Eight middle-class women made a toxic pact to destroy my life. They told my boss I was a paedophile, harassed my family and left me suicidal. They were total strangers - and it could happen to anyone: JESSICA TAYLOR

By JESSICA TAYLOR, COMMERCIAL PARTNERS EDITOR The voice message was spoken by a woman with a professional delivery that jarred with the blunt viciousness of her words. ‘I, for one, cannot wait to end this c***,’ the anonymous female declared. A shocking statement to read, but for Dr Jessica Taylor – the subject of the threat – these words were beyond sickening to hear. ‘I remember exactly where I was standing when I listened to it,’ she recalls. ‘I was in the kitchen, by the fridge. It was so seething, so determined. ‘It sounded like somebody had concluded they were going to do anything and everything it took to hurt me. ‘I honestly don’t have the words to explain how that made me feel. I haven’t listened to it again since.’ By this point, Jessica had been the target of a vicious online trolling campaign for more than a year – a crusade seemingly determined to destroy both her professional reputation and private life. Anonymous accounts accused the psychologist and bestselling author of being a liar, a fraud, a paedophile, a money launderer and even a people trafficker. ‘It sounded like somebody had concluded they were going to do anything and everything it took to hurt me,' says Jessica Taylor Anonymous accounts accused the psychologist and bestselling author of being a liar, a fraud, a paedophile, a money launderer and even a people trafficker Her home address was published online – a form of abuse known as doxxing – and stories were being spread that she had abused her wife and that her children had been taken into care. Terrifyingly, there was no rational ‘reason’ why the trolls would feel that Jessica, 35, ‘deserved’ this level of vitriol. Links to the increasingly grotesque allegations were posted beneath her own social media updates, as well as sent directly to her family, friends and people she worked with. But it was only when one of the trolls had an attack of conscience and got in contact via Facebook Messenger that Jessica realised the true chilling extent of their hate campaign. Shockingly, a ring of eight professional women was responsible. This included a private tutor, a psychotherapist, charity workers, someone from a violence against women organisation and even a magistrate. Ranging in age from their late 30s to their 60s, and coming from professional worlds where trust and safeguarding are supposed to be paramount, they had organised their campaign against Jessica with terrifying efficiency, even setting up a WhatsApp group and Zoom calls to coordinate their attacks. ‘She [the whistleblower from the group] said she had believed what was being said about me and had been swept along by it,’ Jessica says. ‘But she said something changed when she realised they were planning to turn on someone else next.’ The woman recorded voice notes of the group’s conversations, took screenshots and sent Jessica messages revealing who some of the women were and how they spoke about her. ‘At first I didn’t know if she was genuine,’ Jessica admits. ‘I was really cagey, thinking, “Why should I trust you?” ‘It was only when she actually sent me the voice recordings and the messages that I realised it was real.’ The eight professional women had organised their campaign against Jessica with terrifying efficiency, even setting up a WhatsApp group and Zoom calls to coordinate their attacks While listening to the voice message calling her a c*** was horrifying, of all the cruelty that the ring subjected Jessica to, perhaps the most spiteful act was carried out by another member of the group who contacted her via Facebook and Twitter about a year before, seemingly offering kindness and support. It underlines why Jessica had stopped being able to trust strangers. ‘The woman I’d been messaging, who had contacted me under her real name, was one of them, but at the time I had no idea,’ Jessica says. ‘She was asking me all the right things: Was I coping? Was my wife coping? Were the kids all right? Had I gone to the police? How on earth was I dealing with it all?’ Jessica had told her the truth: that she wasn’t coping at all and felt horrifically trapped inside what she described as ‘24/7 psychological warfare’. She told the woman – whom she later discovered worked in the charity sector – how nothing seemed to stop it: not talking to the police, who advised her not to engage; not trying to block it all out. ‘I admitted to her that I’d been on the brink of taking my own life because I couldn’t see any other way out,’ Jessica says – something she’d only previously shared with her wife. ‘[This woman] was saying things like, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, it’s horrific” and, “You’ll get through this”,’ Jessica recalls. ‘It felt like compassion and I felt a little better for having unburdened myself.’ A few weeks later, however, Jessica’s wife, Jaimi, 28 – a doctoral researcher, who had taken over monitoring the online activity so Jessica could, to an extent, disengage from it – came to her holding her phone. ‘She told me those deeply personal messages had been screenshotted and posted online,’ says Jessica. Jessica's wife Jaimi had taken over monitoring the hurtful online activity so Jessica could, to an extent, disengage from it Jessica’s new book, Click, Stalk, Destroy, exposes the tactics and psychology of online stalkers – and the trauma it causes their victims ‘The discovery left me feeling sick, exposed and foolish for having trusted someone who had sounded so concerned.’ Tens of thousands of social media users had seen the messages via Twitter, Facebook and the Tattle Life gossip site. The effect on Jessica was profound, confirming that outside her immediate circle she could trust no one. ‘I developed this massive fear of everyone,’ she says. ‘I stopped speaking to most of my friends. ‘I deleted hundreds of people off social media – people I’d known for years – because I couldn’t figure out who was safe. ‘No words can really convey what I felt at that point. I didn’t know how to even process what was happening to me, let alone how to make it stop.’ Jessica, from Manchester, has built her high-profile psychology career on exposing the ways abusive and violent men discredit women, turning victims into the accused and using fear of reputational destruction to silence them. Her work has included offering support to Amber Heard in the midst of her court battles against Johnny Depp. ‘I teach and talk about really contentious issues,’ she says. ‘The way abused women’s trauma is presented as mental illness. How that’s used against women in the family courts and the criminal courts. ‘I know I’m always going to be a lightning rod. As long as I’m vocal, people will disagree with me and I’m fine with that.’ What she never expected was that other women – some working in exactly the fields she writes about – would turn her into a target for the kind of abuse she had spent her life analysing. The attacks took off in 2022, shortly after Sexy But Psycho – her second book, which combines research and women’s first-hand experiences to examine how female trauma is medicalised and how labels such as ‘mad’, ‘borderline’ or ‘psycho’ are used to discredit victims – was announced as a Sunday Times bestseller. ‘Within hours, everything just went nuclear,’ Jessica says. ‘This woman I barely knew started posting that I’d stolen her entire life story and put it in Sexy But Psycho.’ At first, assuming the woman was confused because the book didn’t contain a life story, Jessica replied saying she must have made a mistake: ‘It didn’t occur to me that this was malicious. I thought she’d mixed me up with someone else.’ Her agent and publishers told her this kind of thing happens all the time when authors become successful and that it would blow over. But the accusations escalated. ‘People were saying I was disgusting and should be struck off. It was on every platform and my notifications were going off constantly,’ Jessica says. ‘I should have been enjoying this massive success. But I never celebrated it because I was drowning in abuse. ‘The police and my publishers said, “Don’t engage with her publicly, let us deal with it”. I’m sitting there watching these posts go up, being shared and believed, and I can’t say anything.’ Then the campaign against her evolved. First, claims that she was under investigation for serious crimes – fraud, trafficking, paedophilia, abusing her wife – began appearing. Then her editor, or a friend, would be sent a message warning them that she was dangerous. Complaints about her to the British Psychological Society – Jessica’s professional body – triggered a six-month investigation that eventually cleared her name but was incredibly stressful. Speaking engagements were put at risk or cancelled. ‘An organisation would explain that it had received a batch of emails overnight and that, while they accepted I denied the allegations, they had to take them seriously,’ she says. Her marriage was also turned into a kind of spectator sport. ‘There were bets online about when we’d divorce,’ she says. ‘Polls about whether we’d make it past Christmas. Jokes that obviously we were going to split up.’ Jessica adds: ‘It got to a point where even when someone contacted me to say something nice or invite me to something, I’d just think, “No, I’m not even responding to that.” I couldn’t trust anyone. ‘Jaimi and I stopped looking after ourselves. We focused on the bits of life we could control – looking after the kids and each other – but pretty much everything else collapsed.’ Around a year after her messages about feeling suicidal were leaked, discovering that there was a group dedicated to bringing her down was both vindicating and horrifying. What struck her, almost as much as the cruelty, was the sheer level of administrative effort involved. She understands that some of the women already knew each other, then recruited others on public forums. They set up WhatsApp groups and Zoom calls to plan what was going to happen to her: sharing information, setting up fake social media accounts and even a Wiki page devoted to discussing her. Thanks to their professional backgrounds, the women knew how quickly a reputation could be destroyed by putting the right words in front of the right people. They drew up lists of her friends, family, publishers, work commissioners and colleagues, drafted template complaint emails full of allegations and encouraged others to copy, paste and send them on. ‘They seemed to believe their own made-up stories about me,’ says Jessica. ‘In their version of my life, I became this criminally abusive, monstrous person under police investigation. ‘In my real life, I’m just trying to get the kids to school and pay the mortgage.’ Jessica reported the material to the police and says most of the women received verbal harassment warnings. Stalking is still overwhelmingly associated with men and it is estimated that 70 to 80 per cent of stalkers are male. But Jessica’s experience sits within a newer and less understood pattern, where women engage in online behaviour they might never carry into the physical world. Meanwhile, she says, the woman she describes as the catalyst for the online campaign – the one who claimed Jessica had stolen her life story – was first made subject to a stalking protection order, then to a two-year court undertakings order for stalking, naming Jessica and Jaimi as victims. Those undertakings, Jessica says, expired in February and she must now decide whether she has the emotional reserves to ask for extensions. If there is any light in this period, Jessica says, it comes from the friends who refused to walk away. Those friends, along with her wife and two sons – now 15 and 17 – are what have given her the strength to be able to speak about it now. ‘This hasn’t gone away,’ she explains. ‘But it’s all much quieter now. ‘There’s not a chance in hell I would have been able to speak about this without crying if you’d spoken to me even last year.’ A turning point came when she and Jaimi started meeting other victims of online stalking. Last year, she spoke to more than 400 women who had been through similar campaigns, analysing 150 of their stories for a report to Parliament. She describes that process as the first time she felt ‘normal’ again. There was the mother whose six-year-old child was taken into foster care for six weeks after anonymous abusers bombarded social services with complaints. ‘In the end they just brought her back and said it was anonymous complaints,’ Jessica says. ‘No consequences for anyone who did it. Just a family who’d almost been destroyed.’ Another family discovered that every time they went on holiday with their young children, their stalker was ringing border control to accuse them of carrying drugs or having committed serious crime. ‘They were getting stopped and detained at airports all over the place – with a newborn baby – purely because someone online had decided to make their lives hell,’ Jessica says. These are just two of the disturbing cases highlighted in Jessica’s new book, Click, Stalk, Destroy, which exposes the tactics and psychology of online stalkers – and the trauma it causes their victims. Jessica believes the law – and public understanding – must urgently catch up with the reality of our technological age. Meanwhile, all she can do, she says, is carry on: mothering her boys, loving her wife, writing her books and training the very professionals – police officers, lawyers, social workers, NHS staff – whose responses to women’s abuse she has spent her career trying to change. ‘There has to be life after stalking,’ she says. ‘For me, this isn’t a happy ever after. But, despite everything, at least I’m still here.’ Click. Stalk. Destroy: Inside The Minds Of People Who Stalk Online by Dr Jessica Taylor is out now (£25, Constable) For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123, visit a branch or go to www.samaritans.org  No comments have so far been submitted. 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