Why TV’s Emily Maitlis has finally exposed the Cambridge graduate stalker who’s tormented her for 25 years
STANDING on the steps of a magistrates’ court in West London, BBC presenter Emily Maitlis reflected on the custodial sentence given to a man who had been stalking her obsessively for years and said: ‘I am immensely relieved. I am pleased that it is over.’ That, though, was in 2002 and, sadly, as the host of BBC2’s Newsnight confirmed at the weekend, her ordeal is still very far from over 14 years on. In fact, she has been stalked by her tormenter Edward Vines for a shocking 25 years, ever since they met as fellow students at Cambridge University.
During that time, the schizophrenic has been jailed and locked up in a secure mental hospital — from which he escaped — leaving the happily married Maitlis in need of police protection.
He has sent letters, turned up at her place of work, called her family, and threatened to kill himself. We can reveal that he has posted many messages on social media sites about her beauty as well as her fears for his ‘mental health’. Most despicably, he has accused her of betraying him and begged her to listen to his side of the story.
Maitlis now says that her two children have had security to get on a bus to school and that at times she has needed an escort simply to go shopping at the supermarket.
One of the most distressing episodes of this saga came during that court hearing in 2002, when Vines sacked his lawyer. This enabled him personally to cross-examine Maitlis in court for 45 minutes. Not surprisingly, she began to weep and the magistrate halted proceedings.
Maitlis, 45, in an interview has revealed: ‘It feels never-ending. His life is ruined; I try to blank it.
‘It’s a heaviness that sits on you, and when he comes back it’s dreadful. I get calls at all times of the day and night. It feels desperately sad. I can’t see how it will end.’
That it has shaped her life is beyond question; she told me some years ago that she habitually gives out an incorrect address, phone number and email because she is so fearful of his attentions.
She has alluded to her stalker in interviews but never wanted to be drawn on it at length until now, for fear of inflaming or prolonging the situation. How brave she is now to make public this terrible experience — and to admit there have been times when she considered moving abroad, or giving up TV work, in a bid to escape his attentions.
Her former agent Jon Roseman, who also looked after fellow BBC presenter Jill Dando — murdered by an unknown assailant on her doorstep in 1999 — says Maitlis has tried to keep her ordeal out of the public eye for a long time.
He said: ‘In all the time I represented her — some three or four years — she never mentioned it, though I’d heard rumours. Oddly, when the terrible murder of Jill was being reported, she still didn’t bring it up with me.’
But now she has broken that silence to tell her story in detail for the first time.
Maitlis, the daughter of a psychotherapist and a professor of inorganic chemistry, has a brilliant combination of brains and glamour. She was raised in Sheffield in an intensely intellectual milieu. At home, everything stopped for the Six O’Clock News, and the events of the day would be debated over dinner.
As she told the court in 2002, her path crossed with Vines at university. They were both undergraduates at Queen’s College and struck up what she called a ‘platonic friendship’ during their first term in 1989.
However, she became aware that Vines wanted ‘something more’ from their friendship than she could offer. After he declared his love, she said the friendship cooled because she did not want to give him the impression that there could be a romance.
There was ‘minimal contact’ over the next three years and they stopped being friends during university, Maitlis has told The Times.
But, he pursued her after Cambridge and would not stop. She said that she felt she needed to try to talk him out of further contact, even though their conversations were reluctant — at least on her part.
After graduation she took a job tutoring languages in Hong Kong, in part, she admits, so that she could get away from a situation which was already very uncomfortable.
In her interview this weekend, she said: ‘I was trying to escape. I had this stalker at university who had been in my college. I’ve never talked about this. I find it mortifying and embarrassing.
‘It takes you a ridiculous amount of time to stop seeing it as your fault. You carry it around like an overgrown verruca on the sole of your foot that no one need know about.’ She remains at a loss as to why it happened in the first place.
‘I wasn’t a celeb; I was just a student who knew him a bit. But it soon became very intense and he turned up everywhere. My whole family was trying to protect me.’
She added: ‘I felt untouchable in Hong Kong, nobody was hunting me down. It sounds medieval, but I wonder what I have brought on my whole family.
‘For the first 15 years, I thought if I did this or that, it would help.’
After five years in Hong Kong, she returned to London. By now she was set on making a media career, having made documentaries and worked for NBC while in the Far East.
She landed a job as Sky News’s business correspondent and married banker Mark Gwynne, whom she had met in Hong Kong. She then got a job fronting the BBC London news bulletin.
However, Vines’s campaign of harassment resumed.
She said he bombarded her with letters declaring his love and that he claimed that she was denying her ‘true feelings’ for him. He accused her of ‘abandoning’ him and of ‘letting him down’.
After the case came to court, she said that it was as if he believed that they had a ‘secret love affair’ but this was not true.
Starting in 1999 he had visited her at work and home — an address she had always tried to keep secret from him — and gone to her mother’s house.
By 2001, as his attentions were repeatedly spurned, she contacted police and lawyers, and put security guards at work on alert of her daily movements.
The matter came to a head when she took him to court in 2002. The magistrate imposed a custodial sentence but Vines was released because of time already served. However, Vines was made the
Emily needed a guard just to go shopping Police described Vines as a ‘very real danger’
subject of a restraining order which banned him from ever contacting Maitlis again.
He gave a statement to the court which said that it had not been his intention to cause distress, and he apologised.
In an interview afterwards, Maitlis said: ‘I don’t think being on television helped, but I believe there are thousands of women out there who have gone through what I have.
‘I was going through all these things such as should we change phone numbers, change career, move back to Asia?
‘Then the other bit of you goes, “Why should I let someone have that control over my life?” I’ve tried to put it behind me.’
However, he infringed the restraining order by sending Maitlis a number of emails, and in 2007 he was therefore sent to a secure hospital. But he escaped in July 2008 and so the BBC presenter was placed under 24-hour protection for a time.
Police described Vines as ‘extremely unstable’ and ‘a very real danger’ to her. He was quickly found, and committed indefinitely.
Judge Christopher Compston said: ‘This is a very sad case. You are a highly intelligent man who has started an obsession, which is really not treatable. You should not be in prison, you should be in hospital.’ And yet, despite numerous interventions by police and the courts, her nightmare continues. His whereabouts are not clear.
She said: ‘I had a police presence outside my house two months ago. There is an injunction and, when he breaches it, it starts again.
‘I now realise it’s not about me. But it is when you need an escort to go to Sainsbury’s and my kids have to have a security guy to go to the school bus. I am butch enough to run fast, but it’s my kids I mind about.’
Vines’s parents, who live in a £600,000 home in a picturesque village close to the River Thames near Oxford, declined to speak to us yesterday.
His Twitter feed, although largely composed of philosophical quotes, contains numerous references to Maitlis.
For example, in October 2012, he wrote: ‘Mark Knopfler’s guitar [a reference to the Dire Straits singer] is so bea-u-tiful only emily maitlis can measure up to it!’ He also wrote: ‘Emily was worried about my mental health. This is what distressed her. But she was, or so i thought, my mental health.’
For her part, Emily Maitlis bravely feels that by making public her ordeal, she will help other victims of stalkers realise they are not alone and to defy their own tormenter.
As she says, though: ‘There is a weariness to it. It feels desperately sad. I can’t see how it will end.’
‘It’s desperately sad. I can’t see how it will end’