how stalking is recorded, and the introduction of stalking protection orders, but partly because of a surge in cyberstalking. The pandemic also exerted an effect – at some points calls to the National Stalking Helpline tripled compared to pre-Covid levels, and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust says the crime remains underreported. However, only 6% of those cases have resulted in charges being made. In more than half of reported stalking cases, victims decide against taking further action. In a third, there is difficulty in collecting evidence. Of those cases that do reach court, 66% result in conviction.
What I went through with Peter was nothing like, say, that of Shelagh Fogarty, the LBC radio presenter who documented her years-long experience of being stalked in her podcast The Followers. In Fogarty’s case, a man repeatedly waited outside the LBC offices, followed her on the London underground, and was eventually arrested after being found outside her home. He is now the subject of a lifelong restraining order.
It was also nothing like the case of newsreader Isla Traquair, who was repeatedly watched inside her home by a neighbour, gardener Jonathan Barrett. Or of Gracie Spinks, who was stabbed to death in the summer of 2021 by a former colleague she had previously accused of stalking after she rejected his romantic advances.
But it is also worth noting that women, in particular, tend to downplay these experiences. An estimated one in five women and one in 10 men will be the victim of stalking, and during Covid, those figures shifted dramatically: some 80,000 cases were recorded by police in England and Wales in 2020 – up from 27,156 the previous year.
* * *
It is difficult to express the vulnerability I felt during that time. I lived alone, and throughout the pandemic I did not socialise. I felt curiously exposed in my isolation. I lived in a community small enough for me to stand out, and I realised that Peter could find me quite easily. I wondered whether I ought to casually mention it to my neighbours. But really, how to explain it? That a strange man might turn up at my door uninvited because he liked some things I had written? It seemed ridiculous.
Whenever Peter had shown up at events, pre-pandemic, I had been friendly, albeit in a distant way. This seemed the best approach. I hadn’t wanted to seem grand, or to make him feel unwelcome. After all, I wasn’t anyone special, and he hadn’t done anything wrong – he was a person who had simply connected to my work. And isn’t that what a writer is supposed to want?
Herein lies the slipperiness of parasocial interaction. Someone might think they are being supportive, a fan, but that can easily cross into behaviour the subject feels is too much, and the police class as stalking. Later, I would wonder whether what I regarded as low-level professional friendliness had been read by Peter as great enthusiasm. I would come to question how I interacted with everybody, both online and in real life. I would wonder who they thought they were interacting with, and to what extent I had participated in that specific impression of me.
The study of parasocial relationships dates back to the middle of the last century, says Dr David Giles, reader in media psychology at the University of Winchester, who is currently working on a book on the subject. “People noticed that listeners to American radio were getting intensely involved with radio personalities, and feeling as if they knew them,” he says. He cites particularly a 1940s programme named Lonesome Gal, which broadcast on more than 50 stations across the US. “She introduced a musical element to evening radio, talking in a seductive voice, as if she were talking to a lover directly: ‘I know you’re out there, listening to me … ’” he quotes. “And listeners were out there, their imaginations running wild.”
We’ve seen examples of this for decades with film stars and pop stars, Giles adds, but with the dawn of social media the range has expanded to encompass other figures: politicians, journalists, influencers, content creators. “Anyone who sticks their head above the parapet.”
Social media is still a relatively new phenomenon, he points out, and it takes us a while to adapt to new technology. In these early, unsettled days, none of us quite know how to behave. “These days, it’s more about media figures and media users communicating directly on social media,” Giles says. “We feel this personal connection to these people, and we have this sense that we know them as they go about their daily business. But people will abuse that access.”
* * *
It had been months since I had told Peter I would not be replying to him any longer, and explained why in as calm and full and kind a fashion as I could, but his messaging and liking and comments continued unabated. He apologised, he grovelled, he announced he was leaving Twitter … and then returned. I predicted that now I was no longer engaging, his feelings would shift from adoration to anger, and indeed they did.
When I moved back to London, in the spring of 2021, I wrote an article about my joy at returning to the city, mentioning my unhappiness during the years I had spent on the Kent coast (which was, I should stress, nothing to do with Peter). He chose to take the article personally, tweeting a long tirade about it, sending aggressive direct messages, and contacting a variety of people I knew. Then came a link to a blog post he had written about me. His vitriol quivered across the screen.
I’ve been a journalist long enough to know that online spats are 10 a penny, and not everyone will like the articles you write in national newspapers. But this felt different, more personal, designed to elicit a reaction – any reaction, from me.
And I did react. I posted a long thread about it on Twitter – after all, it seemed the appropriate platform, and I wanted a public record of his behaviour. “Dear Man Currently Posting About Me Aggressively … ” I began.
The response from my followers was deeply supportive. This was not acceptable, they told me; I should contact the Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service; I should report him to Twitter and tell the police. A few people suggested I should have simply blocked Peter long ago, although I found this advice naive. Unblocked, I had always reasoned, he was less likely to get angry, and I could keep a weather eye on him. In fact, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust advise a similar course of action: cease contact, if it feels safe to do so, but “you may want to consider keeping the line of communication open for the purpose of collecting evidence”.
It was with some hesitation that I filed a Twitter report and registered everything online with my local police force. While Twitter were, frankly, useless (and this was in the pre-Musk days, when the platform had more moderators), the police contacted me the following day and were brilliant. They assured me my fears were not at all out of proportion and that I had done the right thing in reporting him; it was important to record a pattern of behaviour, and Peter’s history of showing up at places he knew I would be suggested he might very well appear again, but angry this time.
A couple of days later, I sat in my local police station in my face mask, giving a full statement to an officer. He was reassuring and sympathetic, and advised me on precautions I could take. The police, he told me, were able to place an alert on my home and my mobile number, so that if I called, it would be treated as a priority.
Although I had never known his full name, and he had now deleted his Twitter account, I had screengrabs of Peter’s messages and blog posts, and the police were soon able to trace his identity and location. Once my statement had been transferred to Kent police, things moved swiftly: officers visited Peter at his home to warn him about his behaviour. Later, they told me he was clearly shaken by their conversation and was hugely apologetic. He understood that if he ever contacted me again he would be arrested.
It is now 18 months since I last heard from Peter. In that time, I have walked through what happened many times in my mind. I have worried I played some part in it by replying to this man, by not wanting to offend him, by worrying about him and his state of mind, perhaps even by feeling sorry for him.
I have fought hard to squash the feeling that my fears were silly or overblown. I have reminded myself that the internet can be a strange and dimly lit place, where people are rarely who they seem. More than anything, I have tried not to forget the years of his rising fixation, the pressure of that relentless attention, the repeated bypassing of my simple requests to be left alone.
I have thought often of the old Margaret Atwood adage that men are afraid women will laugh at them, whereas women are afraid men will kill them. That to explain the fear I experienced is to touch on the way that many women move through the world; how we learn to adapt our behaviour to not upset men. We make ourselves, our needs, our wishes smaller to not incur their wrath.
I can feel now, still, how it affected my life in ways that felt both incremental and visceral. How aware I was to be walking alone down a country lane; how increasingly I scanned people’s faces on the street and in the grocery store. How when this man became angry, I stopped answering my front door, and cancelled public events. How I was scared as I took the short walk from the tube to my home. How I wound myself up in my duvet and cried.
For quite some time, I struggled to write, particularly to write anything personal: I now questioned whatever it was in my writing that had made him, and others, feel a connection to me. I did not know if I wanted that any more.
But people have continued to reach out to me about the things I have written – new things, old things – and the programmes I have made. And over time they have reminded me why I love what I do, what a privilege it is, and a joy. But I have learned, too, to be just that little bit less permeable, less accessible, to keep some of myself back. To let the space between myself and my words grow wide.
• In the UK, the National Stalking Helpline is on 0808 802 0300 or email via their inquiry form at suzylamplugh.org
