This true crime podcast delves into the dark side of cyberstalking

Cast your mind back to the early days of Facebook: when it was the norm to post an entire album of photos from a single night out; to earnestly change your ‘relationship status’ as soon as you’d made it official with a partner; to accept virtually every friend request that came your way, especially if you had a few mutual friends and could see that they lived in the same town as you. It was long before conversations about data privacy and surveillance and the dangers of social media had truly hit the mainstream. This was the climate in the early 2010s, when over 60 people came to cross paths with cyberstalker Matthew Hardy.

Based in Northwich, Chester, Hardy tormented swathes of people on the internet over the course of 11 years. He would steal their identities and message their friends and family. He would create fake accounts and try to break up relationships by falsely accusing partners of cheating. He would call some of his victims up to 50 times a day. By December 2019, Cheshire constabulary had received over 100 complaints about Hardy and arrested him ten times – but he remained at-large, and continued to harass strangers online.

In a new Guardian podcast named Can I Tell You A Secret?, journalist Sirin Kale investigates Hardy’s relentless harassment through exclusive interviews with his victims. It’s a harrowing story of how cyberstalking can wreak havoc on victims’ real lives.

We spoke to Kale ahead of the release of Can I Tell You A Secret?, which is out today (Friday, September 23).

Why did you decide to keep the focus on the Matthew Hardy case, as opposed to discussing cyberstalking more broadly?

Sirin Kale: The Matthew Hardy case was just so shocking and unbelievable that when I first delved into it, I felt like there were so many more questions that I wanted to answer.

I wrote about Matthew Hardy and the case for the Guardian back in March. After that story came out, it had a really big response, and what I realised was that although I had traced the impact of his crimes on his victims, what I hadn’t done was try to understand in more detail how he got away with it for such a long time – 11 years, from start to finish – and also why he did it. I was fascinated by what would motivate somebody to target people  all over the country that they’ve never even met, and to set out to cause absolute chaos in their lives.

There’s often a misconception that victims of cyberstalking should just ‘log off’, or that it’s as simple as blocking the person who’s stalking you. Do you hope the podcast demonstrates how cyberstalking can have real-life consequences for victims?

Sirin Kale: That narrative – ‘oh, it’s only online, it’s not real, so you should just block them and move on with your life’ – is so damaging. That narrative is, in my opinion, the reason why police didn’t take his crimes seriously for such a long time. It really emerged throughout our reporting that women were telling police what Matthew was doing to them, and the police were just dismissing them, saying ‘just block him and he’ll go away’.

Firstly, it doesn’t actually work. It’s not good advice. Blocking Matthew never made him go away – he would just set up a new account and start stalking his victims on that account. Secondly, it should not be on the victims to have to change their behaviour to live lives free of harassment. It should be on the police to ensure that we all have the ability to exist safety online and to enforce those laws that have been put in place to protect us. Finally, I think there’s still this narrative that online stalking is less harmful than physical stalking. I’ve spoken to Matthew’s victims who have been on antidepressants for years – these are people whose lives have been really significantly impacted by the stalking.

And who are we to say that the amount of pain and suffering that they’re experiencing is less valid, just because it’s happening online? It can be so damaging and dangerous and upsetting to be stalked online, and the police really need to do better at recognising that, I think.

Do you think sexism and misogyny came into play here too?

Sirin Kale: I don’t think it’s for me to say whether or not the police behaved in that way due to institutional sexism – what I will say though, is that we talked about this phenomenon in episode two, which is called ‘the digital short skirt’ [where female victims fear their digital profiles can discredit them, in the same way that female assault victims are sometimes discredited by wearing ‘revealing’ clothing]. Many of Matthew’s victims were young, attractive, successful female influencers who are very prolific when it comes to posting online. They would post pictures of themselves in lingerie or swimsuits – which is absolutely their right to do, of course – so it’s hard not to think that that might have been a factor in why the police didn’t take them so seriously. Many of those victims also told us that it wasn’t just the police, and they often experienced family and friends saying ‘well, you put yourself out there so much, so what did you expect?’.

I think it’s really hard not to see a gendered component to that, but ultimately, it’s not something that’s provable.

In your opinion, why did it take so long for Hardy’s victims to get justice?

Sirin Kale: The story of Matthew Hardy’s stalking is almost the story of the internet and social media. He started stalking people on Facebook first, and I think there was really little recognition from police officers throughout the 2010s of what online stalking actually was. We live in this age of social media now, but it’s really easy to forget that ten years ago the world was completely different. When Matthew started stalking people, which was around 2011, most of us weren’t really au fait with social media. Most of us didn’t really think about privacy, we didn’t really think about the information we shared on Facebook. Because Matthew was stalking people throughout the 2010s, police officers didn’t have the tools or the understanding of what social media stalking looked like.

I think that the nature of our policing system is also a problem. Matthew was stalking people from all over the country, and one thing that I learned was that there’s no centralised, national police database. There’s no database where you would actually be able to look at cases like this, and say ‘right, there’s been a report in Leeds, there’s been a report in Edinburgh, there’s been a report in Glasgow, let’s pull all these together and see what’s going on here’ [...] so nobody was connecting the dots. Until a police officer in Cheshire actually did put together all the dots and finally see the bigger picture.

Can I Tell You A Secret? is a Guardian investigative podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts from 23 September 2022.