EE: Producer tormented by stalker

[faceless]

My stalker made me lose the plot
EastEnders producer reveals her real life drama
Louise Berridge
10th April 2010

When EastEnders producer Louise Berridge started receiving abusive e-mails and calls on an almost daily basis, she was told they ‘came with the territory’. But the relentless hounding had a devastating effect on her confidence – and ultimately on her television career

Mine wasn’t much of a stalker by TV drama standards. He never even touched me.
But over two years he made hundreds of phone calls and sent numerous e-mails, destroyed my confidence and did irreparable damage to my career.

It began in 2002, the Sunday before I took over as executive producer of EastEnders. A storyteller all my life, this was my dream job. I’d come into the office a day early to work through the mass of BBC e-mails that had accumulated since my appointment was announced, and found among them a story submission from a member of the public. I responded, explaining that no one working on the show was allowed to consider unsolicited stories about our characters, but suggested he might like to submit any material to the script department.

That’s all it took. Two abusive messages immediately followed, accusing me of lying about my reasons for rejection and planning to steal his story. On Day Minus One of my two and a half years on EastEnders I’d already acquired a stalker.

‘Mr T’ was already known at EastEnders as a sender of rabid e-mails to anyone who failed to employ him. The office staff smiled at my folly in responding and said, ‘Ignore him, he’ll go away.’ He didn’t. From initially blaming me for taking the bread out of the mouths of his starving children, his messages became increasingly menacing, with repeated references to visiting the office. I ignored them, because the prevailing view was that ‘such things come with the territory’.

Then, a few weeks in, a crew member warned me that ‘a journalist’ had phoned the studio and was apparently about to expose me for cocaine abuse. Since I’ve never touched it I wasn’t too worried – but that night my own extension rang, and I heard an artificially plummy voice announcing, ‘Louise Berridge is going to pay the price for her drug habit.’ I opened my mouth to reply – and then stopped. He didn’t know who’d answered the phone, and I wanted to keep it that way. I replaced the receiver, and sat looking at the blackness of the computer screen until the nausea went away.

When I told my secretary, she admitted that this wasn’t the first time. Slanderous and silent calls had been made to the office for weeks, with more than 200 being logged in a single day. My office manager had apparently tried to spare my feelings by keeping it from me, but everyone at Elstree knew. Except me.

We called the BBC Investigations Unit, which arranged for our phone numbers to be changed. I wondered whether the calls might be the work of Mr T, since he’d sent me blank e-mails, the cyber equivalent of a silent phone call, but the unit said such people usually stuck to a single medium. They said cheerfully, ‘It’s probably someone you know.’

That’s when the fear started. The only person I knew with a voice of that kind was the estate agent who’d just sold me my house and had been very interested in what I did on EastEnders. One night I came home to find none of the lights would work. There was no power cut – the houses around mine were ablaze with light. I lived alone and remember standing in the hall, frightened, knowing the estate agent had had a key.

But my new house simply had a circuit breaker I didn’t know about, and my estate agent’s friendliness was perfectly genuine. My irrational fear came only from the strain of not knowing.

Then things started to escalate further. Deprived of our new telephone numbers, my phone stalker got himself an e-mail address virtually identical to my own. I began to receive sexually abusive ramblings apparently from myself, accusing me of having sex with everyone from Angus Deayton to Gary Glitter. His favourite target was Shane Richie, who had just made his debut on EastEnders as Alfie Moon. The press were enthusiastic about my first new character, but my success seemed to incense my stalker. The messages were most frequent whenever I’d won an award. I’d come home happy and excited, to find e-mails reminding me how ugly and repulsive I was. I dutifully forwarded them to the Investigations Unit.

I didn’t think it was Mr T. The ‘Louise Berridge’ e-mails were far more explicit than his. The Investigations Unit agreed, but still didn’t seem unduly worried. They conceded the messages might be ‘upsetting’, but ‘such things come with the territory’. Admitting weakness is dangerous in the macho culture of television, so I agreed and kept it to myself.

In November 2002 the stalker used the Louise Berridge address to send my resignation not only to the controller of BBC1, but also to the press. Not one paper printed the story, which was an obvious hoax, but the full danger of a cyber double was now becoming apparent. My bosses, including head of drama Alan Yentob, received obscene tirades of abuse in my name, and I had to make humiliating explanations, apologising that they had been troubled by my stalker.

Some of the e-mails, however, were sufficiently restrained to pass muster. Two staff members had actually replied to them, divulging confidential information about casting. At the time, we were secretly negotiating a comeback with actor Leslie Grantham, who played Dirty Den, and a leak could have had serious repercussions for the show.

My stalker sometimes copied me in on the messages he sent, but not always, so I had no idea who was getting them. If someone deferred a meeting, or was offhand on the phone, or even just threw me an odd glance, I’d wonder if they believed I’d sent them obscene messages and were secretly thinking I was insane.

I couldn’t know how far he’d go either. The threats were vague – ‘I’m gonna get even wiv ya’ – but it was the relentlessness that got to me. He would send e-mails at the rate of one every six seconds. People said, ‘Why don’t you just delete them?’ but I couldn’t because they were evidence. People said, ‘Just bar the sender,’ but I needed to know what he was sending and to whom, so I could make sure they knew it wasn’t me.

There was a physical fear too. I don’t drive and used to pay for taxis home from the studios, but on two occasions my driver told me we’d been followed. Journalists sometimes did this to learn where EastEnders staff lived, but I couldn’t be sure.

Sleepless nights were making me shaky, while the realisation that my bosses could think me capable of sending insane messages had crunched my confidence. My
work suffered. When I started on EastEnders I made bold decisions; now I meekly agreed with everything. We had a lot of cast crises at the time (illness, scandals in the media, etc) that needed a strong pilot to steer us through, and I don’t think I was up to it.

When the barrister told my stalker I was outside the courtroom door, he caved in and pleaded guilty

It might have been easier to handle in a more supportive environment, but TV requires you to consider abuse as normal. The Investigations Unit did eventually contact the police at my insistence, though they seemed to think I was making a fuss about nothing, and the police apparently agreed. They told me the internet service provider couldn’t be made to divulge the identity of a client without evidence of a serious crime, so there was nothing to be done unless I was ‘actually attacked’.

But he was attacking me, and when a new police officer, Sue, took over the case she understood that immediately.

She swept into Elstree like a gale of fresh air, said, ‘You don’t have to put up with this,’ and set out to catch the stalker. She suspected that it was Mr T, but knew the only way to prove it was by forensic examination of his computer. When her first attempts to track him down drew a blank, she suggested we set a trap with myself as bait.

I agreed, and when his next message threatened a visit I did what I’d done on that first day – I replied. Through a series of exchanges, I gradually induced him to come in for a meeting at my office. Sue assured me it was safe, and that he’d be arrested before he got anywhere near me. We even sent him an ‘official sticker’ for the BBC car park, which had been specially faked for the occasion so the police could spot him.

The meeting was set for 10am, but he turned up at 6.30am, before the police had arrived. Our security officers kept him talking until the police turned up to arrest him.

His computer was searched, but he had kept his drive scrupulously clean. He had, however, made one mistake. He’d been sending abusive e-mails in my name to a journalist, who realised what was happening and forwarded them to me. His evidence told the police what to look for, and they found the most recent had been sent from Mr T’s computer. Just one, but it was enough to prove he’d sent them all, and that Mr T was also the fake ‘Louise Berridge’. The immediate fear of the stalker was removed while the justice process began to crank up, but his legacy remained. The cast problems that beset EastEnders in 2003 and 2004 were not his fault, but I know I didn’t deal with them as well as I might have, and the weaknesses showed on screen.

When I finally resigned from EastEnders at the end of 2004, the stalker case was still unresolved. Sue herself was now getting abusive messages from Mr T to make her back off, and when we hired a strong female barrister, Annie, he started on her too. But they never gave up, and in January 2006 the case came to court.

It had taken two and a half years from his arrest to bring him to trial on a charge of ‘threats leading to fear of violence’. Mr T decided to represent himself and brought a succession of time-wasting suits to delay the inevitable. He was out on bail, and the chief prosecutor felt sufficiently concerned to phone the BBC’s legal department and recommend that they take out an injunction to ensure my safety. The BBC refused, saying that until he was proved to be violent it was a waste of licence-payers’ money.

Now I had to stand up in court and face Mr T, who in a clear attempt at intimidation was demanding the right to cross-examine me himself. Sue offered me the chance to back
out, but I couldn’t let her down.

At court Sue introduced me to Annie, who smiled warmly and said, ‘You have my sympathy. What a horrible little man.’

It was as if some weight had just rolled off my back. Annie saw I was someone who’d been hurt. Within moments we were laughing, three women who were going to make sure that the man who’d stalked me didn’t get away with it.

He didn’t. He’d been banking on my not having the guts to face him, but when Annie told him I was outside the courtroom door, he caved in and pleaded guilty to harassment. In the end it wasn’t I who was scared to face him, but he who was scared to face me.

He was given five months but I didn’t care whether he went to prison, as long as he left me alone and got help. All I wanted was the admission that what he’d done to me was wrong. When the judge said this was the worst case of its kind he’d ever seen, I walked out of that court vindicated.

I remained in TV after EastEnders, but now I decided to leave it altogether. I’d had an idea for a novel with a character whose circumstances would compel them to learn humanity and honour in a ruthless world, but the past four years had eroded my confidence in my ability to tell a story. The idea seemed stupid anyway: nobody could possibly behave honourably and with humanity – and survive.

But now Sue and Annie had proved to me they could, and given me back the confidence to rediscover the person I used to be. After the trial I sat at my computer and typed a single line: ‘You can trust me.’

That one line turned out to be the opening of my book Honour and the Sword.

I have a new life now and am doing what I have always loved most. I do think of Mr T. He’d been through the TV industry too and had, I think, been tainted by it. I hope he finds his writing outlet one day. I know how lucky I am to have finally found my own.

Honour and the Sword by A L Berridge (Michael Joseph, £12.99) will be published on Thursday. To order a copy for £9.99 with free p&p, contact the YOU Bookshop on 0845 155 0711, you-bookshop.co.uk

[eefanincan]

Interesting that all this stuff went on behind the scenes --- almost as dramatic as what happens in Albert Square!

[SpursFan1902]

Pretty scary...