A 39-year-old man from London has been banned from contact for stalking singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor for months. He bombarded the Murder on the dance floorstar with nasty messages and also harassed her husband and one of her young sons. When he had put thirty packages on the doorstep of her house, the police issued a warning, but it did not help.
The stalking started after Nishil Patel met the singer in passing last July, British media write as BBC News. He made several appearances at her home in the English capital and bombarded the artist with hundreds of ‘worrying’ Instagram posts that became increasingly serious, a prosecutor said at a hearing this week.
In the messages, he called her names or referred to things he had left at her neighbor’s house, thinking she lived there. The man brought, among other things, a blue wallet with his initials on it. “It is blue and not black like your soul,” he wrote. Patel also approached her husband Richard Jones, bassist with the band The Feeling, and one of her five sons.
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When Ellis-Bextor blocked the man, he started stalking with a new account where he wrote his name backwards. Among other things, he left Lego at the neighbor’s house and also put thirty packages addressed to Sophie on the sidewalk, which earned him a warning from the police. When he rang her doorbell last April and put a sticker on a nearby car, he was arrested.
Sophie has suffered greatly from the stalking behavior, she told the court. The man, who lost his job as a tax consultant last year and has bipolar disorder, thought it was all harmless “fun.” But he didn’t object and got a so-called stalking protection order imposed.
He may not contact the singer in any way for the next five years, otherwise he will be prosecuted. He also has to hand over all passwords to his social media accounts to the police.
24 hours of dancing
Sophie Ellis-Bextor broke through about twenty years ago with hits like Groovejet (if this ain’t love) and Murder on the dance floor. During the lockdowns she had success with her so-called Kitchen Disco; extravagant Instagram live performances from her kitchen, surrounded by her busy family.
Last week she raised more than a million pounds (more than 1.1 million euros) by dancing for 24 hours for a charity that wants to give children a happy childhood. In April she will be in the Amsterdam Melkweg.
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