A MAN who scared his ex-girlfriend during a “sustained campaign” of harassment – and made a chilling online cash offer to anyone who would cause her harm – has been jailed for 16 months.
Michael Alan Reid, 29, continually contacted the woman during an eight-day period late last June after their short West Cumbria relationship ended. He changed her social media passwords, and utilised other people and mobile phones to give her the impression she was being followed.
One apparent stab threat message sent to her read: “Look out when you are in Tesco that you don’t get shanked.” Reid also posted the woman’s image on Facebook and offered £1,000 cash to “whoever gets to this girl first” and “does serious damage to her”.
“Serious offending and harassment,” prosecutor Kim Whittlestone told Carlisle Crown Court, “that caused her really serious considerable distress.”
In a statement, the victim described Reid’s criminal conduct causing her “upset” and “sleepless nights”, and told how it had “left a permanent scar on me which leaves me with a lack of trust towards others”.
Reid – jailed in 2016 for child incitement and grooming offending – admitted putting a person in fear of violence, having made “full and frank admissions” in a police interview.
Brendan Burke, defending, said Reid, now of Mursley Court, Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes, had relocated in a “determined effort to make a fresh start”. He accepted the relationship was over and hadn’t made any subsequent attempts to contact the woman.
Jailing Reid, Judge Nicholas Barker said: “It was, albeit lasting only eight days, a sustained campaign by you.
“The purpose of that, I have no doubt, was to cause her to suffer and intended by you to maximise fear and distress because that relationship had come to a conclusion.”
He banned Reid from contacting the woman for a decade.
