Emily Maitlis has opened up about her 25-year stalker hell.
Edward Vine became obsessed with the 45-year-old BBC journalist when they were undergraduates at university and she admitted that as recently as two months ago she was forced to have a security detail at her home to protect her family.
Emily said: "I had this stalker at university who had been in my college. I’ve never talked about this. I find it mortifying and embarrassing. It takes you a ridiculous amount of time to stop seeing it as your fault. You carry it around like an overgrown verruca on the sole of your foot that no one need know about.
"I wasn’t a celeb; I was just a student who knew him a bit. But it soon became very intense and he turned up everywhere. My whole family was trying to protect me. There was an awful moment when I took it to court and he cross-examined me."
And Emily – who has two sons with husband Mark Gwynne – admitted she doesn’t see an end to the ordeal, despite Mr Vine, who suffers from schizophrenia, being sentenced to four months in jail in 2002.
She told The Times magazine: "I had a police presence outside my house two months ago. There is an injunction and, when he breaches it, it starts again. There is a weariness to it. It feels never-ending. His life is ruined; I try to blank it. It’s a heaviness that sits on you, and when he comes back it’s dreadful. I get calls at all times of the day and night. It feels desperately sad. I can’t see how it will end.
"It sounds medieval, but I wonder what I have brought on my whole family. For the first 15 years I thought if I did this or that, it would help. I now realise it’s not about me. But it is when you need an escort to go to Sainsbury’s and my kids have to have a security guy to go to the school bus. He can start threatening. I am butch enough to run fast, but it’s my kids I mind about."
Emily Maitlis’ stalker hell
