‘LOVE CONTRACT’ STALKER JAILED FOR FOUR YEARS
÷Victim had signed a 21-clause deal for €50k ÷Trinity manager followed him to UK ÷Filmmaker was ‘driven to brink’
A FORMER Trinity College programme manager has been given a four-year prison term for stalking an Irish film-maker after claiming he broke their €50,000 ‘love contract’.
Jarlath Rice, 50, said he was driven to the brink of suicide by Lina Tantash’s ‘sinister and sustained’ harassment and fled to Britain – but she followed him, contacted his family and even hired a private detective to track him down.
He claimed he was desperate when he agreed to sign a 21-clause ‘love contract’ in which she promised to pay his debts
– which were allegedly worth €50,000. In return he would: Marry Tantash within a year Live with her three days a week
Speak to her on the phone for at least 15 minutes every evening – and be nice to her
Not change his phone number and always answer her calls.
Her campaign escalated when she arrived in Britain, where she suspected he had started a relationship with a work colleague and began bombarding the woman with abusive phone calls and emails, at one stage telling her: ‘Stay away from him, wh***! Stay away from Jarlath, b **** . I’m going to f ***** g kill you.’
The extraordinary saga began in 2007 when ‘highly intelligent’ Tantash, 43, and Mr Rice had a fling in Dublin.
However, over the following years Mr Rice fought to escape her attentions, eventually moving to Brighton to work as a college tutor.
But he did not escape, as Jordanian-born Tantash, then a project manager at Trinity College in Dublin, soon followed, taking up a new role in London. She contacted his friends, family and work colleagues and hired a private detective.
She accused him of breaching the contract, in which she loaned him up to €50,000. Yesterday, Tantash was sentenced to four years in prison at Lewes Crown Court after she was convicted of two counts of stalking.
The English court heard they had a brief sexual relationship in Dublin in 2007, but that Mr Rice ended it after a few weeks when she began to make demands on him. When she continued to contact him, he told her he no longer wanted a relationship with her and asked her to leave him alone.
Mr Rice told police he signed the ‘love contract’ when he was desperate. He was a freelance independent media producer and moved to Brighton to work as a college tutor to escape her.
After she followed him to the UK, she began to believe he was having an affair with Sarah Bolland, a work colleague of his at DV8 College in Brighton, and began harassing her.
In one call to Ms Bolland, who was not romantically involved with Mr Rice, Tantash said: ‘You don’t see him, you don’t date him and don’t f*** him. I’ll kill myself. Would you rather have my blood on your hands?’
In another Tantash was recorded saying: ‘You look like a horse and you’re an ugly f ***** g bitch.’ In an email, she told Ms Bolland she had ‘disgusting frizzy hair, skin like curdled yoghurt and buck teeth’ and that she hoped she had a ‘heartbroken, horrid end’.
Tantash also sent abusive emails from several anonymous accounts to Mr Rice’s friends, family and work colleagues demanding his mobile number, home address and other details.
She bombarded one colleague with 137 phone calls in one evening, asking that he hand over Mr Rice’s mobile phone number and even offered him £1,500 for the information.
On the evening of an open night at DV8 College, Tantash ordered around £200 of takeaway pizzas and had them delivered to the college.
She was eventually arrested and charged with one count of stalking Mr Rice between July 2015 and February 2018 and one count of stalking Ms Bolland. She was convicted after a trial at Brighton Magistrates Court. In a victimimpact statement, Mr Rice said the campaign of stalking left him on the brink of suicide and that he had been in ‘despair’.
He said: ‘For over ten years I’ve had to live with verbal, mental and physical abuse. The aggressive and abusive dismantling of my life has left me vulnerable, frightened and exhausted.’
He also said he had been ‘pushed deep into depression’, adding: ‘At my worst I have gone through periods of despair with suicide ideation.’
In her defence, Tantash said she came from a stable, upper middleclass family but was suffering from a mental condition.
She claimed to have paid Mr Rice’s sizeable debts and supported his career in return for a romantic commitment.
In a victim-impact statement Ms Bolland said: ‘It’s a strange and terrible experience when someone psychologically harasses you like this. It’s an awful feeling. It’s astonishing how much it can impact your life, your mood, your thoughts.’
Teresa Mulrooney, defending, said Tantash ‘deeply regrets her behaviour and has come to understand the impact it had’.
Sentencing her, judicial officer Stephen Lennard said: ‘You were never prepared to accept it was over and thereafter carried out a sustained and vicious campaign of stalking and harassment that lasted ten years.
‘In my opinion you are a vicious, devious and manipulative woman. You should be thoroughly ashamed of what you have done to Mr Rice and Miss Bolland.’ He also issued a restraining order.
Prosecutor Felicity Lineham said: ‘Lina Tantash carried out an orchestrated campaign of stalking over a prolonged period of time, which had a massive impact on the lives of her victims.
‘As a result of Tantash’s obsessive behaviour, her ex-boyfriend moved country and addresses to escape her and has had to change his contact details numerous times. Tantash was relentless in trying to contact him, even offering money to people he worked with in exchange for his new number.
‘Tantash became obsessed that her former partner had started a new relationship and then persistently targeted the woman in her workplace, making her life a misery. Her behaviour was carefully planned to cause maximum distress but all the time she saw nothing wrong with what she was doing or the impact it was having on her victims.
‘We hope today’s sentencing allows both victims to move on with their lives.’
‘Do you want blood on your hands’ ‘Verbal, mental and physical abuse’