Experiences of stalking laid bare in eye-opening podcast The Followers

In 2017, the radio presenter Shelagh Fogarty became aware of a man standing near her on the London Underground when she was on her way home from work. By her calculations, it was the fourth time she’d seen him that week. Nothing odd there, you might reason. If you leave work at the same time every day, chances are you will repeatedly encounter others making the same journey. But when she saw the man sitting on a wall outside her office a few days later, she knew something wasn’t right.

In her eye-opening new LBC podcast The Followers, Fogarty reveals her experience of dealing with a stalker. Over five episodes, she reflects on her realisation of what was happening and her building sense of bewilderment, intrusion and powerlessness. Was she imagining things, she wondered. How long had he been watching her? And how do you deal with a stranger who has never made a verbal or physical threat? As the months passed, he began to appear in more places, including the train station near her flat and, on one occasion, directly outside her home. Stressed, Fogarty sought help, first from friends and colleagues and then from the police.

That she relates her experiences in the present tense gives the proceedings a discomfiting immediacy. Fogarty is an experienced presenter and journalist — she started her career on BBC Radio 4 before moving on to BBC 5 Live and, latterly, to the talk radio station LBC — so she knows how to tell a story. The pace of the episodes is deliberately slow, walking us through her mental processes: suspicion, denial, fear and, later, fury and exhaustion. When you have a stalker, she says, “you’re never free of it, the ongoing theft of your time, your energy, your life”.

Examining the bigger picture, Fogarty talks to police, lawyers and psychologists and looks at how society and the law treats victims and perpetrators. In the UK, one in five women will experience stalking, though many will struggle to be taken seriously by police and will find the onus on them to gather evidence. Often, police will only take action when stalking escalates into violence; for some victims this will be fatal.

Fogarty’s account of her experiences and her broader understanding of stalking is enlightening, though the picture she paints is dispiriting. At the start of the series, she notes how stalking is “intrinsically linked to antiquated and harmful social norms around a woman’s place in society”. Progress is being made, but there is still a long way to go.

In the six-part Audible series Stories of the Stalked, the dancer and film-maker Lily Baldwin tells of her 13-year ordeal of being stalked, which began with emails, phone calls and parcel deliveries and then escalated terrifyingly. She vividly articulates the psychological distress caused and how, for many victims, the threat never goes away.

globalplayer.com; audible.co.uk