Help Save Our Home
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PLEASE HELP US TO OVERCOME A DANGEROUS INJUSTICE
THE SHORT VERSION
We are Steve Paris and Angel Garden, a British couple who amongst other things campaign against bullying. We have three lovely school age children and live in South Wales.
Our family are targets of networked and co-ordinated cyber-stalking, which has enabled covert harassment, cyber-mobbing, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking privacy invasions, disability abuse, and malicious communications.
We realised we had to relocate from New Zealand back to the UK in order to deal with this matter, and we’re being punished for needing to ask for justice at all: the court has said that us writing to defend ourselves while we were abroad (our supposed right to freedom of speech - Article 10 of the Human Rights Act), justified our perpetrators’ attacks on us, even though we showed that they had begun their harassment and character assassination campaign before we had written anything at all!
Our actual words have even been deliberately altered and misrepresented, the chronology of events distorted, and crucial context, which the Judge had specifically promised to look at, ignored: all the lies they spread to so many people behind the scenes - including to influential journalists - to convince them that we were dangerous people that had to be shunned.
You can see some of what they said and did in the report of an expert in cyber-harassment and trolling, at this link.
As a result, because of a punitive costs order against us, unless we can pay their lawyers astronomical fees of £240,000 by the end of August, they will take our home.
Please donate and share to help our family overcome this injustice, and also to help us raise awareness of dangerous covert harassment techniques, to make the internet safer for us all. In fact, clauses introduced into the Protection From Harassment Act in 2012, are specifically designed to address persistent targeted monitoring and spying like this, but the UK hasn't enforced its own laws in our case.
So please make a small donation and pass it on: if people don’t know that course of conduct is actually being rewarded, and therefore sanctioned, by the state, it can happen to anyone and there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself.
THE LONG VERSION
WHAT HAPPENED?
In 2012 our family achieved a landmark Human Rights settlement about school bullying while living in New Zealand.
The settlement is about unchecked bullying, which is bullying where teachers deliberately do not intervene even though they had a school policy of children telling about bullying. This puts bullied children and their families in an impossible position.
Parents who saw our three year struggle to achieve the settlement after what happened to us said things like:
"Congratulations to our Human Rights Commission! Bullies and those who protect them should be accountable.”
"I feel Angel Garden and Steve Paris have supported all of us who have tried to stop their child being bullied in school."
“Great to hear that you are being listened to at last after all that agro. It takes your sort of sacrifice and effort to achieve justice.”
"I applaud you and again thank you for your inspiring and informative, brave, open and transparent site!!”
“Wow. Impressed not just that you won but that you did so with such dignity and class. You’re amazing.”
You can read about this in detail by visiting this site .
LIVING UNDER SURVEILLANCE AND A HATE CAMPAIGN
Unfortunately, during the early part of the process that led to the Settlement, Angel’s beloved mother died and while we visited the UK because of her illness, we met some very well-connected people who had originally found us online, and now made multiple offers of help to us, emphatically citing their position as influential people who strongly wanted to support us in addressing campaign.
This turned out to be a front though and their email communications have since revealed that they were setting us up, and they actually didn’t want what we were doing about bullying to be successful or even happening at all. They set about trying to degrade and destroy it and the help it represents for children and families, involving as many people as they could.
The hate campaign they swept us into has lasted five years during which time they have done everything in their power to destroy our good name and our livelihood, using a combination of public bullying and humiliation, and underhand devious harassment techniques involving coercion and threats to incite others to join in.
Our family has had to live knowing that this was being covertly done, without being able to prove it, while we were also still openly attacked and deliberately provoked. Attacks came from lots of people we didn’t know but they had spoken to, and it was especially bad if we tried to continue to promote influence about bullying.
As if that wasn’t enough, at the same time as they were openly pretending not to be interested in us, we knew they must actually be constantly cyber-stalking us and monitoring our interactions to enable them to achieve our total exclusion.
So we were being cyber-bullied, cyber-stalked, monitored and shunned online all at the same time, and as we lived in New Zealand, we could only use our freedom of speech to publish about what they were doing to defend ourselves and publicly ask them to stop.
WHY WE WENT TO JUSTICE FOR HELP
Although we did eventually succeed in negotiating the Human Rights settlement in spite of their efforts, the effects of their harassment meant we eventually had no choice but to relocate our whole family back to the UK and seek help.
What we found out about what they were doing more than justified that decision and showed that we had been very accurate in our publications based on what was visible, with the exception of one element: it was much worse than even we had thought.
It turned out that we had correctly identified their exact strategy of using networks to block off debate in order to prevent us from being able to prove what they were doing. As the 2nd defendant said herself for instance,
“[Angel] can't mention me because I haven't written anything she can point to.” (29/3/2012)
and
“One of these days someone will tell Steve I’ve warned them about him, and they’ll try to sue me for libel.” (26/8/2012)
The awful feeling we’ve had for so many years of being under surveillance has been 100% proved and their public pretence not to “want anything to do with” us has been exposed as a lie.
But what that lie was masking was truly terrible: we learned that they were actually plotting to break up our family just because of our publications.
So, for example while the 1st Defendant published a humiliating statement about us that he had “filtered them out of my life”, his email correspondence shows that just days before, he was soliciting information from others for a dossier he was building for “authorities” to try and hurt our family, and all because we wrote about what was happening, asked him to stop, and offered him a right of reply!
In fact he was consistently monitoring us, and their emails also show that they knew things like what computers our kids were using, they made contact with people in our local physical community to harass us, and were telling people we were dangerously mentally ill.
It is obvious from the disclosure of these documents through the legal process, that some people were properly resistant to joining in with harassment and shunning, but whenever this happened, they would either be threatened, or the authority of an involved mental health academic would be trotted out to bolster up their vicious mental health smear of Borderline Personality Disorder, which is one of the most stigmatising of mental health diagnoses, in which patients are seen as a risk to themselves and others.
This was done in order to shock the reluctant person into being convinced that it would be dangerous to treat us like ordinary human beings, for example:
“He doesn’t know to trust [my husband’s] clinical opinion. I just hope it makes him think twice” (23/10/2011)
“[My husband] is a GP & academic & an expert in primary care mental health, including personality disorder.” (31/1/2012)
Later in court the mental health academic (and doctor) admitted that using his credentials like that would be likely to make people believe the smear, but the judge immediately went against the Defamation Act to protect him, saying, “I am not dealing with what actually conforms or does not conform with a diagnostic of Manual DSM-IV”, in spite of the fact that such a totally fabricated diagnosis had been spread around, as the 2nd Defendant wrote for example:
“Angel has a borderline personality disorder. This is a clinical judgement, not a personal opinion. It isn’t simply depression. It makes her very dangerous” (12/1/2012).
All this has been going on since 2011 whilst Angel’s mother was dying of cancer. Angel was cyber-stalked to the hospital where her mother was sick with threats to contact the medical staff, and wherever else we went, or if we tried to participate in “open debate”.
They consistently expressed their desire to see us in prison, bankrupt and worse. You can see some of what they said and did in the report of an expert in cyber-harassment and trolling, at this link.
Meanwhile the actual physical impairment that Angel has had since a child, was openly mocked and lied about as part of their public humiliation of us, and to forcibly provoke us so we would react and match the portrait of us they were trying to draw for others: tormented, “mad” and “dangerous”.
HOW JUSTICE LET US DOWN
The awful effects of any one of these kind of tormenting tactics are very well documented, and we’ve had to live under all of them for five years, but we’re still just a family who achieved some useful influence against bullying through a Human Rights process, while all these attacks were going on, and now we have the whole weight of the system trying to bring us to our knees.
Although we were 100% right about needing legal redress, we couldn’t initially take the matter to the police for criminal prosecution, as all the malicious actions against us were done in a covert way. We were forced to bring a civil procedure in Defamation against them, as this appeared the only option open to us, in order to stop the harassment.
When the email disclosure of the Defendants came out, we tried to put the covert harassment claims back into our case as it confirmed that everything we knew was going on under the surface had been correct except we had underestimated the horrendous lies they spread in order to “persuade” others to shun us.
The Judge refused us both the inclusion of the harassment claims, and the release of the evidence of the stalking and harassment disclosure to the Crown Prosecution Service. He promised he would deal with the covert course of conduct during the trial. By the time we found out that he had decided not to, it was too late.
Instead of gaining relief from the harassment, all our efforts to defend ourselves from it using free speech and offering right of reply instead of going to court, have been manipulated to turn the case against us, and our rights to freedom of speech have been taken away in the UK, in 2015.
Due to the Judge’s deliberate decision to award punitive costs, and as the perpetrators were defended on a “no-win, no-fee” basis, their costs ballooned to an astonishing £240,000. They now have a charge over our home and we have until the 31st of August to leave unless we come up with the money; which amounts to paying to be stalked and harassed!
To show you something of the extent of the harassment we are dealing with right now, their lawyers are quite open about wanting to drive us and our children out of our home. They have said that they will sell our home at auction for not less than £180,000 but if we try and raise money to pay the costs order they will demand the full £240,000.
This means that they are willing to take £60,000 less, just in order to know that they are hurting us and our family, by driving us out of our home.
WHY DONATE?
Because this affects all of us and could happen to anyone who stands up for anything at all.
Unless networked covert harassment and stalking are prosecuted, any co-ordinated group/gang can subvert the supposed democracy afforded by social media and the internet, in order to rig open debate and target anyone they want. If this group/gang also happen to be influential people, than those actions can be devastating.
When they refuse to stop, and vexatiously force you into legal action, the courts could punish you for having defended yourself using your Article 10 rights, however transparent, polite, factual and even humorous you have been.
As we have learned all this the very hardest way, we are now quite well qualified to continue to campaign to bring awareness to these very important issues which affect all of us in the digital age, and we will do so.
Please help us to get the relief which the Courts have failed to provide, missing an important opportunity to address such urgent issues for everyone: it’s no secret that the authorities freely admit in the media that they aren’t able to deal with online harassment effectively, and our case proves this conclusively.
However battered and paranoid we understandably are, having been through this experience and documented it, we have only a very short time - to the end of August - to try and raise this huge sum of money.
Even the smallest donation, and every time this message is passed on, is a notice to the perpetrators that this kind of covert targeting behaviour is unacceptable.
By donating and sharing, you will be making a clear statement that children matter, and so does addressing bullying, and that hard-won Human Rights process must not be degraded, especially not by Courts, Judges and influential people who should be championing it!
And you will be sending a message that harassing people behind the scenes in order to have them cast out while presenting to be open and democratic, should definitely not be condoned!
Please help us to make the internet safer for us all, by getting the word out about this kind of networked targeting, show your support for free-speech and for an open and democratic internet, safe for us all.
Although we cannot post pictures of our children online because of all the abuse our family has suffered, we can tell you that all five of us thank you for every penny you donate, from the bottom of our hearts.
THE SHORT VERSION
We are Steve Paris and Angel Garden, a British couple who amongst other things campaign against bullying. We have three lovely school age children and live in South Wales.
Our family are targets of networked and co-ordinated cyber-stalking, which has enabled covert harassment, cyber-mobbing, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking privacy invasions, disability abuse, and malicious communications.
We realised we had to relocate from New Zealand back to the UK in order to deal with this matter, and we’re being punished for needing to ask for justice at all: the court has said that us writing to defend ourselves while we were abroad (our supposed right to freedom of speech - Article 10 of the Human Rights Act), justified our perpetrators’ attacks on us, even though we showed that they had begun their harassment and character assassination campaign before we had written anything at all!
Our actual words have even been deliberately altered and misrepresented, the chronology of events distorted, and crucial context, which the Judge had specifically promised to look at, ignored: all the lies they spread to so many people behind the scenes - including to influential journalists - to convince them that we were dangerous people that had to be shunned.
You can see some of what they said and did in the report of an expert in cyber-harassment and trolling, at this link.
As a result, because of a punitive costs order against us, unless we can pay their lawyers astronomical fees of £240,000 by the end of August, they will take our home.
Please donate and share to help our family overcome this injustice, and also to help us raise awareness of dangerous covert harassment techniques, to make the internet safer for us all. In fact, clauses introduced into the Protection From Harassment Act in 2012, are specifically designed to address persistent targeted monitoring and spying like this, but the UK hasn't enforced its own laws in our case.
So please make a small donation and pass it on: if people don’t know that course of conduct is actually being rewarded, and therefore sanctioned, by the state, it can happen to anyone and there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself.
THE LONG VERSION
WHAT HAPPENED?
In 2012 our family achieved a landmark Human Rights settlement about school bullying while living in New Zealand.
The settlement is about unchecked bullying, which is bullying where teachers deliberately do not intervene even though they had a school policy of children telling about bullying. This puts bullied children and their families in an impossible position.
Parents who saw our three year struggle to achieve the settlement after what happened to us said things like:
"Congratulations to our Human Rights Commission! Bullies and those who protect them should be accountable.”
"I feel Angel Garden and Steve Paris have supported all of us who have tried to stop their child being bullied in school."
“Great to hear that you are being listened to at last after all that agro. It takes your sort of sacrifice and effort to achieve justice.”
"I applaud you and again thank you for your inspiring and informative, brave, open and transparent site!!”
“Wow. Impressed not just that you won but that you did so with such dignity and class. You’re amazing.”
You can read about this in detail by visiting this site .
LIVING UNDER SURVEILLANCE AND A HATE CAMPAIGN
Unfortunately, during the early part of the process that led to the Settlement, Angel’s beloved mother died and while we visited the UK because of her illness, we met some very well-connected people who had originally found us online, and now made multiple offers of help to us, emphatically citing their position as influential people who strongly wanted to support us in addressing campaign.
This turned out to be a front though and their email communications have since revealed that they were setting us up, and they actually didn’t want what we were doing about bullying to be successful or even happening at all. They set about trying to degrade and destroy it and the help it represents for children and families, involving as many people as they could.
The hate campaign they swept us into has lasted five years during which time they have done everything in their power to destroy our good name and our livelihood, using a combination of public bullying and humiliation, and underhand devious harassment techniques involving coercion and threats to incite others to join in.
Our family has had to live knowing that this was being covertly done, without being able to prove it, while we were also still openly attacked and deliberately provoked. Attacks came from lots of people we didn’t know but they had spoken to, and it was especially bad if we tried to continue to promote influence about bullying.
As if that wasn’t enough, at the same time as they were openly pretending not to be interested in us, we knew they must actually be constantly cyber-stalking us and monitoring our interactions to enable them to achieve our total exclusion.
So we were being cyber-bullied, cyber-stalked, monitored and shunned online all at the same time, and as we lived in New Zealand, we could only use our freedom of speech to publish about what they were doing to defend ourselves and publicly ask them to stop.
WHY WE WENT TO JUSTICE FOR HELP
Although we did eventually succeed in negotiating the Human Rights settlement in spite of their efforts, the effects of their harassment meant we eventually had no choice but to relocate our whole family back to the UK and seek help.
What we found out about what they were doing more than justified that decision and showed that we had been very accurate in our publications based on what was visible, with the exception of one element: it was much worse than even we had thought.
It turned out that we had correctly identified their exact strategy of using networks to block off debate in order to prevent us from being able to prove what they were doing. As the 2nd defendant said herself for instance,
“[Angel] can't mention me because I haven't written anything she can point to.” (29/3/2012)
and
“One of these days someone will tell Steve I’ve warned them about him, and they’ll try to sue me for libel.” (26/8/2012)
The awful feeling we’ve had for so many years of being under surveillance has been 100% proved and their public pretence not to “want anything to do with” us has been exposed as a lie.
But what that lie was masking was truly terrible: we learned that they were actually plotting to break up our family just because of our publications.
So, for example while the 1st Defendant published a humiliating statement about us that he had “filtered them out of my life”, his email correspondence shows that just days before, he was soliciting information from others for a dossier he was building for “authorities” to try and hurt our family, and all because we wrote about what was happening, asked him to stop, and offered him a right of reply!
In fact he was consistently monitoring us, and their emails also show that they knew things like what computers our kids were using, they made contact with people in our local physical community to harass us, and were telling people we were dangerously mentally ill.
It is obvious from the disclosure of these documents through the legal process, that some people were properly resistant to joining in with harassment and shunning, but whenever this happened, they would either be threatened, or the authority of an involved mental health academic would be trotted out to bolster up their vicious mental health smear of Borderline Personality Disorder, which is one of the most stigmatising of mental health diagnoses, in which patients are seen as a risk to themselves and others.
This was done in order to shock the reluctant person into being convinced that it would be dangerous to treat us like ordinary human beings, for example:
“He doesn’t know to trust [my husband’s] clinical opinion. I just hope it makes him think twice” (23/10/2011)
“[My husband] is a GP & academic & an expert in primary care mental health, including personality disorder.” (31/1/2012)
Later in court the mental health academic (and doctor) admitted that using his credentials like that would be likely to make people believe the smear, but the judge immediately went against the Defamation Act to protect him, saying, “I am not dealing with what actually conforms or does not conform with a diagnostic of Manual DSM-IV”, in spite of the fact that such a totally fabricated diagnosis had been spread around, as the 2nd Defendant wrote for example:
“Angel has a borderline personality disorder. This is a clinical judgement, not a personal opinion. It isn’t simply depression. It makes her very dangerous” (12/1/2012).
All this has been going on since 2011 whilst Angel’s mother was dying of cancer. Angel was cyber-stalked to the hospital where her mother was sick with threats to contact the medical staff, and wherever else we went, or if we tried to participate in “open debate”.
They consistently expressed their desire to see us in prison, bankrupt and worse. You can see some of what they said and did in the report of an expert in cyber-harassment and trolling, at this link.
Meanwhile the actual physical impairment that Angel has had since a child, was openly mocked and lied about as part of their public humiliation of us, and to forcibly provoke us so we would react and match the portrait of us they were trying to draw for others: tormented, “mad” and “dangerous”.
HOW JUSTICE LET US DOWN
The awful effects of any one of these kind of tormenting tactics are very well documented, and we’ve had to live under all of them for five years, but we’re still just a family who achieved some useful influence against bullying through a Human Rights process, while all these attacks were going on, and now we have the whole weight of the system trying to bring us to our knees.
Although we were 100% right about needing legal redress, we couldn’t initially take the matter to the police for criminal prosecution, as all the malicious actions against us were done in a covert way. We were forced to bring a civil procedure in Defamation against them, as this appeared the only option open to us, in order to stop the harassment.
When the email disclosure of the Defendants came out, we tried to put the covert harassment claims back into our case as it confirmed that everything we knew was going on under the surface had been correct except we had underestimated the horrendous lies they spread in order to “persuade” others to shun us.
The Judge refused us both the inclusion of the harassment claims, and the release of the evidence of the stalking and harassment disclosure to the Crown Prosecution Service. He promised he would deal with the covert course of conduct during the trial. By the time we found out that he had decided not to, it was too late.
Instead of gaining relief from the harassment, all our efforts to defend ourselves from it using free speech and offering right of reply instead of going to court, have been manipulated to turn the case against us, and our rights to freedom of speech have been taken away in the UK, in 2015.
Due to the Judge’s deliberate decision to award punitive costs, and as the perpetrators were defended on a “no-win, no-fee” basis, their costs ballooned to an astonishing £240,000. They now have a charge over our home and we have until the 31st of August to leave unless we come up with the money; which amounts to paying to be stalked and harassed!
To show you something of the extent of the harassment we are dealing with right now, their lawyers are quite open about wanting to drive us and our children out of our home. They have said that they will sell our home at auction for not less than £180,000 but if we try and raise money to pay the costs order they will demand the full £240,000.
This means that they are willing to take £60,000 less, just in order to know that they are hurting us and our family, by driving us out of our home.
WHY DONATE?
Because this affects all of us and could happen to anyone who stands up for anything at all.
Unless networked covert harassment and stalking are prosecuted, any co-ordinated group/gang can subvert the supposed democracy afforded by social media and the internet, in order to rig open debate and target anyone they want. If this group/gang also happen to be influential people, than those actions can be devastating.
When they refuse to stop, and vexatiously force you into legal action, the courts could punish you for having defended yourself using your Article 10 rights, however transparent, polite, factual and even humorous you have been.
As we have learned all this the very hardest way, we are now quite well qualified to continue to campaign to bring awareness to these very important issues which affect all of us in the digital age, and we will do so.
Please help us to get the relief which the Courts have failed to provide, missing an important opportunity to address such urgent issues for everyone: it’s no secret that the authorities freely admit in the media that they aren’t able to deal with online harassment effectively, and our case proves this conclusively.
However battered and paranoid we understandably are, having been through this experience and documented it, we have only a very short time - to the end of August - to try and raise this huge sum of money.
Even the smallest donation, and every time this message is passed on, is a notice to the perpetrators that this kind of covert targeting behaviour is unacceptable.
By donating and sharing, you will be making a clear statement that children matter, and so does addressing bullying, and that hard-won Human Rights process must not be degraded, especially not by Courts, Judges and influential people who should be championing it!
And you will be sending a message that harassing people behind the scenes in order to have them cast out while presenting to be open and democratic, should definitely not be condoned!
Please help us to make the internet safer for us all, by getting the word out about this kind of networked targeting, show your support for free-speech and for an open and democratic internet, safe for us all.
Although we cannot post pictures of our children online because of all the abuse our family has suffered, we can tell you that all five of us thank you for every penny you donate, from the bottom of our hearts.
Organizer
Steve Paris
Organizer
