‘My life was torn apart by a secret stalker – I’m scared he’ll come back after early release’

A woman whose life was “blown apart” by a secret online stalker has said she fears she may “lose her life again” when he is let out of prison next month as part of the early release scheme.

Kirsty Pellant, 46, was working at a school in Canterbury in 2016 when she began to get sexual messages from strange men online. Over the course of several years she received dozens of messages, but said she tended to just delete them and “not give them any thought”.

But when in February 2017, a Valentine’s Day card from a complete stranger was put through her front door, she began to suspect something more sinister was going on. Days later, a man she had never spoken to messaged her on LinkedIn: “I hope you got the Valentine’s Day card, sorry we couldn’t meet”.

She discovered the man believed he had been in an online relationship with her for months, after meeting on an adult site where her pictures, name, and personal information was posted.

It was the start of a long and painful hunt for answers. To her horror, over the coming months she uncovered hundreds of online profiles which posed her as a sex worker, taking pictures from her social media and putting them alongside explicit pictures of women who could pass as her. She also found blogs and “sexualised claims” about what she would do on escort profiles, as well as a crudely photoshopped image of herself holding a man’s penis.

“I felt sick to the stomach,” she said of the moment she discovered the profiles. “It was just disgusting.

“There were explicit photographs and images of other women that looked like me - even I was looking at them and thinking ‘oh my god, how am I ever going to prove this isn’t me’, because they looked so similar. Then next to them was my smiley profile picture and my information.”

In January 2025, Ms Pellant’s former colleague, Jonathan Bates, was sentenced to five years in prison over a series of stalking offences and one sexual images offence relating to her and three other victims. During the sentencing, Judge Simon Carr said it was some of the worst offending of its kind he had seen before the courts.

He is now due to be released in October under the government’s early release scheme. But Ms Pellant said she has not been provided with any “meaningful information” to make her feel safe.

“Because I don’t know if any intervention or rehabilitation has been done, I don’t know how safe I am,” she said.

She added she has received a letter telling her Bates will be released in October, but added that “isn’t helpful to any victim wanting to try and rebuild their life”.

“All you hear is that the perpetrator is coming out,” she explained. “We don’t know anything about the time he has been in, we don’t know if the risk has changed. What meaningful information have I actually been told to make me feel safe? Otherwise we are just releasing these perpetrators as they went in.”

She said she is still in therapy over the “trauma” she suffered and that it “feels very unfair” that Bates will soon be free again and added she is worried that advances in technology since he was jailed will allow him to reoffend easily if he is released without proper intervention.

“There is nothing keeping us as victims safe when they come back into the community,” she said. “They regain their lives and we potentially lose ours again.”

Ms Pellant says she has been forced to rebuild her life and reputation after the profiles were leaked to parents at the school she worked at, driving her to eventually resign.

“A lot of parents were just awful,” she said. “It could have been pushing me out of the way, it could have been making rude gestures behind my back, it was just completely vile.

“It feels like everybody hates you, everyone is judging you, and you just can’t get a break because nobody believes you, because it just looks true.”

She is now campaigning to make reputational abuse a distinct form of abuse in the law and has started a petition, arguing the stalking offence fails to encompass the true long-term damage Bates’ actions have had on her life.

“Because all the pictures of me were fully clothed, a lot of what I have experienced hasn’t been able to come under intimate image abuse,” she explained. “But you don’t have to be naked to be violated. The image can be fake but the damage isn’t”.

She said she still occasionally receives messages from men online and finds profiles using her information still active.

“Once your reputation has been damaged, it is pretty much damaged forever,” she said. “I’ve walked away from my career because of all of this. It has completely blown my life up. I’m still experiencing the damage now after nine years.

“I feel we minimise the dangers and destruction this causes,” she added. “It is a form of abuse in its own right.”

A government spokesperson said: “The actions of Jonathan Bates were vile, and our deepest sympathy goes out to Kirsty Pellant.

“Release from prison does not mean freedom, and we are working with victims to design the toughest licence conditions that work for them, not their offender. The probation service now has the widest ever range of tools at its disposal, from alcohol tagging to world-first restriction zones.

“Sharing or creating intimate images without consent is a disgusting crime, and we are introducing tougher protections for victims, new offences for perpetrators and stronger duties on tech companies to stop it spreading online.”