10 min read
Stalking is often portrayed as something only strangers do, but in 45% of cases, victims are stalked by someone they know in some way. The new Labour government has promised to halve violence against women and girls, but the detail of how they do this is yet to emerge. Here, Kirsty*, 45, shares her story of being stalked by an ex and also having to deal with a criminal justice system that can’t seem to recognise his pattern of intimidation and threats. Here, she tells her story to Sophie Wilkinson.
I used to be in a relationship with my stalker. The physical and emotional abuse started in 2014, six years after we first got together. While I was planning this big extravagant wedding, the cracks started to form. But I felt I was too far in to pull out, I thought we were going through a bad patch that we’d work through. It took me six years to get out, to begin divorce proceedings, and that’s when the financial abuse started. He took me for 50% of everything that I’d owned before I met him. He got 50% of my business, my pensions, my property portfolio. This was a chap who I’d married when he was bankrupt and didn’t even have a driving licence.
I’d asked for the divorce at the very beginning of Covid, but he used the lockdown as an excuse to stay. He attacked me in May and there was so much damage to my throat, so much evidence to prove he needed to be removed. He eventually left of his own free will. But from that day, the stalking started.
He moved out to a house literally across the road. He would watch me and would come to my house every day, using the defence that because his name is on the mortgage he was allowed to. Even though I’d only – foolishly – put his name on the mortgage because he’d asked me to when we were together.
A pattern emerged. He would come to mine, break the door down, I would change the locks, he would pick the locks. He would come in and leave all the doors open while I was out at work so that when I came back I could tell he had been there. He bugged my Alexas, so he could listen to me and knew my every move, even in my bedroom. He bugged my CCTV for the outside of the house so he could see everyone coming in and out. He then hacked me through my Firestick. He would film me from his house, he would then follow me into the hairdressers and the supermarket, this time shouting abuse at me as well as filming me.
When I went to the police they said “This is going to be hard. How can we keep him away from you when he lives literally across the road?” I said “Can’t you see the problem, that he shouldn’t be living across from me when he’s causing me this much abuse and distress?”
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