Day police warned my husband not to deck my stalker, by Maitlis
EMILY Maitlis says the fear that her stalker will never leave her alone is like ‘living with a chronic illness’.
The BBC presenter said that Edward Vines’s 20-year harassment campaign has had a devastating impact on her family.
And she revealed that the first time the police came to her home about the case, officers warned her husband that they were concerned that he would go after Vines.
Miss Maitliss, 47, who has two young sons with Mark Gwynne, a banker, said: ‘They pulled my husband aside and said “You’re the one we’re worried about here”. Apparently there is a very natural course of behaviour, that the husband just goes out and decks the guy or takes him on himself.
‘Then, of course, you’re in the worst possible position because your own husband is serving time instead of the perpetrator.’ Vines, 47, has stalked the Newsnight presenter since they were students at Cambridge University in the mid-1990s.
He was jailed for 45 months on Tuesday for continuing to breach a restraining order by writing to her from prison. Vines had been jailed for four months for harassment in 2002. He was given a further three years in 2016 for continuing to pester Miss Maitlis.
She said yesterday: ‘I get lovely messages of support saying “oh you must be so relieved it’s all over”. And I just think, you don’t understand this has been going on for 20 years. It feels like sort of a chronic illness. It’s not that it ever goes away. It’s not that I ever believe it will stop or he will stop or the system will manage to prevent it properly.’
She also described the effect on her family, saying: ‘You turn into this person who shouts at your kids for the wrong thing. It just makes you jumpy ... You’re having to think about things that are ludicrous, like “how do you get in and out of your front door?”.’
Asked if her children understood, she said: ‘I think they do. I explained it once but I’m not going to explain it every time. My job is just to keep things really normal at home.’
Miss Maitlis criticised the justice system and told of having to repeatedly help the authorities take action against her stalker.
She told BBC Radio 5: ‘When it’s been … 20 years’ worth of harassment, to actually keep on having to do this is a reliving of the same pain that the actual crime has had on you. The onus is on the person who has been stalked, to keep having to explain each time what has happened. It’s like bashing your head against a wall.’
The case has prompted the Ministry of Justice to ‘apologise unreservedly’ to Miss Maitlis for how it was handled.