Former BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin tells of ‘terrifying’ stalking ordeal

‘It was very clear from the messages that this person knew exactly where we lived and had stood outside our front door’

Mia, the presenter’s daughter, says the ordeal left her in ‘floods of tears’ (PA Archive)

Former BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin and her teenage daughter have spoken out about their experience of being stalked.

Louise Minchin, who co-hosted the show alongside Dan Walker, said messages she received from her stalker made it obvious he was aware of where she lived.

Mia, the presenter’s daughter, said the ordeal left her in “floods of tears”.

Carl Davies, a 44-year-old former soldier, was imprisoned for two years and eight months after confessing to causing alarm or distress to Minchin and Mia in July 2020.

The 44-year-old, who has been slapped with an indefinite restraining order, sent threats to the social media accounts of Ms Minchin’s and her daughter that summer.

Minchin, who left BBC Breakfast last September after nearly two decades, told Tonight on ITV: “It was very clear from the messages that this person knew exactly where we lived and had stood outside our front door.

“To say I was frightened just doesn’t really touch the surface. You are kind of on this high state of alert all the time.

“You don’t know who they are so you don’t know that that person standing next to you isn’t them.”

Minchin’s daughter Mia said the ordeal had left her struggling to sleep for the entirety of the night.

She said: “I’m logged into mum’s Instagram account and suddenly loads of messages started coming. They were all kind of just really offensive, calling us not very nice names and then they got much more graphic.

“It was the kind of actions that he wanted to do against me and mum which got really personal and they weren’t nice to read at all. I was kind of terrified... shaking.

“I think my heart was beating really fast. I didn’t sleep all night. The entirety of the next day I was in floods of tears.”

The interviews with Mia and her mother will air on ITV on Thursday night in a show called Louise Minchin: The Truth About Stalking, which looks into the plight of other victims of stalking in the UK.

It comes after the activist who successfully campaigned for upskirting to be made a crime recently revealed she was subjected to a “terrifying” stalking ordeal for eight years in an exclusive interview with The Independent.

Gina Martin, 30, spoke about her ordeal at the hands of a stalker she went to school with, who has harassed her online and even pretended to be her dead grandmother in a social media message.

Ms Martin spent 18 months fighting to make upskirting a specific offence after a man took a picture up her skirt at a festival in 2017.

The Independent previously revealed calls to the National Stalking Helpline rose by 11 per cent during the pandemic. It dealt with almost 18,000 calls from March 2020 until February last year – a substantial jump from the just over 16,000 calls the stalking helpline received in the same period a year earlier.