Imagine you receive a message from an unknown young woman: Can I Tell You A Secret? she says, before sharing shocking details about your life. It might be that your partner has been unfaithful, or that a friend has been dishonest. Eerily, the names she uses are correct. You choose to block the number, and ignore her troubling comments.
But then you receive more messages from a new user, or a relentless series of calls from an unknown number. Things quickly escalate: the woman contacts your friends and family, telling them lies about you, seriously damaging some of your relationships.
However many times you block numbers, or change phones, texts and calls keep coming through. Social media accounts are made in your name, there is an electronic paper trail online of you having conversations – some explicit – with people you have never spoken to. Somehow the woman has intimate photos of you. This goes on and on for months, then years; you become anxious, frightened and paranoid. Your life starts to unravel.
For dozens of women across the country this became their reality. For over a decade, 30-year-old Matthew Hardy, an unemployed British man from Cheshire, purposefully went about destroying the lives of the women he targeted before finally being apprehended.
Now the horrendous story of Britain’s most prolific cyberstalker is being investigated by Netflix in a two-part docuseries, which is landing on the streamer next week. The series will focus on the stories of three of Hardy’s victims, and include interviews with Cheshire police officer Kevin Anderson, journalist Sirin Kale who first investigated the case for a podcast in 2022, and a school friend of Hardy’s.
It’s surprising that the case isn’t better known. The Cheshire police were contacted about the stalker over 100 times, while Hardy was arrested ten times over the decade he was active. His crimes were so extensive that when he was finally apprehended and prosecuted in 2022, he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Stalking usually carries a sentence of around 17 months.
So what happened here? How was one man able to destroy the lives of so many for so long? And why did the police keep letting Hardy go?
The story begins in 2009, when Hardy was around 17. He was having a hard time at school; social media was just getting going. Facebook was five years old, YouTube, Bebo and Reddit were four, and Twitter was three. Hardy started messaging girls at a nearby sixth form college. His tactics were the same then as those he employed later on, as he became more prolific: sowing unease. Hardy would say that friends and partners had been lying, cheating, or backstabbing.
But with teenage confidence or ambivalence, the girls rebuffed his harassments: “We all banded together and found out it was Hardy. Every time he messaged us, we’d say: ‘You’re Matthew Hardy, go away,” said one of his earlier victims to a newspaper.
But Hardy wasn’t finished and years later would return to hound some of the same women. In one case he told a woman that her late mother had been cheating on her father, and taunted her by telling her he was going to speak to her Dad. The case was reported to the police, who said there was nothing they could do because the messages were online, and the legal and technological infrastructure wasn’t yet there for people to be arrested for this kind of online behaviour.
Hardy’s harassment, meanwhile, continued and intensified. Victims included a former schoolmate who said in an interview that she “lost the plot. I went crazy. I accused someone at work of being him”; and a 19-year-old who had intimate photos sent to her boss, and fake accounts made in her name. Posing as the young woman, Hardy harassed her colleagues, friends and family members – causing permanent damage to some relationships.
Hardy told another woman’s fiancé, on their wedding day, that she had cheated on him. Some of his victims began to sleep with weapons by their beds, just in case the cyber violence tipped over into real life. They became paranoid, suspecting their friends and family members.
Sometimes Hardy wouldn’t hide behind fake accounts – he would simply message the girls insulting and disparaging them. As he gained confidence, and skills, and as social media became ubiquitous, he went from stalking acquaintances to other people in his area, to complete strangers from across the country. He would often enjoy targeting popular and beautiful women with large social media followings – bringing them down a peg.
Sometimes he didn’t stop with the women themselves, targeting other people in their lives. In one disturbing case, he posed as a woman’s father-in-law, a well-respected doctor, and then sent explicit messages to teenage girls online – damaging his professional reputation and causing mayhem in his private life.
The police had been involved with Hardy’s case almost from the very beginning – Hardy’s victims often contacted the force. But an unhappy combination of overstretched resources, belittling of female testimonies, a lack of suitable legal framework and Hardy’s own disregard for sanctions, meant that the serial cyberstalker was able to continue enacting his crimes for over a decade.
This is all despite being handed various restraining orders. Three years after a schoolmate first reported Hardy in 2010, the police were contacted by another victim, who had screenshots proving his harassment – and, even better, one of the accounts revealed Hardy’s name. He was handed a restraining order and a suspended sentence. But Hardy paid no mind and simply broke the restraining order. When the victim reported this to the police nothing was done.
Hardy was reported to the Cheshire constabulary again in 2016, but despite being picked up and interviewed under caution, the case didn’t go any further. He was reported to the police again in 2019, this time in Lincolnshire. A victim’s desperate family had hired a private detective who had then tracked down Hardy. The victim gave Hardy’s number to the police who made an official visit to the stalker’s home, but the investigation once again stopped there. In total Hardy was arrested ten times over the same number of years.Everything changed in December 2019 when Cheshire’s PC Kevin Anderson was assigned to the case. It didn’t take long for the constable to find over 100 complaints made from 62 victims on Cheshire’s systems alone.
“I can’t speak for the officers that were speaking to the victims at that time,” Anderson tactfully said to a newspaper. “People maybe didn’t understand what was happening to the victims, or understand the legislation.”
While contacting the victims on file, he came across former paralegal Lia Marie Hambly, who, helpfully, had made a 700-page dossier which documented all of Hardy’s communications, massively helping Anderson to build his case.
Hardy was arrested in October 2021, and sentenced to nine years in prison in January 2022. Although the sentencing made the national news, it wasn’t until The Guardian explored the case in a September 2022 podcast series, Can I tell you a secret?, that the extent and impact of Hardy’s crimes began to gain more exposure.
While only nine cases were taken into consideration during Hardy’s sentencing, the true number of his victims is immense, possibly running into the hundreds, with Anderson saying there were “too many to comprehend”.
