Manchester Evening News

Man signed women up to porn sites

STALKER, 27, BOMBARDED HIS VICTIMS WITH THREATENIN­G MESSAGES ON SOCIAL MEDIA

- By ANDREW BARDSLEY

A STALKER bombarded three women with messages on social media and signed them up to emails from porn websites, a court heard.

Kyle O’Connor, 27, also sent them messages about the ‘involuntar­ily celibate’ or ‘incel’ community, an online group inspired by a mass murder in America.

He sent messages to one woman for 11 months, and another two for eight months, often using fake Twitter profiles. O’Connor, who has ‘considerab­le mental health difficulti­es,’ knew two of his victims from school years, the court heard.

Prosecutor­s said that he would ‘turn nasty’ when he didn’t get a response.

He would say he loved the victims. The content of the messages then became sexual.

O’Connor asked one woman for naked photos and sent pictures of underwear to them, saying they would look nice wearing it.

O’Connor, of Wythenshaw­e, found out their email addresses, and signed them up to pornograph­ic websites, from which they would receive emails.

He also created social media profiles in their names, prosecutor James Preece told Manchester Crown Court.

When one of the victims was on holiday, O’Connor messaged her saying he had walked past her place of work - and knew what her boss’s car looked like.

At one point, O’Connor told one of the women to unfollow her boyfriend on Twitter. She replied, asking: “Or what?”

O’Connor then sent her a picture of what she described as looking like a ‘serial killer,’ followed by a number of exclamatio­n marks.

Judge Martin Rudland said victim impact statements submitted by two of the victims ‘both speak of the severe impacts on their lives in serious ways.’

“Perhaps the most serious is the sense that they cannot escape it,” the judge added.

The other victim was pregnant while the stalking was happening, and this caused her added stress and led her to delete all her social media accounts.

The judge sentenced O’Connor to an 18-month sentence, suspended for two years, to include a 12-month mental health treatment programme. An indefinite restrainin­g order was also passed, banning him from contacting the three victims and from setting up social media accounts in names other than his own.

 ??  ?? Kyle O’Connor was convicted of stalking three females on Twitter
Kyle O’Connor was convicted of stalking three females on Twitter

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