INTERNET PARASITES WHO PREYED ON HER
FOR A long time, Gemma didn’t want to see anyone. I don’t think she was being difficult, just embarrassed about all the fuss she’d caused.
She became hooked on social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. That was bad enough. But then she started corresponding with strangers who were trying to befriend and manipulate her.
It chilled me how badly these weird people wanted to be part of her story. There were two women in their 30s who were particularly creepy — actually, downright sick is a better way to describe them.
One of them from the North of England, with grown-up children of her own, became so obsessed with Gemma’s story that she’d created a ‘Gemma and Jeremy shrine’ on her Facebook page.
She’d Photoshopped pictures of the two of them into a heart shape and adorned it with stars and flowers. ‘This shrine will not be removed until Jeremy is free,’ she wrote.
I was also very worried about a woman from Hertfordshire who tried to befriend not only Gemma but also me, our friends, Forrest’s family and ours by pretending she had family connections to us.
She could totally sympathise with what Gemma was going through, she said, because she too had once had a relationship with her teacher.
There was worse to come. The ‘parasite’, as I called her, started writing to Forrest in prison. Then she began visiting him. This involved a round-trip of four hours — yet her husband never had a clue.
This wicked woman made a solemn promise to support Forrest and look after my daughter until he was back with her. How twisted is that?
One day, I received an unusually large bill for Gemma’s phone. From the itemised list of calls, I discovered that almost every one was to the same number.
As I didn’t recognise it, I gave it a try. It was the parasite from Hertfordshire. ‘Stay away from my daughter!’ I told her forcefully.
But it was difficult to do anything about these two nutters. Of course, I tried to impress upon Gemma that they weren’t real friends, but I was mindful that I couldn’t run roughshod over how she was feeling. To start with, I think Gemma just saw them as harmless spectators who took a sympathetic interest. They became more dangerous, however, as they reached out to her, offering her a link to Forrest.
I spoke to the police about taking action against them, but they told me that no crime had been committed. So they kept going on and on at Gemma, reinforcing her belief that she belonged with Forrest.
As far as she was concerned, they were the only ones on her side. It was their malign influence, I believe, that eventually led to the breakdown of my relationship with her.
And they weren’t the only ones intent on stirring things up. There were several ‘Support Jeremy Forrest’ pages on Facebook — and I later discovered that Forrest’s mother had joined a couple of them.
She even gave the woman operating one of them permission to publish her home address so people could write to her son. And at Christmas, she asked ‘supporters’ to raise a glass to Forrest at 3pm on Christmas Day.
I was disgusted. I felt she was condoning her son’s criminal actions.
As for the parasite, she preyed on my mind. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest had Gemma decided to head to Hertfordshire on the spur of the moment — or turned up on the doorstep of Forrest’s parents.