How stalker’s decade-long campaign of hell forced me to quit Ireland
Filmmaker only got his life back thanks to ‘awareness’ of UK police
A DUBLIN filmmaker has revealed how a stalker waged a terrifying 11-year campaign of harassment against him, even following him to the UK before she was eventually arrested by armed police.
Jarlath Rice could not have known the hellish turn that his life was about to take when an attractive young woman approached him in a cafe in Ranelagh, south Dublin, in 2007. He had just been to his brother’s house when 33-year-old Lina Tantash struck up a conversation.
The encounter would precipitate more than a decade of violence, intimidation, the loss of his job, home and many friendships before the Jordanian born woman was finally jailed on stalking charges.
Mr Rice said that, at the time he just thought she was ‘an interesting, friendly person’. She held down a good job at Trinity College and was bright and well educated.
A brief sexual relationship followed, before her dark side began to reveal itself.
Mr Rice told the Irish Mail in Sunday this week: ‘Looking back now on that first meeting, and with hindsight, I can see she was extremely inquisitive, asking me a lot of questions, but she passed herself off well. She was very intelligent, she was high-functioning.
‘I realised after meeting her a few times there was something off, she was a person with a lot of issues. Personal issues, financial issues, someone who needed a lot of help.
‘I also got the feeling that this was someone I didn’t want to be around too much, though I did try to help her. But by that stage, she was very adamant that I should be in a relationship with her. It sounds kind of silly now, but you’re not expecting someone to be a psychopath, for want of a better word.
‘She started doing things like turning up at my house when I wasn’t there; she got into my house, she got into my office and screamed the place down. She started coming up to me in public and screaming at me, telling me I had to go out with her. She said I owed her money. People would look at me like I was the bad guy.’ He recalled how his stalker discovered he had a female friend living in Bray after hacking into his phone. ‘She got into this woman’s workplace pretending she was there for an interview, and then she told her if she didn’t break up with me that she’d get a hammer and smash her head.’
It was at this point he first went to the gardaí; the first of several futile attempts to get them to help. The lack of stalking specific legislation in Ireland no doubt blunted their efforts, but Mr Rice said says he doesn’t believe gardaí took him seriously.
‘They put it back on me. It was me who had to take evasive action. They advised me to change my phone number, move house, change my job… I did all of these things but she kept coming back,’ he said.
He recalled one frightening incident when she arrived at his house, banging on his door ‘for hours’. He said: ‘I could see the side panels; they were literally about to come in. I was terrified. ‘I rang the guards several times but none came. Eventually I got talking to a guard, and he said: “If you don’t stop ringing me I am going to come down there and arrest you and put you in a cell, and then we can both have a good night’s sleep.” It was unbelievable. Another time a guard told me after going to see her: “You know, she’s very upset, maybe you should just try and talk to her.” It was like being in a horror movie.’
He said that he tried to move on in a new relationship after a few years, ‘but I couldn’t. She found us out and made my girlfriend’s life hell. It had to end, it wasn’t fair on her.’
Mr Rice said Tantash would hack his phone ‘repeatedly and find out what was going on and that’s how she could track me’. He went on: ‘She would ring [mobile operator] and tell them she was my wife and she needed access my account. She even told them I was dead once to get access.’
International research suggests up to one in six men experience stalking in their lifetime, but Mr Rice said there is a stigma in Ireland about being a man who is stalked. ‘There was a lot of attitude like, “You’re man – pull yourself together.”’
Eventually Tantash’s behaviour forced him to leave the country in 2016. All was well for a year, until the private detective she hired tracked him down the south coast of England. At the time, Mr Rice was working as a tutor at a college in Brighton, and Tantash wrongly suspected he had been a relationship with one of his colleagues. She began bombarding the female colleague with abusive phone calls and emails at the college, demanding she stop seeing Mr Rice.
On one occasion Tantash called her and said: ‘Stay away from Jarlath, b **** . I’m going to f ****** g kill you.’ In another threat, she 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?’
On the evening of an open night at the college, she ordered around £200 (€234) of takeaway pizzas and had them delivered to the college.
She bombarded another colleague with 137 phone calls in one evening, asking for him to hand over Mr Rice’s mobile phone number. She even offered him £1,500 for the information.
When Mr Rice eventually went to the police, the experience was entirely different from Ireland.
‘The police there took it onto a different level,’ he recalls. ‘I was taken extremely seriously and the whole thing kicked into gear. I had a community officer who gave support for my own mental health and well-being. It was a revelation.
‘The training just wasn’t in place in Ireland. There was lack of care and awareness there on a major scale.’ Tantash was arrested by armed UK police in Brighton. She was later prosecuted her on counts of stalking Mr Rice and his female colleague. She received two fouryear sentences, which ran concurrently, and released from prison two years ago. Mr Rice has not heard from her since.
Today, Mr Rice said he is now in ‘a good place in his life’ with work, family and friends in England, but he paid a heavy price from his ordeal. ‘I went through periods of despair with suicidal ideation. I was constantly scared. It’s taken me years to unravel that fear.’
Mr Rice’s story features in a new documentary from Alan Bradley, which examines the devastating impact of stalking. It also charts the journey of stalking survivors Eve McDowell and Una Ring, who both championed the urgent need for stalking-specific laws to protect victims in Ireland, which finally came into effect in November 2023.
‘Looking back, she was extremely inquisitive’’
‘She told them I was dead to get access’