What would you do if someone slid into your DMs offering to tell you a secret? According to the Netflix true-crime documentary, Can I Tell You a Secret?, that’s what happened to possibly hundreds of women in the U.K., and when those women responded, they fell victim to cyberstalking.
In the true stories covered in the Netflix two-part series, the messages those women received offering to tell them a secret seemed to come from a woman. For just three women featured in the two-part documentary, the temptation proved too much, and when they responded, they were told rumors that their partners were cheating or that they had been somehow betrayed by people close to them.
When those women, and potentially hundreds of others, thought better about what they’d done, they were cyberstalked and harassed by a series of fake accounts targeting them and their loved ones.
Meanwhile, others had fake social media accounts created in their names. And through those accounts, lies were spread, affecting their professional and private lives, according to The Guardian.
Matthew Hardy was responsible
At the center of the social media cyberstalking was a man named Matthew Hardy, whose pattern of targeting women online began while he was still in school. In 2022, Hardy was sentenced to nine years in prison for five counts of stalking, when stalking sentences in the U.K. are typically around 17 months. Hardy was arrested several times for cyberstalking before he was finally put behind bars.
As early as 2010, Hardy was cyberstalking his teenage classmates. One Hardy victim, identified only as Melanie, told The Guardian, “A random person would add me on Facebook and start messaging me. They’d say my boyfriend was cheating on me, and they just wanted to let me know.”
Hardy’s cyberstalking was reported, and restraining orders were filed, but Hardy violated them all, while authorities largely ignored his pattern of abuse.
Hardy’s final arrest happened in 2020
By 2020, Matthew Hardy’s stalking and harassment escalated to women who didn’t live near him, and even involved contacting one woman through an account claiming to be her grandmother, who had recently died from COVID. Hardy was finally brought to justice with the help of Kevin Anderson of the Cheshire police, who uncovered the years of reported stalking and harassment and found out little had been done to stop it.
In 2021, Hardy pleaded guilty to involving fear of violence and harassment, and he was sentenced to prison the following year. According to Kevin Anderson, “[Hardy] would never have stopped … Even on bail, he was still doing it.”
Can I Tell You a Secret? producer Nancy Strang said that she hopes her show ” … will shed light on the reality of online stalking and change the conversation about what constitutes harm in a digital age.” Strang’s show streams Feb. 21, 2024, on Netflix.