'It was strange watching it' - Irishman details harrowing own Baby Reindeer stalking story

An Irishman has recounted his experience of his own 'Baby Reindeer' stalking experience which went on for a decade, initially in Ireland and then in the UK. 

Jarlath Rice told Lunch Time Live on Newstalk about his traumatic experience which he endured for 10 years.

In an ordeal lasting until 2017, Jarlath was assaulted, subjected to thousands of messages of abuse, and relentlessly followed in Ireland and abroad by a woman who has since been convicted of stalking in the UK.

He told presenter Andrea Gilligan that his own situation has "a lot of similarities with Baby Reindeer - it was really strange watching it. Obviously it is a dramatisation, but there were a lot of parallels". 

A simple conversation with a random woman in a Dublin café in 2007 resulted in 10 years of stalking hell for Jarlath Rice.

He recounted how they ended up meeting a couple more times before he realised she was "something a bit troubled about the person", but by then it was too late.

He wasn't interested in having a relationship, but the woman was very persistent and "needy". 

"You are a human being, you feel empathy for people and you want to help them - you don't expect them to be psychotic," he said. "Very quickly things escalated and I realised that this person wasn't the person they were making out to be," he said. 

She started following and tracking Jarlath to his mother's house and to where his father lived. She found out information about him, and even rang up the phone company "pretending that they were my wife or that I had died or something to get the PIN for my phone, so they could listen to my messages and obviously monitoring what I was up to," Jarlath recalled. 

The woman began randomly “popping up in strange places,” at the Luas, in a shop, or when he was leaving his home – all under the pretence of chance encounters.

This caused a lot of disruption for Jarlath who was studying for an MA at the time. 

"Then she moved to an apartment above where I was living in Balinteer and had to drive by my house to get where she was going and that became a bit of an issue," said Jarlath.

“When I didn’t want to talk to her, she’d often be confrontational and scream at me in the street or scream at me on the Luas, the train, or wherever I happened to be," he said.

"Things took a nasty twist when I was doing work for a friend of mine, a female, and they had left a message on my phone,” he said.

"This woman had got the phone number, got the message and made a threat to my friend that she was on her way to her house and she had a hammer. My blood runs cold every time I think about it and that was the sign that this person was dangerous,” Jarlath said. 

He reported her to police and she told them that they had been engaged, and Jarlath had let her down and she had been emotional. Jarlath said the police told her to "just calm down and believed all that she said". 

From there, he said it became "constant, persistent emails, phonecalls - no matter what I said to her, she wouldn't listen. She was adamant that we were going to be in a relationship". 

Jarlath said he wasn't believed, despite the perpetrator being brought to court and having an assault charge struck out in lieu of a fine. 

"This was pre-stalking laws and the police weren't trained and weren't up to speed and pushed an awful lot back on me," he said. 

Jarlath's stalker broke into the apartment building of his partner at the time, and tried to kick the door in before being removed by the police. "She waited all night and the next morning she violently attacked us," he said. 

If she had been charged and punished through the legal system, he felt her behavour would have stopped. 

Events continued when he moved to the UK in 2015. She had followed him to the UK and made threats. 

As the UK had strong laws against stalking in place at the time, which weren't in place in Ireland, police took the situation seriously and the woman was sentenced to eight years in prison.

She was released on parole after two years and Jarlath said, “touch wood,” he hasn’t heard from her since and there have been no further incidents.

You can listen to the full interview with Andrea Gilligan on Newstalk here