It’s an incomprehensible but very disturbing story that happened this week in Britain: a 22-year-old director, Riagain Grainger, was sentenced to almost three years in prison for continuously harassing one of her old friends for more than three years. The young man, hope of Northern Irish cinema did not leave his victim “time to breathe before a new message“.
Appointed at the last Cannes festival as a producer of a short film, he had met Georgia Smith, originally from Manchester, during their studies in film school. Having become friends, he had started to send her a lot of messages but above all had not supported her going on vacation with other friends.
The ordeal began at that time for the young girl, who is only 21 years old. Tired of the dozens of hate messages, she blocked Riagain on all social networks but this one didn’t care: he created many fake accounts which he used to send her hate messages. Knowing where she lived, he used to hang around and text her saying “I watch your every move“.
His victim then took fright. “I couldn’t do anything anymore, I felt like he was watching me and following me everywhere. In college, he watched me through the window and I spent my third year locked in my house, panicked that he might be outside my door. I always had a lot of self-confidence but his messages destroyed everything, I started to not support my appearance, my weight, the shape of my face and even my hair color!“
Riagain Grainger, seeing that the girl no longer wanted to talk to her, had in fact begun to fill social networks with hate messages, urging her to commit suicide and calling on people to kill her. He had even put his picture on porn sites, which is a real “psychological disaster” according to the prosecutor.
After a first fine of 2,500 pounds in 2019, the young director who was about to collaborate with HBO and the BBC will therefore go to prison because the judge did not take into account the mental disorders his lawyer had spoken of.