Last week, I was scrolling aimlessly through documentaries on Netflix when Can I Tell You A Secret? was offered to me. “There it is,” I said nervously to my partner. As the trailer began to autoplay, he raised his voice. “Get off it, click through to something else.” This documentary was one I helped make happen, and I would even go as far as to say it was only made because of me. It tells the story of an obsessive and manipulative cyber-stalker through the victims, survivors and women whom he targeted. I was one of those women.
Back in 2022, after I found out that the man who cyber-stalked me on and off for eight years had finally been arrested, I worked on a piece with brilliant journalist Sirin Kale about my experience. I pitched to some outlets but didn’t hear back; Sirin reached out to my management. She was already working on a major investigative feature about him. She handled the story with care and was able to uncover so much more about him. Her piece introduced him as “Britain’s worst cyberstalker” – and though I knew his impact was huge, it was now spelt out in black and white, and reading it gave me the sense that my reactions to him over those eight years hadn’t been disproportionate. Sirin's words felt validating.
“I didn’t want someone else making my experience into entertainment.”
After it went live, production companies began contacting Sirin and I. She went on to make a podcast about the story, and my team and I held meetings with many production companies, discovering an appetite to make a documentary about our stalker. I instantly felt uncomfortable and wanted creative control. I didn’t want someone else making our experiences into entertainment.
Let's talk #LobotomyCore.
I also felt a misplaced need to protect the other women from the effects of sharing my trauma in public, even though they didn’t ask me to. I had done this before, during the upskirting campaign [In 2019, upskirting – taking a photograph under a person's clothing without their permission – was criminalised after two years of lobbying by Gina and other activists], and all it did was mess me up.
During the meetings I held, it was clear that some companies were aiming to make a sensationalist true crime documentary instead of focusing on the incredible survivors and the broader impact of stalking; some wanted to focus on the “police’s heroic efforts”, for example. This felt wrong to me – it had taken over 100 victims, 11 years and 10 arrests to get our stalker sentenced because the police consistently failed to recognise him as a major threat. I personally had a case against him for over a year, which was dropped for insufficient evidence, despite me providing the police with approximately 100 screenshots of his obsessive messages to me, my friends and my family. The police had done nothing for me but make me feel like I was overreacting.
After many meetings, Mindhouse – founded by Louis Theroux – came around. They had a mostly female team, and they wanted to make a documentary about us, not him. They also wanted me in the documentary both because I was one of his victims and because I had an activist's lens: an understanding of misogyny, the failings of the legal and prison system, the relationship between victims and the police, and more. I supplied them with a timeline of my story and all the evidence I could access (most of it was on an old laptop in the UK), which they paid for. I had discussions and interviews with them, all of whom were comfortable, considerate, and understanding. They went on to make Can I Tell You A Secret?, but I ultimately decided to pull out of appearing in it. They were beautifully supportive of this.
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For many people, it can be uncomfortable to watch themselves on video or listen to their own voices. As a campaigner who has been in the media a lot, I have had to sit through watching myself crumble on television, cry, plead and argue inarticulately out of nerves. I’ve seen myself edited together into a patchwork video of me gaining and losing weight from stress. I’ve seen myself debate with people and be edited to sound overly dramatic.
But a long time ago, I drew the line at watching myself narrate my most traumatic moments through the lens of entertainment, which dramatises my reality to such an extent that I don’t recognise it as mine any more. Even the most well-meaning and well-handled productions can make the subject feel this way, because watching yourself relive trauma is not natural – and TV is fundamentally about entertaining at the end of the day. I can’t do that again. I’ve realised it’s really bad for me. I’ve seen the impact on my mental health since 2019.
Pulling out of Can I Tell You A Secret? made me think a lot about how we consume other people’s –especially women and marginalised people’s – trauma through our entertainment. For the viewer, who is safely removed, it might be a gripping, morbidly fascinating or shocking bit of content, but for the subject, it can be a painful experience that impacts them insidiously.
“People’s anger and sympathy don’t always lead to action…”
I remember the first time I told my therapist about my experience of being upskirted; I couldn’t get through it for crying, which felt unbelievable to me given how many hundreds of times I’d told the story on TV, at events or to the public. She gently told me it may be because it was the first time someone was here to actually listen and help me, and not just here for the story. This was painful to hear, but it was true. That sentence stuck with me, and it came bubbling up again when this documentary aired. What is the impact of this on the women appearing? Even when the production company does everything in its power to care for the contributors – which I fully believe Mindhouse has done – can it ever be good for us? What do we gain?
In the past, I convinced myself that sharing my story in the mainstream would not only create change, but that it was good for my healing. At first, I thought I was gaining from it because spreading awareness felt like action, and the reactions to my story validated my pain. But what comes with validation is online abuse and minimisation, too, in bucket loads. And the acid of that dissolves the positive impact of any validation that initially soothed you. When the media’s attention moves on, and the anger or sympathy your story elicited disappears – which it always does, and which always feels disappointing – you realise that you opened your chest up and spilt your trauma for the public for everything to go back to normal. The change you need to see to believe that this won’t happen to you again never comes. You realise the truth: that peoples’ anger and sympathy don’t always lead to action, and that while everything is back as it was, you’ll now be memorialised as a traumatised person in the eyes of the public.
Working on the ground, having conversations with people about gender, misogyny, sexual violence and more feels more impactful that meetings in Parliament ever did.
I often think about the individuals, families and loved ones who have documentaries and TV shows made about their lives – some without even being told– and how they must feel. Not all documentaries are carefully made like Can I Tell You A Secret?. How do the families of murdered women feel about the slasher docs on Netflix? How do the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims feel about the series since they had no control over it at all, and do we have a responsibility to them? I hope we do.
Past the individuals involved, there’s also a moral question about culture here. Do we become de-sensitised to women and marginalised people’s pain if we are constantly scrolling past stories of their death, murder, abuse or stalking while we sit down to do something as benign as eat our dinner? The landscape of misogyny and rape culture becoming a form of entertainment may have originally been about building awareness, whistleblowing or analysing the problem in the past (though I’m sceptical), but are we past the point of awareness or is there still a place for it on our streaming service menu?
“As a gender equality activist, I can no longer watch true crime documentaries because it's too close to the reality I see in my work every single day.”
For me, it feels like action has to come with storytelling. Without it, it feels like there is no chance of the individuals who lived through the trauma healing or the culture itself changing either. As a gender equality activist, I can no longer watch true crime or documentaries about femicide because it is much too close to the reality I see in my work every single day. It is no longer simply a TV show, but a window into the pain and trauma I am trying to constantly disrupt through my work. My cup runs over with real-life stories from women I have known or worked with and I can’t watch these documentaries without thinking about a woman I know who has been through something close to what is being shown. This makes it feel kind of unbearable to watch; it’s as if the distance we create between us and subjects on TV has disappeared, and suddenly, I am almost watching someone I love – or could love – be abused, hurt or tortured on television.
If you watched Can I Tell You A Secret?, I don’t blame you; I’ve heard it’s a brilliantly-made piece that focuses on the women who survived the ordeal as well as the wider impact and the neglect from police. One review by Lucy Mangan for The Guardian noted that it: “does an excellent job of marshalling the salient facts and pivotal points of a large, sprawling case… without making him the star of the show (as so many of these documentaries end up doing, however good their intentions),” and when I first read this it brought a huge sigh of relief to my anxious chest. I was terrified of him leaving prison and puffing his chest out at the thought of being famous.
Even though Mindhouse are the only team I would have wanted to produce this, I would still ask us to consider, carefully, how we consume and engage with stories of misogyny and women’s trauma. Did you finish the documentary and turn your view into action by donating to cyberstalking charities like Paladin Services or something similar? And if not, why not? Sit with the question – and next time, turn your views into action so that we aren’t just consuming victims' and survivors' pain as something to discuss on our lunch break, but instead engaging with it meaningfully, and doing something that actually benefits them, in the process.
“Women are not props for men’s egos.”
