Netflix’s Can I Tell You a Secret? tells shocking story of UK’s biggest cyber stalker

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It would begin with a message on-line. “Can I tell you a secret?” would flash up on a girl’s pc or telephone display, earlier than the sender proceeded to make a troubling, unusually private declare about her life: a faux-pally warning that she was being cheated on, or a trace that she was getting too near a pal’s boyfriend. This was only the start. Fake accounts may spring up, utilizing the girl’s images to interact in specific conversations. Their family and friends can be bombarded with disturbing messages, which featured false rumours that might flip the sufferer’s life the other way up. And then there have been the numerous menacing telephone calls, which they’d decide up solely to listen to the perpetrator respiratory down the telephone.

That perpetrator was Matthew Hardy, an unemployed man from Northwich in Cheshire who’s considered the UK’s most prolific cyberstalker. Over greater than a decade, he terrorised his victims by creating a whole lot of pretend accounts and utilizing them to destroy relationships and reputations. Finally, in 2022, Hardy was sentenced to 9 years in jail for 5 counts of stalking (later diminished to eight years on enchantment). Now the Netflix documentary Can I Tell You a Secret? is exploring the tales of the ladies Hardy focused, unravelling why it took so lengthy to convey him to justice. A two-part sequence from Louis Theroux’s manufacturing firm Mindhouse, it’s primarily based on The Guardian’s 2022 podcast in regards to the Hardy case. “I was really struck by the power of the women’s stories and their bravery,” says sequence director Liza Williams. “They had huge amounts of agency in how the perpetrator was caught, and had to take the matter into their own hands, to a degree.”

The documentary options interviews with Hardy’s victims, punctuated with actual screenshots of messages, together with disconcerting, even eerie visuals designed to “make the psychological impact very clear”, Williams says. It took a very long time to construct up relationships with the interviewees, she explains: due to their previous experiences, “If they get a call from somebody they don’t know, that can be really affecting.” Some determined to talk to the filmmakers off-camera, to assist with analysis, whereas others discovered the interview course of “cathartic”, she says.

Hardy, now 32, began harassing his classmates on-line when he was a secondary faculty pupil, again within the late 2000s when Facebook was in its infancy. Despite being given two restraining orders after focusing on two native girls, he carried on stalking. He would later flip his focus to girls who lived in completely totally different components of the UK, to whom he had no hyperlinks in any respect. Many had a large following on social media; they shared frequent snapshots from their full lives on-line. One of them was Zoe Jade Hallam, a mannequin from Lincolnshire, who seems in Can I Tell You a Secret? Initially, Hardy messaged her pretending to be a photographer, feigning curiosity in working along with her; quickly, he had began establishing pretend accounts, utilizing her photos, to ship pernicious messages. At one level, the 33-year-old tells me, “he made a fake account of my partner’s father, who’s a doctor”, and began inappropriate conversations with younger ladies.

Boutique proprietor Lia Hambly’s expertise adopted a comparable sample. After sending an preliminary message to Hambly, who’s now 25, Hardy would name her a whole lot of occasions; he additionally impersonated her on-line, bombarding others with sexual messages. “You’d block one account and then he’d make another one,” she says. “Or then he wouldn’t be contacting me, he’d be contacting a family friend, their boyfriend or their husband.” Years later, she “still feel[s] embarrassed” to be round some of the people who Hardy spoke to utilizing these catfish accounts. “I think that will stay forever. I don’t think that will ever go away. Even when I watched the documentary, it still makes me emotional. It brings back that feeling of: why have you done this to me?”

She was additionally consumed with fear about her private security, believing that her stalker was monitoring her. On one evening out, she advised a bouncer about what was happening, and he suggested her to not go to the bathroom on her personal. “You should be having a good time with your friends, why should you be worried about that? [Hardy’s] hundreds of miles away behind this computer screen, but he’s making out he’s watching me.” Hambly grew to become “so wary of everyone that I met” – if somebody requested her a query, she’d instantly suppose, “Oh, is it you?” Hardy’s assaults had been so focused and private that they made her assume that the wrongdoer “was someone very close … It almost makes you feel like you’ve gone a bit mad”. Hallam, in the meantime, grew to become “scared to go to the gym, because Matthew knew which gym I went to, what time I went to my class. There [was] nothing stopping him getting in a car and driving down and being outside.”

Hardy’s intricate on-line internet of pretend accounts was “creating real world consequences for all the people [the victims] knew”, as director Williams places it. “It was destroying their family, their relationships and friendships.” In the documentary, performer Abby Furness, 24, reveals how the chaos wrought by Hardy broke up her and her boyfriend (who had obtained messages falsely claiming she had cheated on him); at one level, Hardy despatched intimate images of Furness to her boss. Another nameless sufferer had her wedding ceremony day sabotaged, when she was despatched messages alleging that her fiancé had been untrue.

But regardless of all this, Hardy’s victims struggled to be taken critically by the police. Hambly reported her experiences quickly after she began being focused, however was primarily advised: “Until something happens to you physically, then we’ll look into it. But until then, come off your social media and basically don’t go out.” Of course, she had already came upon that blocking Hardy’s accounts didn’t deter him. Hallam had a very comparable expertise with a totally different police drive. “The second you put the word ‘cyber’ next to anything, so cyberstalking, cyberharassment, cyberbullying, it’s never taken as seriously as if it’s physical,” she says. “But the way that the internet works, now social media is so integrated into our lives, it’s not the case that you turn your phone off and you don’t get hassled any more.”

Hallam, who used social media as a platform for her modelling work, remembers exhibiting her account to an officer and feeling judged. “Even just his expression – the whole thing was like, well, you deserve it, you’re asking for it, because I decided to have photos that were a little bit more posey than what he would accept. It wasn’t even just from the police – other people were like, ‘You’re bringing this on yourself a little bit.’” Even some of her pals thought she was being dramatic. “It was always like, ‘Oh god, Zoe, it’s always you.’ No one seemed to really understand the magnitude.” Williams describes the final response to the victims as “classic victim blaming”, and it’s arduous to not agree: the onus was at all times on the ladies to alter their behaviour.

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During one dwelling go to from the police, Hambly says she realized that one of Hardy’s telephone numbers had been beforehand searched a whole lot of occasions – and realised that she wasn’t his solely goal. At this level, she began compiling a “bundle” of proof, very similar to those she had put collectively throughout her stint working as a paralegal; it comprised screenshots of each interplay and each pretend account (it’s large, as I see when she consults it throughout our Zoom name). “I remember going to the police station with this file, in tears, and begging them saying, ‘Please, can you help me? I don’t know what to do,’” she says.

Sometimes, Hardy used his personal account to ship messages; at one level, he even confessed to Furness. Some victims handed on his title to the police. But it wasn’t till PC Kevin Anderson, an officer with the Cheshire constabulary, began to research a totally different stalking criticism towards Hardy that issues really began to progress. Looking into police data, Anderson found greater than 100 studies about Hardy, from 62 victims; he’d additionally been arrested 10 occasions. He began to succeed in out to girls from different areas who’d reported Hardy, together with Hallam, Hambly and lots of extra. “In the conversation with him, he wasn’t just ticking boxes, he wasn’t just going through the process of asking the questions, telling me to get security lights,” says Hallam. “He cared, you could tell by his whole demeanour […] There was relief that, god, finally someone’s doing something.”

Eventually, Hardy pled responsible to 5 counts of stalking; solely he is aware of simply how many individuals had been impacted by his behaviour. His defence barrister argued that Hardy’s autism and psychological well being points had left him remoted, prompting him to hunt connection on-line and “lash out” if these approaches had been “rejected”. Williams felt it was vital to put this in context within the documentary. “We spoke to charities and organisations run by autistic people and their main fear was there’d be an assumption that this was typical behaviour of an autistic person, which clearly it isn’t,” she says. “The vast majority of autistic people don’t display these types of behaviours … but it’s also important to talk about the fact that Matthew was diagnosed with autism late, and that meant he was very socially isolated as a young person. And that is a factor in why he became so obsessive and so glued to his social media. I think the film did have to discuss that: it’s absolutely not an excuse for his behaviour, and it doesn’t explain the harm he caused, but it is an important thing to explore.”

Both Hallam and Hambly hope that the documentary removes any false impression that cyber stalking is in some way a much less critical offence than so-called “traditional” stalking. “We want to raise awareness, we want to put pressure on social media platforms to stop the ability to make so many accounts in such a short space of time,” Hallam says. She nonetheless finds the disparity between the dismissive response to her first criticism and the load of Hardy’s eventual sentence fairly troublesome to compute. “It was such a vast difference: from no one caring, to ‘we’re taking this seriously, and this is the punishment we think it deserves,’” she says. “I wish I could tell the girl at the beginning what was going to happen. Just to give her a bit more strength. Because strength comes with support, and in the beginning, I didn’t feel like I had any. But by the end I felt like I had an army.”

‘Can I Tell You a Secret?’ is out now on Netflix