End of mental torture for Good Things Guy as cyberstalker is found

4 Aug 2024

Brent Lindeque went through months of hell while he was being stalked and threatened. He only found relief when the person could be exposed and he was granted a protection order by a court.

There really is no place to hide and you will be exposed. This is the message from a relieved Brent Lindeque (39), the former journalist behind the popular Good Things Guy website, after a four-month ordeal of online and email abuse that included death threats.

“I would like every single keyboard warrior to know you are not anonymous – you can be found,” Lindeque warned this week.

The Baby Reindeer vibes (à la the Netflix series) started in March when Lindeque – who has grown what started in 2015 as a blog about good news in South Africa into a platform that has won a number of awards – began receiving a barrage of messages.

Lindeque’s profile as a natural optimist has grown over the years. His celebration of South African achievements and excellence has drawn followers from across the globe – also on Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube – during the bleakest years of State Capture and the Covid-19 pandemic, and his encouragement of random acts of kindness and paying it forward has inspired South Africans to reach out and help each other across all spheres of life.

“It came out of nowhere,” he said. “It was one email the first day, then followed a barrage of up to five a day, including hateful messages. Some days the messages came hard and fast.”

What troubled Lindeque the most was how “hate-filled” the messages were, and that the sender was beginning to tag his clients after he had the opportunity to highlight his website at a Deutsche Welle (DW) global media forum two months ago.

“I had been on a global stage with this little publication. I considered it a highlight and, when DW tagged me on X, I shared it. The stalker began posting that I was a horrible person and tagging other people,” he explained.

The first vitriolic messages had left him unruffled, he said, but when they escalated to death threats, it was “deeply concerning”.

Unmasking a stalker

The conundrum was how to find a person in this anonymous world where they can use fake X and Facebook accounts. The culprit went by the moniker of “Fearless”.

Lindeque’s lawyer advised him to document all the communications and, with the help of the IT team that runs his website, an internet protocol (IP) tracker was placed on the site. “We struck gold. My lawyer then got hold of tech experts who enabled her to probe which internet service provider owned the address.”

The internet service provider (ISP) agreed to cooperate with Lindeque’s legal team. “The ISP understood that this was not about them but about someone who was using their service,” he said. However, it withheld the person’s identity for seven weeks, waiting for a court subpoena.

Read more: Meet Good Things Guy Brent Lindeque, the architect of the kindness movement

Once the sender’s identity was revealed, Lindeque approached the court for a protection order and a date was set for 25 July.

“The case was rolled over by the magistrate to the following day, when we were granted our order with additional protection in a clause stating a warrant for arrest would be issued should the person violate the protection order.”

The owner of the email addresses and fake online profiles failed to turn up at court, but was notified that an interim protection order had been granted.

As Lindeque noted: “How do you stand up and defend how you harassed someone when the proof is all there? Just like that the X and Facebook accounts were deleted and I have not heard anything since.”

He has opted not to name his stalker, because he fears this would lead to a persecutory online mob perpetuating the toxic zeitgeist he so abhors. “On the internet the individual felt to me like this big, scary person and I was actually afraid for my life, but in real life the person looked like they wanted to cry when the lawyers paid a visit. When I saw this, I thought how sad it all is.”

Although the troll had put him “through hell”, Lindeque said he did not want revenge. But cyberstalkers beware: “You are not anonymous online – you can be found. Anyone dealing with this, the courts are there for you,” he said.

The law in South Africa

Research conducted in 2019 by Nelufa Ahmed for a master’s degree in social science from the University of KwaZulu-Natal noted that the enactment of the Protection from Harassment Act, which took effect in April 2013, indicated that these types of crimes were being taken seriously.

Unlike the Domestic Violence Act, it included harassment from persons not in a relationship with the target and “protects women against all forms of stalking, whether traditional or online”.

“The law generally stipulates that if an individual is being relentlessly targeted with abuse on social media or via email, that particular individual can apply for a protection order under the provisions of the act,” Ahmed wrote.

The definition of cyberstalking is wide, but it includes “inappropriate, uninvited social exchange behaviours initiated by a perpetrator via online or wireless communication technology and devices”.

“Forms of cyberstalking include sending threatening or obscene electronic emails, harassing in chat rooms, spamming, tracing another person’s computer and internet activity, and posting threatening or harassing messages on blogs or through social media,” Ahmed wrote.

The Protection from Harassment Act enables a target to deal with stalking by means of an “immediate, quick and inexpensive civil remedy in the form of a protection order”. Although this relief exists, Ahmed wrote that it was still not being used efficiently to combat cyberstalking.

She identified three categories of stalker in her research: those who need to fulfil psychological needs, wishes or cravings regarding the target; those motivated by the need to instil fear and gain control over their victim; and those motivated by revenge or a need to punish the victim.

Gender-based offences

The act makes stalking a criminal offence and is a shield in the fight against gender-based violence perpetrated online. “The South African Police Service is also ordered by the court to help track the cyberstalker and bring them to book,” noted Ahmed.

The South African Law Reform Commission grasped the seriousness of stalking in 2006 already. It recommended that “the civil remedy for stalking should, with the exception of domestic violence specific provisions, mirror the civil remedy provided for in the Domestic Violence Act, i.e. a protection order against harassment... coupled with a suspended warrant of arrest”.

The primary focus of the legislation, said the then commission chairperson, the late Constitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, was “to interrupt the stalker’s pattern of behaviour before physical harm to the victim occurs”.

Read more: Former Helen Suzman Foundation chief granted court order to halt cyberbully after ZEP challenges

Ahmed found that gender-based offences had already been on the increase in 2019, with young women aged between 18 and 24 being subjected to “disproportionate” types of cyber harassment. This included cyberstalking and online sexual harassment, and she noted that one in three women who used the internet would face this scourge.

“Of importance to note is that of all the women who have suffered from gender-based offences committed online, over half (54%) of the cases of cyberstalking involved a first encounter in a real-world setting,” she wrote.

According to a global survey by the British research and data analytics firm YouGov, South Africa has the fourth-highest rate of cyberbullying worldwide, and one out of five teens “[falls] prey to cyberbullying”.

For Lindeque, a usually resilient man, the ordeal took a serious toll, as he spiralled into a state of anxiety and dread. It was only after his court victory that he was able to share with his online followers just how crippling this modern form of mental torture can be. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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Unmasking a stalker

The law in South Africa

Gender-based offences