Stalking terror of paralysed TV star
TELEVISION presenter and model Sophie Morgan was too scared to leave home after being bombarded with almost daily online messages from a stalker, a court heard last week.
In one chilling message, Robert Keegan is said to have told the star, who is paralysed, that he wanted to take her out of her wheelchair and carry her around ‘because it would be romantic’.
Ms Morgan, 33, said she was ‘left feeling very scared’.
Mr Keegan is accused of sending a large number of unsolicited messages to Ms Morgan on Instagram between last October and this month, even though they had never met.
He allegedly attempted to contact Ms Morgan almost daily, but she did not respond to his messages, which ranged from ‘romantic to threatening’, Camberwell Green magistrates in South London heard.
Ms Morgan was said to be ‘very scared about what he [Mr Keegan] will do if he sees me in person. I have had to stay away from my home address’.
Mr Keegan, 33, denies harassment, and his request for a crown court trial was adjourned for three weeks.
Gordonstoun-educated Ms Morgan was in a devastating car accident when she was 18 that meant she will never walk again.
The day before the crash in 2003, she was told she had achieved the A-level grades she needed to study law at Manchester University but her life-changing injuries forced a rethink and she stayed at home in Brighton and studied art.
Her big break came ten years ago when she was runner-up on Britain’s Missing Top Model, a BBC3 show where eight disabled young women competed for a modelling contract. She is best known as the face of Channel 4’s coverage of the 2012 and 2016 Paralympic Games in London and Rio.
She also modelled Stella McCartney’s Adidas range for Team GB at the London Games. She has said that despite her disability, her life was ‘better than a lot of people’s because I’m just happier and more fulfilled’.
She also said that before the accident she ‘wasn’t so passionate about much – I was a bit like, yeah, whatever. And now I have a mission’.
In 2014 she appeared on the BBC’s Beyond Boundaries, which followed 11 people with disabilities on an expedition across Nicaragua.
‘I wasn’t passionate – now I’m on a mission’
She has made documentaries about disability access in Ghana and road accidents caused by young drivers and presented Channel 4’s Tricks Of The Restaurant Trade. As well as her TV career, she has been a fierce campaigner for disabled people. There have been a string of stalking cases involving television presenters this year. Last week, Christine Lampard, 39, gave evidence against a stalker who sent her ‘very nasty’ tweets. Christof King, 39, admitted stalking Mrs Lampard, the former presenter of the BBC’s One Show and wife of ex-England and Chelsea football star Frank. The court heard that one tweet from King said: ‘ I am planning the words that will go on your gravestone.’
Earlier this year, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, 47, revealed how being stalked for more than 20 years by a former university friend had devastated her and scared her children. Edward Vines was even able to send letters from prison and while on probation.
In January, Vines, 47, was jailed for 45 months for breaching an earlier indefinite restraining order banning him from contacting the BBC journalist.