I was stalked by two exes — Nicola Thorp case means victims finally have more power

He’d been turning up at my new flat as well as my office and I’d begged my landlady to tell him I was out whilst I hid behind the curtains in the front room, listening. He’d been out that night and was drunk, probably, and I’d had 45 missed calls in a row. Every time the phone stopped ringing, it started again. In some ways it felt safer to have him unblocked, so I could try to predict when he might turn up somewhere I was and leave, but that meant I had to see all the messages coming in and it was horrible. They begged, swore, blackmailed, complimented, criticised, and accused me of all sorts of things. He wouldn’t let me go, he said. Delusionally, he was telling himself this was a love story and thought he was “fighting” for me — the one he should be with. “You’re the love of my life,” he claimed. The extremity of it was scary — it was “I can’t live without you”, “all or nothing”, stuff. But I’d chosen “nothing” and he still wanted “all”.