Anyone entering the pizzeria would have picked him out immediately as an arty
middle-class type: shaven head, lanky body, green eyes. A gentle soul, I
decided, after we’d talked for a few hours and he’d made me laugh with
stories about his distant past in an anarchists’ commune. No, nothing
alarming about him at all.
He was my first internet date and I had arranged to meet him in a public place
- just as you’re supposed to do. It turned out he was a former theatre
director, poet and landscape gardener who was now divorced and living in
genteel impoverishment in north London. When he suggested a second date I
was enthusiastic.
His profile on the Guardian Soulmates dating website - under the username
Mystic - had caught my eye: he was “ethereal and sensate”, he had written,
and naturally he claimed to have a mystical side. He loved America in
midwinter, railroads and phones attached to walls. And, happily, he seemed
to share my love of poetry and thrillers (declared on my own profile) and
liked the fact that I was looking for a “fearless companion”.
In retrospect, of course, I see the irony implicit in my romantic shopping
list: Mystic was indeed fearless - to the point that it took two court cases
finally to expel him from my life. The last one was on Wednesday, at
Highbury Corner magistrates’ court in north London. I couldn’t bear to
attend; I know the result only because a policeman called me to say Greg
Downing had been found guilty of harassment and breach of a restraining
order and conditional discharge.
It’s not that I was reckless. Before the second date with Mystic Greg I had
tried to do some research on him - not easy, as he was American and had
lived abroad for most of his adult life. All I discovered was that he had a
job teaching adults; so the next time we met I asked him outright whether he
had ever been convicted of a criminal offence.
He replied, in his mid-Atlantic drawl, “only for jay-walking” - and kissed me.
And he said we could be each other’s muse. I took a deep breath, decided to
trust him - and our relationship became, perhaps too quickly, more intimate.
Then, after we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks, little warning flags
started to pop up. One day, over dinner, Greg announced that he wanted to
retrain as a counsellor for people who’d been abducted by aliens. I nearly
dropped my forkful of tofu curry (like me, he was a vegan). Later, he told
me 9/11 was a CIA conspiracy.
Having spent much of 2002 working on documentaries about the aftermath of that
Al-Qaeda attack, I knew there was no way I could be involved with someone
who peddled such a ridiculous theory. True, I had enjoyed getting to know
Mystic Greg, but our views were incompatible. So I gave him the heave-ho.
I thought that was the end of it. First, there were e-mails regretting the end
of our brief relationship. They pleaded for another chance, insisting we’d
both regret it if we didn’t try again. Foolishly, I responded, not wanting
to be unkind.
Nothing I wrote gave him grounds for hope but the e-mails continued, gradually
becoming stranger, darker, more sexual. One, written when he was strung out
on caffeine (he said), wound its way through phone sex, obesity and voodoo.
It frightened and disgusted me.
Then the phone calls started, several a day. I told him again and again that
it was over. But he didn’t stop. There were frequent calls in the middle of
the night from a withheld number. When I picked up, there was silence on the
other end of the line. After four silent calls at two in the morning, I rang
him at 8am and asked him what he thought he could achieve through this
harassment.
“Closure,” he said, “I want closure. I need to meet.” I said that wasn’t
possible. “Well, in that case,” he said, “I want you to buy me a gift
subscription to Soulmates. I want to meet someone new. It’s the least you
can do.”
I refused this extraordinary request and put the phone down. By then I was
finding it impossible to concentrate on work. I had a bar put on the line so
that nobody could call from a withheld number. I also called the police, who
took my concerns seriously: within 10 minutes I had been contacted by the
telephone investigation unit, who took a statement over the phone.
But as soon as I’d put it down, Greg called again and left the following
message: “I have to speak to you - you can either call me or I am just going
to come over. I am sorry, this is just the way things are. Get back to me if
you want or I will come round in about two to three hours. I’ve said my
piece and I will either talk to you or come over.”
Seriously alarmed, I phoned the police again who immediately warned him that
if he came near me he would be arrested. Greg had agreed to “leave town” and
not contact me, they told me. But on the same day he e-mailed and phoned -
ostensibly to apologise.
At this point I decided to let the website know what was going on. But whom
should I contact? There was no name; no phone number; nothing at all on the
website about its safety policy. I sent an e-mail to the only address I
could find. No response. I sent another. Nothing. I sent a third.
At last: a reply dropped into my inbox from Guardian Soulmates Support. It
thanked me for my three e-mails but said: “We don’t generally get involved
in offline disputes between members, simply because we have no way of
establishing the truth of any allegations made.” After more anxious e-mails
from me, my anonymous Soulmates contact claimed that he had tried to call
the police but hadn’t got through to the right officer.
For a week or so the calls ceased. I went to Wales with my family. Halfway
through the holiday, on a fine August morning, Greg phoned seven times.
Furious that he felt he had the right to disrupt my life, I cracked and
dialled his number. I asked him to leave me alone. What he said chilled me:
“You’re not at home, are you?” When I phoned the police again, the
investigating officer ticked me off for contacting Greg and failing to
report his earlier calls: “I don’t like it when they disrespect the police.
Come in and give a statement.”
Back in London, the night before I went to the police station, Greg phoned me
four times. After midnight the phone rang for 20 minutes. The n e x t d a y
h e w a s arrested and apparently broke down under questioning - “blubbing
like a baby”, as the officer put i t - a n d admitted that he had been
convicted of a similar offence in America some 10 years earlier and had been
served with a restraining order.
Such was the efficiency of the community safety unit at Islington police
station that Greg appeared in court a day later. He was found guilty of
harassment, given a conditional discharge and served with a restraining
order not to contact me. I contacted Soulmates, this time asking it to
remove him from the dating website. There was no answer for five days -
during which Greg was able to contact other women who were unaware of his
history. When I e-mailed Soulmates yet again, my anonymous respondent asked
for a crime reference number and said details would be checked with police.
I noticed that the subject line of my e-mail had been altered: “Harassment
from another member” had been replaced with the anodyne “I had a bad
experience on this site”.
Six days on I was given the name of the person who would be dealing with my
complaint - but no phone number, despite numerous requests. Finally, more
than two weeks after I had first told Soulmates that Greg had been found
guilty of harassment, his details were taken off the website.
I then fired off a complaint about its negligent attitude to members’ safety.
Seven weeks after I had first contacted the site about my concerns, a real
person with a name and phone number finally contacted me. Kate Morgan Locke,
MD of Guardian Ventures, was profusely apologetic: there had been “a
catalogue of mistakes”, she admitted, and the website would be changed to
include information on harassment and a page for reporting incidents.
When I asked why Greg hadn’t been suspended immediately, she told me: “There
was no clear way for someone to flag up a more serious issue than a browser
not working - and thus what happened to you wasn’t recognised as a serious
incident.”
Thankfully, the website was indeed quickly revamped. So, several months later,
reassured by all the security procedures that had been put in place, I
decided to try my luck again. There were several immediate replies - one of
them from a man with a blurry photograph who called himself “Serpentine” and
said he was a foreign correspondent who had worked for both The Guardian and
The Times. He described himself as “suffused with wit, intelligent, but
never pedantic”.
I thought he sounded rather full of himself - especially when he decribed
remodelling a friend’s garden Japanese-style - but I had worked with foreign
correspondents before and found most of them to be great fun. So I gave
Serpentine the benefit of the doubt and e-mailed him back.
Because of his work as a journalist, he said that was concealing his profile
from “all but my favourites because I’d like to exercise a little discretion
and not risk anyone who knows me reading my profile”. Fair enough, I
thought, making a note of his real Christian name: Dominic. I was
sufficiently intrigued to Google Dominics linked to The Guardian and The
Times, but couldn’t find anyone who fitted his self-description.
Then his profile disappeared. A week or two later he was back as “Sirocco” -
with his change of username explained away as a “technical hitch at Guardian
headquarters”. He said he had been busy covering the American elections. I
asked if Dominic was his real name. He e-mailed back, saying: “Today my name
is Dominic; tomorrow my name is Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice” - at which point
I decided he was a jerk and didn’t bother to reply.
Then came another e-mail, with a poem by Keats, saying he had been riding in
the Forest of Dean. And more poems in e-mails that grew ever longer as mine
became shorter. Eventually, tiring of his e-mails, I asked him to phone
instead. He e-mailed to say that he was about to visit his sister in
America: “She’s battling with stomach cancer and we’re all very, very
concerned about her.”
Then, one Sunday, he phoned. “I’m calling from my sister’s place,” he said. I
asked how she was and he said she was better. And he laughed - a slightly
unhinged laugh that I thought I recognised. “Greg,” I said, “is this Greg?”
There was a long silence before he replied: “No, my name is Dominic.”
He insisted that he was a well established journalist, now doing travel
writing, gave me his surname and told me to Google him. (The name checked
out; it was only later that I discovered he had assumed the name of a real
and blameless travel writer.) But I had a sick feeling in my stomach. When I
tried dialling 1471, Dominic’s number was withheld. Could Greg be back?
The next day I asked the head of security at Telecom Express (the company that
handles safety issues for Soulmates) to check Sirocco’s billing address. A
few hours later I had my answer: “Dominic” was Greg Downing. I felt
violated. I was also horrified that he had invented a new identity to harass
me again. He had evaded all the security procedures by giving a false name,
false e-mail address and false photo. But he had used his real credit card.
Greg was picked up the next morning, appeared in court and was granted bail.
The police, again admirably efficient, came round within hours to install a
panic alarm in my home. The fact that they considered this necessary
frightened me more than anything that had gone before. When the case went
ahead last Wednesday, he pleaded guilty; he will be sentenced on January 14.
I certainly hope he is no longer a menace to anyone: Soulmates has contacted
all the other women whom Greg had e-mailed through the site to warn them
about him. But how many more Gregs are out there, creating false identities
and then stalking their victims under the cover of dating websites?
Would I try internet dating again? Probably not. But, while I was being
cyberstalked, through the same website I met someone else - and he seemed
rather wonderful. Nothing has occurred since to change my mind. We’re
offline now, we see each other regularly and our cyber identities no longer
exist.
Jemma Rayner is a pseudonym
Small talk and online lies
2.25pm, November 8 2008 Dear Jemma, Dominic here. Apologies for the
delay in getting back to you. My profile was twice wiped clean owing to a
technical hitch, would you believe? In any case, the past few days have been
frenzied. I was in the office covering the election on Tuesday and that
extended over into Thursday with barely a breathing space. How are you?
2.43pm, November 8 Hi Dominic, I’m very well, thanks. Hope you are
well too - must have been fun, covering the dawn of a new age. What a great
man he seems to be.
Anyway, do get in touch soon - Jemma
2.55pm, November 8 Dear Jemma, I would have preferred a woman in
office, but it is a landmark, no doubt about it. I look forward to Oprah
standing in 2012.
3.20pm, November 8 Ah yes, but why not Condi? Is Dominic your real
name, btw? Or is it an alias? I promise not to tell anybody - honest.
4.24pm, November 8 Dear Jemma, Why not Condi indeed? Though I see her
as a little inflexible for high office . . . Today my name is Dominic;
tomorrow my name is Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice . . .
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