Late one evening last week, a call from a number I didn’t recognise flashed up on my phone. For a second, my whole body tensed, familiar feelings of terror flooded back and a voice in my head whispered, ‘Be careful.’
As a driving instructor, answering calls at anti-social hours from strangers wanting to book lessons is part of my job.
Yet even now, six years later, the sound of my ringtone at 11pm transports me back to a time when such calls were not innocent inquiries but the manifestation of one woman’s obsession that left me fearing for my life.
Donna Hartley was a 28-year-old client whose quiet indifference at the wheel suddenly switched to infatuation when, after passing her test, she besieged me with calls and messages, her words alternating between obsession and vengeance, and deepening in intensity with every passing week.
She wanted to hug me, then hurt me, and threatened to hurt herself if I didn’t comply with her demands.
She tried to befriend me on Facebook, wrote letters, and drove to my house in Thornton Cleveleys in Lancashire, a dozen times.
Blocking her number made no difference — she simply bought another sim card with a different number — and for weeks, police insisted there was nothing they could do.
It was only after she turned up at my house at midnight, threatening suicide unless I opened the door, that she was arrested for stalking.
Yet her conviction at Blackpool Magistrates’ Court in August 2017, for which she received an 18-month suspended prison sentence, neither quelled my anxiety nor stopped Donna reoffending.
The following August she received a second suspended jail sentence for threatening to kill me, and the psychological ramifications of my ordeal remain with me to this day.
So I can understand how footballers Mason Mount, 24, Ben Chilwell, 26, and Billy Gilmour, 22, must have felt when they were targeted by model and social media influencer Orla Sloan, who last month was also spared jail and given a 12-week suspended sentence for stalking.
Sloan, who dubbed herself ‘Devil Baby‘, changed her number 21 times so she could keep bombarding Mount with messages after a brief relationship.
The Chelsea star believed she would turn up to his home or training ground, while Brighton player Gilmour, who only met Sloan once, said he had been forced to delete all his friends and family from Instagram so she could not contact them, and been reduced to taking sleeping tablets.
Chilwell, who also plays for Chelsea, described Sloan’s behaviour as ‘erratic’ and said the ordeal left him ‘terrified’.
Still, some have questioned how much of a threat Sloan could possibly have posed to these players. She was blonde, beautiful and only 22 after all.
Indeed, there is a popular misconception that female-to-male stalking — about half as common as its male-to-female counterpart — is funny, flattering and harmless.
Certainly, some colleagues and friends thought I should ‘take it as a compliment’ that a twenty-something woman was showing interest in a 59-year-old man like me.
Although they never said as much, I got the impression even the police wondered what my problem was at first.
Yet stalking emasculated and debilitated me. I was left on antidepressants, vulnerable, seeing a counsellor and struggling to leave my house. So I think it’s time that as a society we started taking it more seriously.
My initial impression of Donna, an air conditioning company supervisor I met for her first lesson in May 2017, was that she was exceptionally quiet.
I assumed she was nervous, but no amount of friendly conversation could elicit anything other than a monosyllabic response.
‘All right’, was her reaction to me asking how she was as she got into my car; ‘No’ the retort to me asking if she’d done anything interesting that day, as she stared silently out of the windscreen.
I continued to report Donna’s calls and texts to the police, and they kept telling me there was nothing they could do, until, eight weeks after her test, my doorbell rang at midnight.
Heart pounding in the darkness, I lifted back my bedroom curtain an inch to see Donna’s shadowy figure outside my block of flats.
She must have followed me home to find out where I lived, and, I later found out, she’d rung every buzzer until someone had told her which one belonged to me.
When I didn’t answer, she texted, begging me to speak to her. Frantic, I called the police, but there was still nothing they could do, they said, unless Donna made direct contact.
‘How direct does it have to be?’ I asked, exasperated. ‘Does she have to be physically touching me?’
I was a nervous wreck by the time, two days later, Donna sent me a message that read ‘follow the music’.
I looked out of my window to see her in her car outside, playing heavy metal. ‘I’m going to overdose outside your house if you don’t come out,’ she texted.
This time, hands shaking, I dialled 999, terrified not just for my own safety, but that I’d have someone’s suicide on my conscience. Three officers arrived within minutes.
After arresting Donna, police told me they found a stash of pills and six envelopes addressed to me, all with differently worded suicide notes.
As they questioned me about my relationship with Donna, and asked whether I’d encouraged contact, I felt I was being treated as the guilty party, having to justify my innocence.
At her trial that August, Donna admitted stalking and it emerged she’d driven to my flat a dozen times.
Her mother was there to support her in court, but a psychiatric report found she’d had a troubled upbringing and in me, it seems, had found a figure of trust.
Her lawyer claimed she’d had ‘little experience of relationships’ and ‘completely misread the signals’ from me, while the chairman of the Bench told Donna she’d been ‘persistent and calculating’ and ‘extremely manipulative’.
Although I realised Donna was vulnerable, too, I was still aghast when she was given an eight-week jail term suspended for 18 months.
How much protection would the indefinite restraining order she’d been given offer me if her mental health worsened?
My doctor put me on anti- depressants. I started counselling and spent my spare time sitting at home, staring at the living room wall, wishing I could disappear.
