When Alex Belfield was sent to prison for five and a half years last month for online stalking, his accusers cried with relief. Finally, respite from what for some had been a decade of near-constant abuse. No more waking up in the middle of the night filled with dread about what he might have said about them to his then 373,000 YouTube subscribers or in bitter emails to their bosses or clients.
For the TV presenter Jeremy Vine, the most high-profile target of arguably Britain’s most prolific troll, it would be the first time in several years that he could host a live phone-in without worrying that one of Belfield’s acolytes would hijack the programme to confront him with Belfield’s lies.
The relief was temporary. Within hours, a video appeared on Belfield’s “secret” video channel, accessible to anyone willing to pay him a pound a week. “If you are watching this, I have been sent to jail,” intoned Belfield in his Steve Wright meets Alan Partridge boom, standing in front of a skewwhiff union jack in the living room of his Nottingham home, wearing one of his trademark jazzy shirts. For just over three minutes, the 42-year-old delivered a monologue in which he said he was in prison for simply “defending himself”. All he had done, he suggested, was challenge people who had said “things I believed to be untrue”. He had “never gone near anyone”, he insisted, and was not accused of threatening any violence.
Belfield compared his treatment with that of a police officer who had escaped jail despite being convicted of possessing child abuse images. “I’m clearly of more risk to this country than a man who is attracted to children,” he deadpanned. He ended with one of his catchphrases – “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it” – before making what to his victims was a sinister promise: “We will be back.”
It was classic Belfield. Sanctimonious, petulant and remorseless, taking elements of fact and twisting them to suit his own purposes while belittling his targets – and monetising these distortions, even as he sat in a prison cell.
The royal “we” was a frequent Belfield affectation, designed to give the impression that he sat at the top of an anti-woke multimedia empire in the Alex Jones/Infowars mould. In court, he claimed to have nine employees, but who they are remains a mystery. When not filming himself he would address his camera operator as “Tarquin”. He would invite viewers to send in fan mail not to any registered office but to his local pub, whose landlady he described as his “receptionist”.
To those who had been monitoring Belfield’s output for the past few years, it was no surprise that he wanted the final word. This was a man who had not only eschewed lawyers to represent himself in court, but who had reported on his own trial each night online; a man who even after being found guilty, appeared on stage in Blackpool with controversial rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins, playing up his role as “The Stalker” as he awaited sentence.
The morning of his sentencing, Belfield had sat silent in the dock at Nottingham crown court as barrister David Aubrey KC finally mitigated on his behalf. Belfield, a former BBC radio presenter turned YouTube “free speech advocate”, was “deeply sorry” for the hurt he had caused, said Aubrey, after Belfield was convicted of stalking Vine and three other men online.
It didn’t work. Judge Saini jailed Belfield for five years and 26 weeks, accusing him of having “weaponised the internet” to “haunt” his targets. “Online stalkers like you have the ability to recruit an army of followers whose conduct massively expands the effect of your stalking. That is why I say your stalking is in many respects more serious than a conventional stalker,” the judge said.
Four women, past and previous BBC DJs and executives, had also accused Belfield of stalking them via email and social media, but the jury found him not guilty on those charges. Regardless, the judge clearly considered him a threat. “Each of them suffered a campaign of harassment by email and social media communications. Each of them suffered serious mental health problems arising from Mr Belfield’s conduct,” he said, imposing indefinite restraining orders preventing Belfield from contacting the women.
The eight complainants hoped to never hear from their tormenter again, only to discover that he had arranged for that one final, defiant video to go live after the judge sent him down, goading them from beyond his prison walls. Within days, 15,000 people had signed a “Free Alex Belfield” petition and Hopkins was on Instagram mocking Belfield’s targets for whining about simple “hurty words”. Would they ever truly be able to escape the man Vine described as “an Olympic-level” stalker?
How a failed local radio DJ with Timmy Mallett’s dress sense ended up making potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds broadcasting lies about his largely obscure enemies is a story that begins in 2010. That’s when Rozina Breen, then the managing editor at BBC Radio Leeds, decided to take what she thought was a calculated chance. She was looking for a new presenter to liven up the mid-morning show and thought Belfield, who was working for BBC Hereford and Worcester, was the man for the job.
It was a risk. Belfield came with certain baggage, not least an Ofcom reprimand four years earlier, after he had referred to a pregnant teenager on Capital Gold as a “dirty little slapper” and a “dirty little tart”. But Breen thought he would bring “personality” to the station.
A few months in, alarm bells started to ring, remembers Liz Green, who presented the lunchtime show that followed Belfield’s each day. First Belfield bawled out the station’s beloved gardening correspondent for a perceived act of insubordination, prompting a surge of listener complaints. Then, during a broadcast at Leeds Playhouse, he asked an elderly lady what colour knickers she was wearing, resulting in the theatre boycotting the station.
One day, Green says she found a talented young producer crying in the toilets after being shouted at by Belfield. Green was having none of it: “I went up to him and I said: ‘You are a grade-A wanker.’” She stands by that description, but came to regret making an enemy of someone who turned out to be a herculean grudge-holder. Ten months into the job, Belfield pushed his luck too far in an innuendo-laden chat with the station’s weather presenter, in which he suggested he had been masturbating over her. Despite later coming out as “a member of the LGBT community” when defending himself against allegations of homophobia in his trial, Belfield attempted to project an image of rampant heterosexuality for much of his life, with frequent references to “breasticles” and “the current or future Mrs Belfield”.
Breen sacked him on the spot, but agreed to honour the last two months of his contract. Soon she terminated it altogether, after he tweeted something that suggested – albeit in veiled terms – that Green should be sent to Auschwitz, after his rival presenter fronted a highly praised documentary about the concentration camp.
Then began a 10-year campaign of harassment against both Breen and Green, as well as Helen Thomas, Breen’s line manager, who was head of regional and local programming for Yorkshire.
Another BBC radio presenter, a transgender woman called Stephanie Hirst, became Belfield’s next target after refusing him an interview after her transition. She suffered years of what the judge described as “transphobic and hateful comments … motivated in part at least by feelings of jealousy as to her success when his own career within the BBC had foundered”.
One of the BBC targets was Bernie Keith, a veteran presenter at BBC Radio Northampton who was once Belfield’s friend. Apparently jealous that Keith’s BBC career carried on while his own was stymied, Belfield set about trying to ruin Keith’s life using his usual weapons of YouTube, Twitter and emails. It was a nine-year obsession, which saw him make what the judge described as “the false and scandalous accusation” that Keith regularly had sex in public on gay beaches with strangers.
The effect on Keith’s life was profound. He told the jury he was seconds away from killing himself. Sentencing Belfield, the judge said he had “made this highly successful and confident radio presenter lose all joy in life and turned him into a shell … He was terrified of you.” So scared was Keith that he gave neighbours a copy of Belfield’s photograph, in case he decided to take his campaign of harassment offline. Keith tried in vain to get YouTube to remove all of the libellous videos, even turning up at the social network’s HQ to beg it in person.
Belfield’s final BBC target was Vine, who made the mistake of responding after learning that Belfield had called him and fellow broadcaster Victoria Derbyshire “cunts” online. He soon made it to the top of Belfield’s hitlist, featuring regularly as a hate figure in his videos and social media posts. Giving evidence in court, Vine said: “I have in the past had a physical stalker who followed me. That is a picnic compared to this guy. It’s like an avalanche of hatred that you get hit by.”
Vine didn’t think he had ever even met Belfield, but another former BBC radio presenter, James Hazell, remembers Vine delivering a masterclass to local BBC presenters in 2010. Belfield clearly resented being there, recalls Hazell – “He was sulking and had a face like thunder. He hated being told how to improve by Jeremy, and that’s where I think it all started.”
Hazell is one of numerous others who now say Belfield trolled them. In October 2020, Belfield spread a false rumour that he was having an affair with a fellow BBC radio presenter, using it as part of his ongoing campaign against the national broadcaster. Presenter Iain Lee has since come out to say Belfield targeted him for many years, but that he was too frightened to go to court to give evidence. Some believe he relied on others as media monitors and had sources within the BBC itself: he seemed to know everything discussed on each of their radio shows every day, along with a number of internal matters.
After being sacked from BBC Radio Leeds, Belfield had to move back to live with his mother in Nottinghamshire and found it difficult to get regular radio work. He started his own online show, Celebrity Radio, bagging interviews with famous people in return for advertising plugs, and tried to sell himself as a theatre and restaurant reviewer.
He soon made enemies in the theatre world, says a director who started monitoring his online activities a few years ago (and who wishes to remain anonymous). “Belfield became known across theatres as someone who would throw a tantrum if he didn’t get the press tickets he wanted. He would harass some theatre companies, to the extent that his email address was blocked, and front of house staff were warned about him.”
Belfield had a complicated relationship with the entertainment industry, the director believes. “He loved and hated showbusiness, and if he couldn’t be you, he’d have you, and be part of you, another way. If that way was via abuse, then that was certainly effective in being part of your story. He hated the thing he loved, or hated other people having success within it.”
The final two victims who went to court and testified against Belfield were both from the theatre world. Neither had ever met him. Ben Hewis is a videographer who works in the theatre and wedding industries and Philip Dehany was a rival theatre blogger. Both had come to the defence of others under attack by Belfield.
Belfield soon became obsessed with ruining Hewis’s professional and personal life. He took photos of Hewis’s wife and young child from social media and included them in his videos, even using a picture of a foetal scan showing Hewis’s unborn baby as part of his relentless email campaign of harassment. He also contacted Hewis’s clients to undermine his business and encouraged his followers to join in with the abuse.
Dehany ended up the subject of numerous YouTube broadcasts where Belfield suggested he was mentally ill, and called him a “mincer” and a “little twirly” with an “incredibly tiny man sausage”. Belfield also phoned Dehany’s mother and then threatened to broadcast the call – “an outrageous and cruel act”, said Saini – and effectively sought to blackmail him by revealing details of a long-spent conviction.
By the time Belfield began tormenting Dehany in 2020 he had become a successful YouTuber who could have been earning up to £528,000 a year, according to Social Blade, a website that monitors social media channels. That all stopped in February this year when YouTube suspended monetisation on Belfield’s Voice of Reason for violating its “creator policy”, after a negative article in the Times about high-earning conspiracy theorists.
That prompted Belfield to set up his “secret” Voice of Reason channel, which streamed behind a paywall on his website. Launching it on 1 March this year, Belfield said he wanted to broadcast “away from the toxic spectrumed trolls, lefties, fart heads & Mogadon moronic medicated mentalists & journalists”. How many people signed up for £1 a week is unclear, though some live streams attracted barely 300 viewers.
It was on that channel that he first broadcast highly partisan “court reports” from his own trial, later posted to YouTube and still available to view, after persuading the judge that he was a journalist and should be given the same rights as the Nottingham Post. That he was allowed to play court reporter upset many complainants, particularly as Belfield decided not to give evidence under oath.
Some feel he was given too much power in his own trial. While never submitting himself to cross-examination, he was allowed to deliver a pompous closing speech deriding the case as a “BBC and police witch-hunt” and describing himself as “the No 1 anti-BBC journalist”. “I am offensive … My human right allows me to speak words that are not to everyone’s taste,” he told the jury.
The judge did stop him from interrogating complainants, appointing David Aubrey as a proxy advocate. But when Aubrey caught Covid, Vine opted to be questioned by Belfield rather than delay a long-booked holiday, and found himself being asked about the true meaning of the word “cunt”. While most defendants on trial try to avoid cameras on the way into court, Belfield seemed to be doing his best to attract them, wearing an array of wacky jackets and shirts. The day he was found guilty he was wearing a Bermuda shirt and shorts. Instead of a lawyer, he was often accompanied by James Brandon, a member of the old-school comedy duo the Grumbleweeds. Fans, largely older women, were often in the public gallery to show support.
How much money Belfield made in recent years is unclear. His last company, Champagne Sippers, incorporated in December 2020, has never filed company accounts. He bought his detached house in Mapperley, Nottingham, for £314,950 in October 2018, and it is mortgaged. After his first arrest, in June 2020, he started two crowdfunders to raise money to sue first the BBC and then Nottinghamshire police. According to GoFundMe, which hosted the appeals, he raised a total of £29,446. Most of it had been withdrawn by Belfield by the time GoFundMe got around to banning him for inappropriate “off-platform” behaviour, with the exception of £5,260, which was refunded to donors.
Even after YouTube stopped him making money from his channel, Belfield was still reasonably flush. He is being sued for libel by Vine, as well as by the Nottinghamshire police detective in charge of the case against him, and when ordered to pay Vine’s initial costs of £26,000 after failing to file a defence on time, paid up, in October 2021, within a few days.
It was lockdown that offered Belfield an opportunity to make some proper money. Unable to work and claiming to be on £86-a-week universal credit when the theatres shut, Belfield reinvented himself as a rightwing shockjock. At first, he grew his audience with silly sketches and phone-ins, railing against government Covid policy, particularly the ban on care-home visits.
Steven J Miller, another YouTuber, explained Belfield’s initial appeal in his own video, recorded after Belfield was jailed: “Alex Belfield was responsible for putting smiles on thousands and thousands of people’s faces and he did that not … by slagging people off but … by him being him.” People loved Belfield’s innuendos, said Miller, giving an example of when Belfield filmed himself on a train platform as a train whizzed by and exclaimed: “Oh, I nearly got sucked off!”
Then in June 2020, Katie Hopkins was permanently banned from Twitter, opening up a gap in the market for anti-woke, anti-immigrant polemics with an English accent. Belfield started wearing Trump polo shirts and began campaigning against small boat crossings in the Channel, using a dinghy as a prop for his live shows.
Close Belfield-watchers believe his lurch to the right was a business decision rather than an ideological one. The Belfield Green knew at Radio Leeds in 2010 was difficult but he wasn’t a “table-thumping, immigrant-hating rightwing polemicist,” she says. “I don’t think that stuff even bothered him.”
His anti-BBC stance soon attracted prominent support: Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen appeared on his shows and last year wrote to Priti Patel, then home secretary, to complain about what he called a “BBC witch-hunt” against Belfield, after one of his arrests. The Guardian asked Bridgen if he regretted supporting Belfield and did not receive a response.
Barring a successful appeal, Belfield will serve at least the next two years and 39 weeks in jail, before being released on licence to serve the second half of his sentence. But some of the complainants feel they never really got justice. Breen and Green both think the BBC failed all four women who gave evidence against Belfield. Both question why the corporation only really took the abuse seriously once a well-known man – Vine – was involved. “The optics aren’t good,” says Breen.
For the best part of 10 years they had been complaining about Belfield’s vendetta, in which he sent hundreds, if not thousands, of emails to them and their superiors. Sometimes these emails included what the judge said were “highly offensive and personal comments about their physical appearance, including sexualised comments” as well as “wholly false allegations” that the women had bullied him. “I accept the evidence that Mr Belfield effectively ‘followed’ these women by online harassment throughout their careers,” said the judge.
The BBC turned a blind eye to the abuse, says Green: “We were not heard. Our fears and anxiety were downplayed.” Helen Thomas, now director of BBC England, told the jury that she was told to “man up” by a BBC boss when she complained about Belfield’s behaviour. Worse, in 2013, a few years into Belfield’s campaign against her and Breen, the BBC’s HR team chose to launch an investigation not into their harassment, but into whether they were guilty of bullying Belfield. They were exonerated.
Breen says she and others flagged Belfield’s behaviour repeatedly but were told “just not to look at the emails, or to delete them”. Though the BBC knew Belfield was spreading lies about them in public, “at no point did anyone from the BBC refute the allegations”, she says. “Silence was the best policy in the eyes of the corporation. The fact we were asked to ignore potentially criminal evidence is an issue. The fact we were left unsupported from the acts of someone regarded as a prolific, now convicted, stalker is problematic. Nobody from the corporation has apologised for what I and the others faced for more than a decade.”
Very soon after Vine complained, by contrast, the BBC appointed a QC to conduct its own investigation into Belfield’s behaviour, which it handed to Nottinghamshire police.
Green blames the BBC for the not-guilty verdicts: “The reason I believe the court didn’t find him guilty on our charges – though we will never know what the jury was thinking – was because the BBC allowed it to go on for so long. I think the jury thought: ‘Oh, it can’t have been that bad.’” She says Belfield has “destroyed” her mental health, and that she was so frightened that he or his followers would turn up at her house, she spent £20,000 on security measures. “I live in fear and I have done for a long time,” she says. “We were the learning curve for Belfield. He realised what he could do and did it with impunity. We were the warm-up act.”
Vine said it is “very, very important that the BBC learn lessons” from what happened to the women at BBC Leeds. “It was hard to take any satisfaction from the jailing of this despicable man when he will not serve a single day in jail for what he did to the four Leeds women,” he said.
Green still works for the BBC but is trying to negotiate a settlement to leave. Breen left this summer to become editor-in-chief at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. She has asked the BBC to commission an independent investigation into what happened. “There are lessons to learn clearly and the toxic nature of online hate will only get worse for staff. It’s not enough to leave us to sink and swim, as we had to in this case,” Breen wrote in an email to Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC’s director of nations.
In a statement last week, the BBC said: “We know this has been very difficult for those involved and we continue to provide support to current and former staff. We also want to learn from this to ensure we offer the best possible support to all colleagues, who may sadly experience the threat and risks of online stalking in the future.”
Last Friday, the four BBC women received an email saying the BBC had commissioned an internal review to “establish what lessons can be learned from the recent criminal case”. The women were told: “The aim of the review is to provide recommendations to the BBC on how it can best support colleagues facing online stalking or significant social media harassment.”
Green says she is “deeply disappointed” that the BBC did not commission an independent inquiry. “It could be interpreted as a reluctance to expose systemic failings and a complete failure in duty of care. Perhaps that independent review would expose those at the very top (men) who left us exposed. I can tell you now their proposed review will not claim responsibility nor say sorry. That’s a word I have never heard … We four were left to suffer and are suffering still,” she says.
A few weeks after he was sent to jail, most of the 7,000-plus videos Belfield posted on YouTube are still publicly accessible. His subscriber count has dropped, but still stands at 354,000.
Asked why it had not banned Belfield from its platform following his conviction, YouTube did not respond. It sent this statement: “Monetisation on the Voice of Reason channel remains suspended for violating our creator responsibility policy. Our community guidelines prohibit content that threatens individuals and we have removed several videos for violating these policies.”
Unless there are broadcast prohibitions attached to his release, there is nothing to stop Belfield firing up Voice of Reason again when he gets out of jail. Hopkins believes he will be back, his ego “bigger than ever” after honing his act in front of a literally captive audience. “He will be even more unbearable,” she said in an Instagram video, with a twinkle in her eye that suggested she can hardly wait.