It all started with a selfie. It was 2015 and Hannah Mossman Moore, a 23-year-old graduate, had just arrived at her first London Fashion Week, bristling with excitement. Mossman Moore was interning with Alighieri, a jewellery start-up. Her job involved rubbing shoulders with models, fashion insiders and journalists. She was searching, among the hordes of well-dressed somebodies, for a cash-rich foreign buyer. And it wasn’t long before she found one.
Mossman Moore was introduced to an elegant Hong Kong national who seemed, to her, to be a big player in the Asian fashion market. The pair took a selfie together, and swapped contact details. This seemingly innocuous chance meeting would change her life, forever.
Stalked, a ten-part podcast series on BBC Sounds, tells how Mossman Moore’s life was upended after meeting the man. For most of her twenties, she was stalked by a barrage of faceless creeps: each day, she received thousands of emails, texts and messages from unknown accounts who seemed to know everything about her. These anonymous tormentors somehow knew details of her private life, her family, her job and her location. She had to change her phone number over and over again – but still the messages kept coming.
Mossman Moore was the stepdaughter of the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who joins her as the co-host of this podcast. Cadwalladr has had her own experience of vicious cyber-stalking, following her investigation of Cambridge Analytica and the weaponisation of social media in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum. In this thrilling yet deeply worrying series, Mossman Moore and Cadwalladr work together to uncover the stalker’s identity. They are fearless in their pursuit. Using sensitive reporting of an extraordinary personal story, they highlight the shocking lack of care being taken to safeguard victims of stalking.
Stalked
BBC Sounds
[See also: Misogyny in the metaverse]
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This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain’s Child Poverty Epidemic