Like millions of people around the world I have a blog. I started mine on 7/7
after a suicide bomb exploded in my train carriage. When I got home from
hospital, after being treated for shock and cuts, I posted my account of my
shattered journey on urban75.com, a London message board.
Afterwards I carried on writing. Blogging was a way for me to work though
posttraumatic shock; the flashbacks, my guilt at being alive when 26
innocents in my carriage had died and the crippling fear that made everyday
life feel like moving through a war zone. My blog found a worldwide
audience: I inadvertently became an extra in a global news story and my
diary was the focus of media attention.
Among the people who read my entries were fellow passengers; many contacted me
and related their own experiences and feelings, which were so similar to my
own. We formed an online self-help group and went to the pub and shared our
stories. Other strangers who had not been involved in the bombings left
sympathetic comments.
In January 2006 I began to get dozens of effusive mails from a reader called
“FJL”. I found they were coming from a self-styled “secret history
researcher”, Felicity Jane Lowde, a woman in her early forties with a
grown-up son, who lived in Oxford. While such intense attention from a man
might have struck me as creepy, a woman seemed harmless enough.
As months passed, FJL’s communications began to hint at a mysterious
back-story. There were mentions of “colleagues at Special Branch” and
“secret casework”. As it struck me as wildly unlikely that anyone who was a
real security services operative would broadcast this fact in a blog, I
privately wondered if FJL had a rather overactive imagination. Reading
Lowde’s own blog, I discovered that she was researching Jack the Ripper. She
claimed she would soon be publishing her “research disclosures”.
In May 2006 the tone of Lowde’s comments suddenly changed. She issued dire
warnings that the security services had “opened a surveillance file on me”.
Lowde made it clear that she expected me and the group to drop our calls for
a public inquiry and instead ask to gain access to “classified casework
files” – with Lowde at our side. Startled, I politely declined her demands.
There was a meeting with the home secretary in the diary to discuss the 7/7
victims’ inquiry calls. Other readers left comments telling me to ignore
Lowde’s odd demands.
Lowde left a flurry of insults and then e-mailed that she was reporting me to
the police and “taking legal action against me”. I asked her to leave me
alone. I hoped that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t. Lowde published a long essay on her blog in which she accused me of
“using press attention to further ambitious career goals rather than help
people”. Further e-mails followed in which she demanded: “Why didn’t you
stay and help the dying? So you could have a go at journal-ism? There, that
ends what I have to say to you and you know what I think of you. That really
was unforgiveable, brat.”
It struck a raw nerve and I began shaking. Was that really what people thought
of me? I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I had been writing about 7/7
to try to help myself and others. I had poured out my heart on my blog about
the nightmares of the screams in the dark, the helpless guilt I felt because
I couldn’t help those who were killed and injured. I could not believe this
woman was targeting the posttraumatic shock disorder (PTSD) symptoms that I
suffered from in this deliberately cruel way. All I had done was politely
disagree with her and then ask her to leave me be.
More e-mails followed from Lowde, addressed to a police officer, copying me
in. I was being accused of a “harassment campaign” and of having sent her “a
series of screamingly aggressive and threatening e-mails” . But I had done
no such thing. A week later, in June, another long essay about me was
published by Lowde on her website, describing me as “libellous”,
“persecuting”, “playacting”, “verging on the insane”, “having an apparently
genuine need for psychiatric help” and stating that I had been “rebuked by
the authorities”. Dozens of anonymous comments appeared on her blog
agreeing. It seemed Lowde was trying to wreck my personal and professional
reputation.
Reluctantly, I contacted the officer to whom Lowde’s complaint e-mails were
addressed. I felt embarrassed; the whole thing seemed extraordinary and
unreal. But the officer was sympathetic and told me he “was very aware of
Lowde” already. He asked me to keep in touch and to let him know if it got
worse over the next few months.
It did get worse. I wrote a piece for The Sunday Times about how I was
violently raped and left for dead by a stranger in 2002 (my attacker was
jailed for 15 years). Lowde sent e-mails stating that “None of us think
North can ever have been sincere in her rape claim”, stating: “I fully
believe that you are capable of lying about being raped. I wonder whether
some poor bastard isn’t doing time for nothing.”
She continued to accuse me, publicly and privately, of having “fled the scene”
on 7/7. Again, dozens of comments seemed to agree with her, which upset me.
I know now that these comments were written by Lowde.
I e-mailed her again and asked her to stop sending me e-mails and blog
comments – explaining this was harassment and that if she did not cease I
would go to the police.
“Perverted Rachel,” she wrote, “the police have all the evidence. You haven’t
a hope of prosecution after the pure vindictiveness and harassment you’ve
exhibited. Go to hell!” I gave up asking her to stop. The situation felt out
of control. By now I had given up working in advertising and was working at
home, spending my days trying to write Out of the Tunnel, a book about
recovering from PTSD. This involved constantly revisiting the horrific
details of the rape and the bomb. It left me drained. Every time I turned on
my computer it seemed there would be more attacks from this woman. But I did
not want to stop blogging or change my e-mail account – I regularly got
anonymous messages from trauma survivors asking for help. If I was silenced
then she would have won.
As Lowde’s hate campaign continued, I began to receive e-mails from other
people describing how she had done the same to them. “All I did was warn
that she was defrauding other sellers on eBay,” wrote one man. “She’s been
after me ever since, complained to my employers about me, phoned me,
e-mailed me relentlessly . . . I ended up on victim support for two years.”
Dan Hart, a website designer, described how she had refused to pay him money
she owed him and was now setting up hate blogs with the name of his business
in the title, so new customers searching online for his business site would
instead find his photo and the untruthful claim that he was a “violent
stalker” who “abused women”. It was awful to hear that I was not her only
victim. But I was anxious about antagonising her further by progressing the
police complaint and lay awake worrying about it. Why me? Surely two attacks
by strangers was enough for one person to go through? Why did I have to take
this on?
I did go to my local police, who were extremely supportive. In November 2006
Lowde was arrested, bailed and ordered not to contact me or write about me –
a condition she broke within hours of release. Rearrested and rebailed, she
was told not to use the internet until the trial. She bought a new computer
and carried on. By now I had received more than 100 abusive e-mails from her
and more than 250 abusive comments.
The trial took place in early April – but Lowde failed to appear, so she was
convicted in absentia of harassment. A warrant was issued for her arrest.
Most people were shocked but many bloggers had known what was going on. They
had seen Lowde’s blog and had even been contacted by her, asking them to
join her hate campaign. It was a huge relief to be able to refute Lowde’s
false claims about me: the worry that people might actually believe her lies
had been the hardest thing to bear. Now I could finish my book and prepare
for my wedding a few weeks later.
Lowde went on the run and moved from Oxford to within five miles of my flat. I
returned from my honeymoon still floating with happiness. Back home, I
switched on my computer to find 47 anonymous messages, all grimly familiar
in tone.
“You will pay for your actions,” they read. “People pay for their spite,
slowly. In your wedding picture you look happy to have got away with it. But
time is ticking and you’ll wind up in jail with the stupid grin wiped off
your evil face.”
It was too much. I had not spoken out to defend myself in more than a year
because I did not want to interfere with the police investigation. I had
hoped, once Lowde was convicted, that she would be given psychiatric help
and prevented from contacting me. Instead, she was still after me and the
intensity of her rage was becoming truly terrifying. I was convinced she
would soon turn up at my door.
I called the police: they believed she was in east London, using cybercafes
and returning to Oxford periodically. Perhaps cybercafe users could help to
track her down, I wondered. I asked my readers for advice. Fellow bloggers
rallied round. A “Find Lowde!” campaign began, with hundreds of bloggers
attaching virtual “wanted” posters to their blogs.
Lowde continued to blog defiantly but the net was closing in. The police got a
tip-off: a blogging regular at an East End pub had spotted Lowde in a
cybercafe in Brick Lane. She was arrested and kept in a police cell
overnight; she was in court the next day. I went along and stared at the
woman who had made my life miserable for so long. She wore a black cardigan
and flowery skirt and looked startlingly ordinary. She had no excuse for not
having missed her own trial. “This court is a farce!” she shouted angrily.
Three weeks later I returned to court to see Lowde sentenced. Next to me were
other bloggers who had supported me and Dan, the website designer whom Lowde
had targeted. She was sentenced to the maximum six months, given a
restraining order banning her from harassing me and a postconviction Asbo
that protected a long list of her other victims for five years.
Three strangers had attacked me in five years; a rapist, a suicide bomber and
a stalker. But the rapist and the bomber did not know my name. They had not
attacked me, Rachel: I was anonymous, just in their way.
Lowde was different. She had attacked my sense of self, the life I had
painfully rebuilt twice after trauma. She had done her best to blacken my
name and attack my friends and family. She had deliberately targeted my
survivor guilt, my grief and my despair. She had invoked the screams of the
injured I had left behind, the desperate attempts I had made in the
aftermath to help myself and others and thrown them in my face. She had
waged a year-long psychological war; although she had never met me, she had
written that she wanted me dead, disgraced, that I was mentally ill, a liar,
hated and despised.
And that was the worst thing. Nobody understood why she was the hardest of all
to bear. You can show people physical injuries and they understand, but the
damage left by crawling fear, the shuddering horror that I really was an
evil bitch who should have died, who had let people down – that damage was
invisible.
Perhaps she was mentally ill, perhaps she was just wicked. After she was
sentenced a few bloggers said it was cruel to send her to jail. But the
failings of the UK justice system are not my problem, although I would love
Lowde to be helped and for nobody else to be targeted by her.
I saw what she did to others. I wish she had never come into my life. I wish.
I wish. But I hold on to what I still believe: she was a one-off. I do the
maths: there were three strangers who tried to destroy me, but so many other
strangers who supported me and gave me hope. That’s enough: it has to be.
Rachel North’s book Out of the Tunnel has just been published in paperback www.rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com
This person who stalked you Rachel is obviously a nutter in need of serious and immediate care.
The sooner they are off the streets the better and the sooner an example is set to anyone else contemplating this sort of stunt in jest or maliciousness.
Byron, London, UK
i sympathise with the hell you have lived with, u are very unlucky, either that or there are just too many psychos on UK streets that encounters are becoming more common. i myself am living through a very traumatic time at the moment being cyber stalked by a man who has totally invaded my life and privacy, intruded on my work, my home, my collegues, my freinds and familly. His stalking has resulted in me losing my job and he has also obstructed my path to find another job. i am totally shocked at how life in the UK now allows any nutcase to quickly build up a profile of a target within the click of a mouse button, forget using MI5 all you need is some money these days to spy on a target and terrorise them. If the tartget fights back they are labelled paranoid and crazy. i think the media attention needs to focus a lot more on this problem in the UK so that people are appropriately educated as to the harm it causes and how evry day people can act on situations they find uncivil.
targert, london,
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.
Andrew, Hatfield,
Rubbish, I'm afraid. The case is going to be re-tried, as the defendant was not even there at the time, and she was not represented either. This article is just alot of spin, it appears. Ugly stuff.
Tim, Oxford, UK
Well done, Rachel North. Unfortunately, these people are very hard to deal with - I for one can't comprehend what they get out of it. But cruel to send her to jail? No - she terrorised you and others for so long and so relentlessly, she deserved her sentence.
Very best wishes.
Gabrielle , London,