A woman who stalked a man and mounted a campaign to destroy his reputation after he spurned her advances has been jailed.
Farah Dan, also known as Farah Damji , 49 (9.10.66) of Regency Street, SW1, who set out to blacken the name of an engineering director and volunteer church warden was sentenced to five years imprisonment at Kingston Crown Court for three counts of stalking on Friday, 19 August.
She was found guilty of one count of stalking on Thursday, 7 July and had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking a second victim.
Dan met her first victim, aged in his 40s, on an internet site in October 2013. They met to discuss social housing, to which the victim agreed to help Dan with her social housing firm. Following their meeting Dan, initiated a sexual encounter, but an agreement was made between the two to limit their relationship to a business level.
In December 2013, the victim attended Dan’s company Christmas dinner. He became suspicious as there was hardly anyone there and told Dan he didn’t believe she ran the extensive company she claimed.
At the end of the night, Dan tried to initiate sexual contact but the victim refused. That evening was apparently the trigger for the campaign of harassment that followed.
Over the next month Dan assumed a number of false identities to call and the text the victim. She subjected the victim to 186 silent or hoax calls and texts to his mobile between 19 December 2013 and 5 January 2014.
Dan also contacted other people, including the media, using hoax names to claim there were issues at the company where the victim was working. She made silent calls and sent sexually explicit texts to the victim’s 16-year-old son and even attended his school to speak to the deputy head teacher about the ‘affairs’. Dan also emailed his wife under a false name, saying she had compromising pictures of her husband with a number of women and in a separate message said: “Look after your children.”
The court heard that messages received by the victim included threats of sexual violence including his six-year-old daughter.
She contacted the vicar of the parish where the victim attended and played an active role, making false allegations about affairs.
She also contacted the press, asking them to write a story exposing the victim as a married member of the church using online dating sites. Later she emailed the victim stating the only way he could stop the story being published was to resign activities in the church, get counselling for his sexual addiction and abuse of women, and apologise to Dan.
At one point Dan claimed, via a false identity, that she was pregnant by the victim. She also set up a fake Facebook account with posts accusing the victim of being a sex pest, having numerous affairs and accusing the vicar of his church of covering it up.
Police attended Dan’s home on 5 January 2014 in an attempt to arrest her. She handed herself in on 9 January and was charged with stalking; one of the first charges made under new 2012 legislation.
On 10 January 2014 she was granted bail by Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court and immediately resumed her stalking campaign by emailing business associates, blogging allegations of domestic abuse, making a malicious report to police about the welfare of the victim’s children and continuing to press the church for action against the victim.
She contacted several high-profile figures in the police and MPs to voice her concerns.
She was arrested and further charged on 28 March 2014 with stalking.
On 2 April 2014, police received a third allegation of harassment, this time from a man in his 50s, which led to Dan being arrested again for stalking and charged on 12 April 2014.
Dan began harassing this man, a business associate, after he provided a statement that led to her bail being revoked on 3 February 2014 at Kingston Crown Court. Dan emailed a number of high profile businesspeople, alleging he was involved in domestic abuse and fraud.
During court proceedings Dan admitted stalking the man in his 40s, but subsequently vacated her plea. She was found guilty of the offence on Thursday, 7 July following the trial at Kingston Crown Court. She was previously found guilty of stalking the man in his 50s in February 2015.
Investigating officer PC Vincent Chan, of Wandsworth borough, said: “This has been an extremely complex case of stalking with Dan using a number of aliases via multiple social media accounts and mobiles in a planned and co-ordinated effort to utterly destroy the home, social, religious and work life of one of her victims. The victim in his 40s lost his employment and his social and home life has been severely affected. Dan’s sentence is a reflection of how seriously the judicial system, and more importantly, society acknowledge such criminal behaviour
“The amendment to the harassment laws in 2012 was designed precisely to acknowledge and recognise this style of severe and malicious behaviour to disrupt a victim’s day-to-day life. The legal system understands the psychological impact of such campaigns of stalking as much as the more obvious forms of violence and physical threats. The Metropolitan Police Service is fully committed to investigating the perpetrators in such cases.”
The Metropolitan Police Service takes all forms of harassment seriously and encourages all victims to come forward and report to the police as soon as possible. Crime prevention and personal safety advice is available from the Met’s website at www.met.police.uk.
