Me and my stalker: online hate, antisemitism and a death threat

Times

11-07-2025

An obese, arthritic man in his late forties shambled into Durham crown court in May for sentencing. David Lindsay, a self-styled political commentator, was jailed for six months for harassment, stalking and ten breaches of a restraining order. He had conducted a long campaign of vilification against Angie Richardson, a former safeguarding officer for the Roman Catholic diocese of Hexham and Newcastle.
This may seem a parochial matter. In truth, Lindsay is an extreme case of an online troll and fantasist. He has caused people distress and fear well beyond his locality, and the law appears powerless to stop him. He provides a parable of the dark side of the digital age. This is his story.
Lindsay is unmarried and lives with his mother in the village of Lanchester, Co Durham. His life is dominated by writing a blog, usually thousands of words a day and well into the night. He has conducted years-long campaigns of denigration and threats towards many people in public life and some who just happen to be neighbours who've angered him.
Lindsay is a Catholic convert. He alighted on Richardson after she attempted to investigate complaints against him from a number of parishioners concerning his conduct towards their children. Lindsay did not reply to inquiries, and Richardson thereafter found herself the target of invective and worse. Lindsay told her to 'watch her back', referred to her as 'Satan's concubine' and claimed she was possessed by demons. He also fabricated an anonymous letter purporting to be from a young person who had been sexually abused by Richardson in childhood and sent it to the Catholic diocese.
The methodology is familiar to me because, though we have never met, I too have been a target of Lindsay's sustained abuse. While dimly aware of him before, I have closely observed his activities since 2015, when I received an anonymous antisemitic death threat that I concluded he had authored. Over years since, I've struck up a friendship with Richardson, who has agreed to be named for this article, and spoken with others who've encountered Lindsay.
Lindsay is outwardly a figure of respectability. He's a graduate of Durham University, where he read divinity. Among his contemporaries was Manveen Rana, the Times Radio journalist. Fellow students and former tutors recall him as eccentric in manner and dress but genial and with a dry wit.
• 'The time it took to charge my stalker was ridiculous'
Lindsay did not thrive academically; he read much, but not the texts assigned for his degree. His autodidactic approach has persisted. His blog espouses an unusual melange of far-left politics, social conservatism and religious zeal, born of extensive research but — at least on issues I know about — minimal understanding. He is a conspiracy theorist, claiming that Margaret Thatcher colluded with the IRA to fake the 1984 Brighton bombing, and that Jimmy Savile was posthumously framed by the establishment because of his Catholicism. Some of his writings express deep hostility to Jews, women and gays.
I have found no evidence that Lindsay has had employment since graduating. But he did at one time serve as a parish councillor in his village and (according to his blog) harboured ambitions to be a Labour MP before being expelled by his local party. The high point in his life appears to have been when, for a few weeks in 2009, he wrote a blog for The Daily Telegraph.
Blogs were then in vogue. The Telegraph recruited several writers to contribute these on a freelance basis. Its blogs editor was Damian Thompson, now an associate editor at The Spectator and a former editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald. Thompson noticed voluminous comments contributed by Lindsay to Telegraph articles and took a calculated risk in offering him space 'above the line' too. It proved a disaster. Lindsay had claimed to hold an academic post at Durham University and a doctorate. Neither of these things was true and his copy — as Thompson puts it — was crazy and full of mistakes.
Lindsay was sacked from this unpaid position after a few weeks. His explanation, vented at length on his personal blog for years thereafter, was that the Telegraph had taken orders from Israeli intelligence and that he was a 'Mossad martyr of the Daily TelAviv-egraph'. His seeming vendetta against Thompson has never ceased, and was promptly supplemented with one against another journalist: me.
In his quest to become a figure in the world of letters, Lindsay would write to dozens of journalists at a time, often under aliases but always with a distinctive prolixity that betrayed his authorship, declaring the genius of his work. He sent us the text of a self-published book on politics and theology, challenging us to write a response. I made the fatal error of replying, advising that this approach was unlikely to provide a way into a career in journalism, but offering tips on how best to couch his arguments in a way that might capture the attention of the comment editor of a newspaper.
In some corner of his mind, Lindsay concluded I must be in league with Thompson in conspiring to deprive him of the success he deserved. Ever after, he has treated us alike and denounced us in concert, though Thompson and I write for different publications, cover different subjects, hold differing opinions and have never even met.
It was that spurious linkage that made me conclude Lindsay had probably been the author of the death threat against me. It was sent by post to The Jewish Chronicle, for which I then wrote a regular column, claiming that a contract had been taken out on my life. The newspaper alerted me and I informed the security department of The Times, which took it seriously and acted promptly. I was advised on ways to ensure my safety and the security of my home, and for a long time the post room screened my incoming mail.
Thompson then revealed on Twitter he had received a death threat, sent to the offices of the Catholic Herald. It was the same letter, in the same words, enclosed in the same type of envelope (though Thompson is obviously not Jewish, I guess he may still be an agent of a Jewish conspiracy). I saw the tweet and concluded the threat could probably only have come from the one person who maintained we conspire to thwart his professional success. I told Thompson and we reported it to Durham police. They did their job with exemplary thoroughness, but it turned out there were no fingerprints or other incriminating evidence. The anonymous author had done an efficient job.
I thereafter read Lindsay's blog avidly. His threats piled up. He urged the assassination of Thompson and of Adam Wagner, a prominent Jewish KC, and of me. He claimed that Luciana Berger, then a Labour MP facing down antisemitism within her local party and now a peer, had secured a safe seat by offering sexual favours. He likened the Labour leader of Durham council at the time, also Jewish, to Adolf Eichmann, and imagined in pornographic detail his physical flagellation.
• 'Police laughed at me when I reported my stalker'
Lindsay's impunity could not, and did not, last. In 2019, Durham police received an anonymous letter threatening the lives of all 57 members of the Labour group on the city council. Lindsay had overreached: his fingerprints were on the envelope. He was arrested and charged with malicious communication. There followed a long delay before he came to trial owing to a bizarre scheme to derail it. Lindsay faked a letter purporting to be a terrorist threat to his own life, and emailed it to a confederate in the United States, who on Lindsay's instructions then sent it by post to Durham's chief constable and local clergy. Lindsay demanded that charges be dropped and that the police interview Thompson and me to determine whether we had had a hand in the threat.
The trial, inevitably, took place. In July 2020, Lindsay pleaded not guilty to charges of malicious communication and attempting to pervert the course of justice. The jury took under an hour to unanimously find him guilty on both counts. The judge, terming Lindsay an 'eccentric loner', described the offences as bizarre yet said the convictions were based on 'overwhelming evidence'. He sentenced Lindsay to 16 months, suspended for 2 years, with 300 hours of community service and an indefinite criminal behaviour order.
The suspended sentence failed to deter Lindsay, whose behaviour worsened. He went on trial again the next year, pleading guilty on three charges of harassment. His targets were Richardson and another local person, then working for the Labour Party. Lindsay made numerous derogatory references to this second victim's stepson, who has special educational needs. This time he was sent to prison for 12 months.
The respite was brief. On his release, Lindsay claimed he had been pressured into a guilty plea and that prison staff, including the governor and a prison psychologist, had agreed he was innocent. He also alleged I had paid an inmate to murder him, but that this fellow prisoner had returned the money to me on realising what a splendid fellow Lindsay is. The harassment of Richardson began all over again, with the predictable outcome of a further prison term. A local political activist received a death threat during last year's general election campaign; I have read it and it bears striking similarities to Lindsay's bombastic prose style.
The idées fixes of those who believe the world is against them and act on that impulse can be all-consuming. It is not a pathology only of the digital age, yet the internet gives wings to conspiratorial fantasy. And there are human victims of such behaviour. Lindsay is unusual only in the extent rather than the fact of his monomania, and the means by which he expresses it. Believing he is entitled to recognition, he has embarked on a quixotic campaign for influence among opinion formers.
Lindsay has lately campaigned for the Workers Party, led by George Galloway and the former Labour MP Chris Williamson. My own relations with both these figures are extremely poor, but I don't believe they have encouraged or embraced Lindsay in any way.
On the contrary, Lindsay approaches many people who have no reason to be aware of his background. His methods typically include composing round-robin letters to newspapers and inviting public figures to append their names — generally politicians, academics and journalists of pro-Brexit and either left-wing or socially conservative views. Perfectly respectable people, including the former Labour leadership contender Bryan Gould, have been inveigled into co-operating. Others, I have since ascertained, have had their names added to these letters without their knowledge or permission. Even The Times published one, during the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, with the names of Lindsay and several academics endorsing the economic policies of Jeremy Corbyn.
Whenever I've seen such letters, which Lindsay proudly reproduces on his blog, I've written to his alleged associates to point out his record of criminality and extremism. Without exception, they've been astonished by the information. Gould entirely unnecessarily blamed himself for being too trusting and apologised to me.
There is a precedent for such shenanigans. In a brilliant short book titled The Professor and the Parson (2019), Adam Sisman recounts how the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was first impressed by the blandishments of a fantasist — who claimed to be a man of the church who had been cruelly treated — and then, on realising the deception, kept tabs on him for decades. I have likewise taken it as a duty to follow Lindsay's twists and turns, all conducted from his bedroom in his mother's house, to ensure that innocent people don't get hurt and that anyone he approaches is made aware of his obsessive hatreds and long criminal record.
The question inevitably arises of Lindsay's mental state. Though I have made it my business to know Lindsay's output better than anyone — and it's weird stuff — I have suppressed an inclination to speculate on whether he is ill, as even psychiatrists rigorously resist any temptation to diagnose remotely. I'm hence relieved the defence raised the issue of Lindsay's admitted obsessive behaviour and disclosed he is receiving psychological therapy. The judge expressed a wish that the treatment continue when Lindsay is released from prison. I have no professional competence in this field, but I once experienced severe and prolonged mental illness and know how bleak the world can appear when in the grip of cognitive disorder. For me, the best remedy, along with psychological treatment, was to find a renewed purpose in living.
Years ago, when I offered to help Lindsay in his quest to enter journalism, I concluded a more fruitful aim would be for him to take up voluntary work. To find fulfilment in helping others might be open to a man who has failed by conventional standards, yet has intelligence and decades ahead of him. In the meantime, the sort of behaviour I've described will continue to blight people's lives. Despite its manifold benefits, the digital age provides malcontents with a megaphone. The victims of online harassment should not suffer in silence, nor be overlooked, and perpetrators should be granted no tolerance.