Finita, la commedia

I dare say that loyal readers were made anxious a couple of weeks ago when I announced that Nikki Harper, ably assisted by Maire Stafford and Mike Fortune-Wood, was trying to have me arrested for a criminal offence. This supposed offence was poking fun at her on this blog. When she contacted the Lincolnshire police on July 11th, she did not put it in quite that way of course. Instead, she suggested that she was a victim of harassment, contrary to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. It was a brave and inexpensive attempt to get at me, once she had discovered that bringing an action against me for libel would have ruined her financially.

I have gained a great deal of pleasure from this whole affair. It is the first time in sixty odd years that I have been accused of a crime and so it was a novel and interesting experience for that reason  alone. Even better was the discovery that Nikki Harper was every bit as excitable and verbose when speaking to a police officer as she was when complaining to Lincolnshire County Council about a circular letter which she received from them. The police file on Mrs Harper’s views and opinions about me and my blog is extensive, because of course she was unable to keep to the point without bringing astrology and spiritualism into the matter. One is reminded of Mr Dick from David Copperfield, who, it will be recalled, was unable to write anything with introducing King Charles’ head into the case.

When first Mrs Harper told them that this was a case of online harassment, the police assumed that I had been sending her abusive or threatening communications via email. Either that or pestering her family and friends by contacting them and saying things about her.  When, after some time, it merged that what had actually happened was that she had blogged unpleasantly about me and I her and that she had been coming onto my blog and rowing with me via the comments, they rather lost interest. It might be annoying for somebody to tease you on a blog; it is not a criminal offence.

I wonder if anybody can guess what advice the police gave Mrs Harper, if she wished to avoid becoming distressed and upset by me and my blog in the future? Yes, they told her that the best thing she could do was to avoid contacting me or having any further communications at all with me. They also suggested that if I had been telling lies about her, she might pursue a civil remedy. Case closed.

As a matter of interest, one of the things that this well known astrologer was irritated about was what she described as ’malicious tagging’ in my posts here. She told me in a comment here  that she objected to this. On July 6th, for example, she asked me, ’ What are your reasons for tagging this post with "Ashby Spiritualist Church"?’ She went on to suggest that this was part of a smear campaign against her. Talk of a 'smear campaign' leads one to suppose of course that she had no connection with the 'church'. The problem is that when you are writing for the Huffington Post about home education and introduce yourself there as an astrologer, that does rather bring the subject into the debate. When you are using your articles there to promote a book aimed at dragging  young people into this mad belief system and getting them to subscribe to this nonsense, that too makes your views on both  astrology and what is described as, 'mind, body, spirit',  a fair matter of comment. As for the Ashby Spiritualist Church, the linking of which with her name Mrs Harper views as a 'smear campaign'; she is being less than candid. Here she is promoting and advertising it in a tweet from March 1st this year:



http://en.twitter.com/SpiritOdyssey/status/175181439803994112





You can hardly demonstrate your involvement with the place one minute and then the next go racing  off to the police and say that you are being criminally harassed because somebody has  linked  your name to it on a blog!

Anyway, this will mercifully be the last mention here of Nikki Harper; a matter of some relief to us all. As long as she follows the advice of the police and avoids coming here or communicating with me, I see no reason why there should be any further contact between us. I am sure that this will be a great relief to her as well as me. She is currently in the process of trying to take Lincolnshire County Council to a judicial review for what she sees as their unlawful policies. This is proving harder than expected and will,  I think,  be enough to keep her out of mischief and away from here for the foreseeable future.

A do-it-yourself guide to online harassment: Part 2

Maire Stafford is currently posing as the selfless defender of a woman who has allegedly been harassed by me on this blog. This dupe has been persuaded by Maire Stafford that I am, as she puts it, in the habit of, ’making very unpleasant accusations’ about people’s children. This at least was what she told me in an email. Maire Stafford has told her that she herself has been upset by what I have had to say about her on this blog. She is being less than candid; Maire Stafford actually began a vindictive campaign of harassment against me before I even started this blog. Come with me now, as the years roll back and we revisit 2009.


Up until the end of July 2009, I had been a member of several HE lists for years. I had encountered Maire Stafford, but not really taken any notice of her. On July 30th, a piece of mine was published in the Independent. That same day, Maire Stafford tweeted this:

http://twitter.com/Maire52/status/2927163148



Simon Webb is Judas! Strong stuff indeed from somebody I did not know and had barely exchanged a dozen words with on an internet list. From then on, Maire Stafford saw it as her personal mission to attack me. How did she do this? One way was to get people to post comments on the online versions of my article and also to encourage the spreading of untruthful rumours about me. Some fool posted this on the HE-UK list on July 30th;

There is a Simon Webb mentioned here as an Area Education Officer.... under
Badman! Listed is the
CFHE Directorate Structure Chart which is readily available on the
internet.... .


http://docs. google.com/ gview?a=v

m/request/7844/ response/ 21038/attach/ 2/cfe-structure- chart1106. pdf+Simon+ Web
b+badman&hl= en>
&q=cache:W9Udfm7eA8 AJ:www.whatdothe yknow.com/ request/7844/ response/ 21038/att
ach/2/cfe-structure -chart1106. pdf+Simon+ Webb+badman& hl=en




This was an attempt to prove that I was a former colleague of Graham Badman. Maire’s response was to post;



Brilliant research R.


Maire

She then touted this idea around and tried to get others to take it up and use it. Mike Fortune-Wood was quick to join in and posted a comment on the Independent site, claiming that I had lied to gain access to the HE-UK list and that I was a colleague of Graham Badman’s. Of course, he didn’t want to use his own name, these people are too cowardly for that, and so posted as Maesk123.

Meanwhile, Maire Stafford was doing her best to get people on various lists to criticise me on newspaper sites. Still on July 30th, she posted:


Couple of less supportive comments on there now, even a nothing to fear
nothing to hide one! Anyone got the energy to slam em.




‘Slam em’; this hardly ties in with her description of herself on her twitter account as shy and sweet! Her aim was to present me in as bad as light as possible. That same day, she posted again on the HE-UK site, saying of me:

Perhaps he has one of those illnesses, you know like people who confess to
murders they haven't done in order to get attention.




The next day, July 31st, somebody posted something unpleasant about me on the HE-UK list and Maire Stafford said:



This would look very good in the comments section under the article.


Maire




Here she is again on both HE-UK and EO, a day later:



What about lots of comments that support Jeremy but ignore Simon.


And don't forget to vote in the poll.


Maire




Now I do want to emphasise that this was all at a time before this blog even existed. I am not going to put all the things down here; there are simply too many. She was posting comments all over the place, telling lies such as that I was a local authority officer, that I was not really a home educating parent and, most ludicrous at all, that I was actually a home education inspector. She was tweeting these falsehoods, emailing them to people, commenting on newspaper sites, lists and forums. This was not limited to passing on rumours from others; she would make up her own.

This might not sound too bad, except that these lies soon spread round the world. In September 2010, for instance, a year after Maire Stafford had invented these stories, Kelly Green in Canada said of me on her blog, Kelly Green and Gold:


'He was an advisor to Graham Badman and the Department of Children, Schools and Families over the course of the Badman Review,'


A year later and the story cooked up my Maire Stafford is surfacing on the other side of the earth! Are readers beginning to see why I might have been a bit annoyed about this?

I gave another example of this yesterday. In the autumn of 2009, a rumour was circulating that I had told Graham Badman to ignore Paula Rothermel’s research. I was also alleged to have warned him that many home educating mothers were suffering from Munchausen’s Syndrome. This was so completely barmy that I could make no sense at all of it and wondered where it had started. Eventually, I tracked down the story to it’s earliest appearance. Not surprisingly, this was on the HE-UK list, which had served as a clearing house for these lies. On November 4th, Maire Stafford posted there, saying of me:


And considering it was probably him who told Badman that Paula Rothermel's
work was not sound I think he has an immense amount to answer for. Wouldn't
be surprised if this wasn't the source of the Munchausens fiasco too


I might have guessed; it originated, like so much of the other poison, with Maire Stafford.

Now I will freely admit that I began to get a little ticked off with the woman after all this. I barely knew her and here she as inventing stuff about me and doing her damnedest to make life difficult for me. I had said nothing at all about her at this time and was puzzled as to why she seemed so determined to try and harm my reputation. I certainly made a few sharp comments about her once the blog was running, but this was in an attempt to stop her carrying on in this way. Anybody who wishes to check up on all this can of course still see the messages on the HE-UK site on the dates I have given. That a woman like this, who has behaved in such a way, should now offer to help people who have supposedly been the victims of online harassment is little short of incredible.

I hope that readers will understand if I hold back a good deal of material in reserve, in the event that Maire Stafford really does try to stand up in court and portray herself as an innocent victim of my malice. I have in the past been in contact with people who have been bullied by her and two new people have now come forward to offer me emails and statements. Boy, am I looking forward to a court case! I have already drawn up a provisional list of witness summonses and I think that I can safely assure readers that Maire Stafford will not, by the end of it, be in a very strong position to represent herself as my victim; quite the opposite in fact.

A do-it-yourself guide to online harassment; Part 1

As readers will have seen this morning, I have been reported to the police for harassment. Fortunately, or I suppose unfortunately for those making the complaint, the police want a little more than just my making jokes about spiritualism. When Maire Stafford heard that the police were reluctant to act, and I think I ought to mention at this point that the whole idea of contacting the police in the first place was hers, she got in touch with Mike Fortune-Wood and asked him to help. She did not actually use the expressions stalking-horse, patsy or fall-guy when discussing this, but the gist was that she had managed to get somebody to pose as a victim.  There was now a golden opportunity for the pair of them to get their own back for all the jokes and snarky remarks which I have in the past made about them. There would never, she told him, be another chance like it.  Mike obligingly posted the following  on the HE-UK list, of which he is the owner:



Hi all


First off I don't want this to develop into a discussion topic, I still
regard this topic as restricted.


Those who don't know what this is about probably don't need to and those who
do will understand the context.


If anyone has had their personal details given out on Simon Webb's blog can
they please get in touch with Maire Stafford


mairestafford@XXX.com


This is urgent, if you want to do something about this today is the day.
Maire will explain to you what is being done.


Thank you.


Best wishes


Mike F-W
Your man in a hammock




What is being done is an attempt at making a case for what is known as ‘collective’ harassment. This is when somebody harasses members of some religion, ethnic group, profession and so on. It is a peculiarly ill-judged enterprise for several reasons and is doomed to failure, but we will let that pass for now. The fact is, these two are trying to do it.



Now what they both of course know, but the woman who was encouraged to go to the police does not, is that Maire Stafford and Mike Fortune-Wood worked a neat double act in the summer of 2009, whereby they used emails, blogs, HE lists, twitter and the comments on online newspapers to try and blacken my name. Some of this mud stuck; there are still people who believe that I was a colleague of Graham Badman or that I used to work for a local authority. This is the thing about activities of this sort, it is impossible ever wholly to set the record straight. This post is getting a little long and unwieldy, so I shall break it into two parts. This first part has laid the ground and tomorrow I shall demonstrate clearly, using her own emails, posts and tweets, just why Maire Stafford is the best possible person to consult on the subject of online harassment. She is a master at it and examining her tactics will show readers how this sort of thing may be done effectively. It’s no good just mentioning stuff on a little blog like this from time to time; you have to be proactive! Studying Maire’s methods will show how one home educator can really harass another successfully.

Maire Stafford, Mike Fortune-Wood and Nikki Harper try to have me arrested!

The title of this piece is not one which I could, in my wildest dreams, have ever thought that I would be typing. Never the less, it is actually the case. Having realised that action against me for libel would be horribly expensive and in any case unlikely to succeed, Nikki Harper has decided to go for the cheaper option of reporting me to the police for supposedly harassing her and her husband on this blog. As readers might know,  Mrs Harper posted a piece on her blog at the beginning of May, naming me and saying some unflattering and untruthful things about me:

http://secondaryathome.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/the-inadequacies-of-mr-anonymous/

Since then, I have made the odd reference to this woman and her husband’s eccentric ways of making a living. Then, a week or so ago, Nikki Harper began coming on here and getting herself worked up into a regular state.

Now of course this is nothing unusual on the internet; spats like that happen all the time. By a stroke of ill fortune for her though, Mrs Harper fell under the influence of that most malevolent of women, Maire Stafford. This is when things took a decidedly surreal turn, as Maire Stafford advised Nikki that she had a duty to beetle off to the police station and report me for saying upsetting things about her such as that she was an astrologer. Mrs Harper duly did so and, it will come as no surprise to readers to learn, she was promptly given the bum’s rush by police officers who have more important things to investigate than this blog; things like murders and rape, for example.

In order to give her the brush-off courteously, they being unwilling to be too brusque with somebody who was obviously distressed and whose mental state was clearly a little fragile, they told her that if I was in the habit of upsetting people in this way, then they would get in touch and have a word with me.

Enter, stage right, Maire Stafford. Readers with long memories will recall that Maire Stafford ran a campaign against me on the HE-UK list a few years ago, after pieces of mine about home education were published in the Independent and Times Educational Supplement. She devised rumours, spread lies, coordinated the online comments on the articles and generally made a thorough nuisance of herself. To give just one example, when Paula Rothermel claimed that Graham Badman had suggested that home educating mothers were suffering from Munchausen’s and also questioned the validity of her research; many parents were annoyed and upset. On November 4th 2009, Maire Stafford posted on the HE-UK list, trying to make people think that this was in some way my fault! She wrote,

And considering it was probably him who told Badman that Paula Rothermel's
work was not sound I think he has an immense amount to answer for. Wouldn't
be surprised if this wasn't the source of the Munchausens fiasco too


She also helped to spread the ridiculous lie that I was a former colleague of Graham Badman’s. Even this was nothing compared to a Tweet of hers in September 2009, to the effect that I was really not a home educating parent at all, but a home education inspector!  I don't suppose for a moment that Maire Stafford believed all this, she just felt that lies like this would make people view me with suspicion. Much of this malicious activity was undertaken on the HE-UK site, with Mike Fortune-Wood’s aid and encouragement. Maire Stafford is a strange woman. The very fact that she describes herself on her blog as being sweet, mild, timid and shy should be enough to alert any objective observer to the probability that she is actually unpleasant and aggressive and so it has proved over the years.

Yesterday, Mike Fortune-Wood appealed for information on his list that might help Maire Stafford to help Nikki Harper to get me prosecuted. The idea is that I have been revealing personal information about people here and attacking them. As a result of what she has been told by Maire Stafford, Nikki Harper is convinced that I  have, 'a reputation for attacking people, making very unpleasant accusations about their children', as she puts it.  I have no idea what these unpleasant accusations are about children, but Maire Stafford and Nikki Harper are currently scouring this blog for them. I will not go into all the things that were said about me on both HE-UK and various other lists and blogs in the past, but I will instead limit myself to remarking that it is a good thing that I was not the sort of chap to feel that he was being harassed online! It is to be hoped that this nonsense will end soon and I shall be able to get back to blogging about home education, which is after all the purpose of this place. I have an idea though that this business has a little way to run yet.