Can I Tell You A Secret is a documentary about the stuff nightmares are made of. Over the course of a decade, a cyber-stalker named Matthew Hardy haunted the inboxes of women around the UK, harassing them via Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Dubbed ‘Britain’s worst cyber-stalker’, he escaped police notice for years, before finally being jailed in 2022.
If this story sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s been told before – in the form of a podcast series from the Guardian, confusingly also called Can I Tell You A Secret? That was hosted by Sirin Kale, who does pop up here as a talking head, albeit literally only for five minutes, to explain how she first heard about the story.
This, the TV version, is the first Netflix commission for Louis Theroux’s production company Mindhouse, and as with the podcast, the majority of the two-parter focusses on the stories of three women who were hounded by Hardy.
That would be stay-at-home girl Lia, influencer Abby and model Zoe. All of them loved to post about their lives online – “everywhere I went, social media followed me,” Zoe says at the start – and at some point, this brought them to the attention of Hardy.
Soon, the harassment would begin, preceded with a simple text message: “Can I tell you a secret?” In a few days, Hardy was flooding the girls’ inboxes, ringing them multiple times a night and wreaking havoc on their personal lives by stealing the identities of family and friends.
“It spiralled out of control,” an emotional Lia tells the camera at one point. “[Hardy] was involving my friends and their husbands” – in one instance, Hardy posed as Lia herself and convinced her best friend’s fiancé that she was cheating on him. Abby recalls nude photos of her being stolen and used to start a fake flirtation with an older male colleague.
The stories are obviously horrific, and the producers handle this sensitively – although the ‘flashback’ style cutaways in which they mime reacting to Hardy’s messages as though they’d been sent for the first time are spectacularly cringe. But things start going off the rails slightly in the second episode.
To put it simply, there just isn’t enough airtime to condense this hugely complex story into less than two hours. Moments that should have been given more airtime, such as the police refusing to show up at Abby’s house after she receives a threat from Matthew (and telling a shaken Abby those threats weren’t serious) are only given a cursory nod.
After spending the first episode examining the effect Hardy had on the lives of his victims, the documentary pivots from the girls and attempts to examine why exactly he did what he did in the second – but we’re left none the wiser after the credits have rolled. An interview with an old school friend of Matthew’s establishes that he was an ‘outsider’, but little else – and though the documentary devotes plenty of time to Cheshire PC Kevin Anderson, whose efforts finally saw a case come together against Matthew, why did it take so long for the police to take him seriously in the first place?
Ultimately, there’s a happy ending of sorts here: the women’s determination and willingness to speak out eventually saw Hardy jailed for nine years, for five counts of stalking. But the questions the documentary asks remain unanswered, and the unrepentant Hardy remains a shadowy figure in the middle of a spider’s web: defanged but still dangerous.
