Click. Lie. Repeat? Inside The Claims of A Self-Styled Trauma Psychologist Who Markets Online

I often receive emails from women who have been stalked, some for months, some for years, and who have finally reached out for help. Often, they include the same line; I didn’t know if I should tell someone or report this, because I wasn’t sure if it counted.

It always counts. But stalking tends to erode a person’s grip on what is significant, what actually is happening to them, and whether anyone will believe it. I know this personally as a victim of stalking. I know it professionally as a Registered forensic psychologist and as the current Chair of the National Stalking Consortium and sitting Trustee of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust.

So what is written below does not come from a fleeting or abstract concern. Nor does it stem from ‘professional envy’, before anyone reaches for that one and causes my eyeballs to roll so far back in my head that I briefly become qualified to examine my own brainstem.

Dr Jessica Taylor wants you to know she is a victim.

Most recently and pertinently, the victim of stalking. Of harassment. Of a coordinated gang of ‘thousands of people’ determined to destroy and even end her life.

She has written a book about it. Click. Stalk. Destroy: inside the minds of people who stalk online is due in June 2026. The book promises to reveal ‘how the internet and social media have fostered new conditions for stalking’, a valid and interesting topic. It is also being promoted extensively to a large social media following, most of whom are women, many of them survivors of abuse who trust Taylor as an expert.

But there are a couple of problems. Not least that dozens of largely unconnected people, professionals, abuse survivors, and former employees are stepping forward to say that they have been falsely accused of both direct and cyber-stalking. By her.

Now, I am not a neutral observer, and I will not pretend to be.

I met Jessica Taylor around 2018 when she was a PhD student, at which point she told me someone from her university was stalking her. I was initially supportive, including speaking at an event she organised. Over time, I disengaged as her social media became increasingly clickbait and self-serving. I regretfully concluded, after looking into concerns raised by numerous respected colleagues, that Taylor does not adhere to the professional values, standards and ethics I would expect of a psychologist.

Which brings me to April 2023, when a colleague and I were contacted by commissioners at Warner Bros. Discovery, where I have worked as an on-screen expert and presenter for a decade, following complaints about Taylor’s advertised appearance on a series called The Fraudsters. My colleague, who had no prior knowledge of Taylor and had simply taken a cursory look at her PhD thesis and social media, told commissioners he “wouldn’t touch Jessica Taylor with a barge pole.” I told them I agreed. (He had, I thought, put it rather well.)

The following month, my regulatory body (the HCPC), informed me that Taylor had made a complaint about my fitness to practise. She alleged I had harassed her and shared rumours about her personal and family life. She said that she had reported me to the police. She also alleged I had cost her the role in The Fraudsters and “pitched for her job.” Warner Bros. Discovery offered me a written statement confirming this was, frankly, bobbins. But Taylor’s complaint was closed without investigation, as she had not provided sufficient evidence to meet the threshold for one. I was never contacted by the police.

It is a sequence that has now repeated itself, with minor variations, at least twenty-five times.

Taylor is a busy woman. She runs VictimFocus, Aureum Trauma Experts, the loftily-titled International Institute for Trauma, Abuse & Society, and The Sound Bath Studio. I have no idea about sound baths, but the others are unregulated private training and consultancy companies. They sell courses, resources and also - in direct violation of the British Psychological Society guidelines - clinical services, including court expert witness services, that Taylor is unqualified to provide.

Taylor holds a PhD in the niche area of the psychology of victim blaming. That has merit, but she is not a clinical or forensic psychologist. Those titles are legally protected, require HCPC registration, and take years of closely supervised clinical training to achieve.

Over several years, Taylor has claimed to have been stalked or harassed by a named woman identified as her primary stalker (see below); a coordinated group of unnamed feminists; professional women in the violence against women sector; academics; Johnny Depp fans, incels, men’s rights activists, neighbours and unnamed men in an alleged conspiracy to kill her. The list, like the claims, keeps growing.

As do the questions.

More and more people are coming forward and describing the same experience. Each raised a concern about Taylor’s work or conduct. Each says Taylor then made formal allegations of stalking or harassment against them. In every one of these cases, the complaints were dropped.

“I met her when she was a PhD student. Since then her career seems to be a triumph of shallow knowledge and ambition over ability. When I questioned what she was writing on social media, she accused me of stalking her and complained to my employers. It got nowhere.”

Name Witheld, Professor of Criminology

“I contacted the police officer she set on me and other ex-employees in an attempt to silence us, and I told him that I thought she was dangerous and that her lies and use of the police to intimidate people were part of a pattern of behaviour.”

Name Witheld, Former Employee of Victim Focus

If Taylor has been subjected to any stalking, she has my sympathy. But it seems odd that, given how vocal she is on her platforms, to my knowledge, not one individual has ever been charged, cautioned, or made subject to a full court order in connection with stalking or harassing Taylor. Not one.

And only one person has ever been publicly named.

The abuse survivor whose story was stolen — then used against her

Sally Ann is a survivor of childhood abuse who shared her personal story with Taylor and later found it published in one of her books without Sally Ann’s knowledge or consent. When she asked for it to be removed, Taylor told her followers that Sally Ann was confused, that the account in question was not hers, and later, that she was mentally unstable, ‘obsessed’ with Taylor and had invented the claim. The book’s publisher, Little Brown, however, confirmed that Sally Ann’s story had been used without formal consent. (One might have thought that Taylor would issue a swift apology, and that would be the end of it. One would be wrong.)

In January 2024, Taylor then fully named Sally Ann to her entire social media following as not only her stalker, but also as the primary instigator in group-stalking against her. Taylor claimed that Sally Ann had been served with a Stalking Protection Order (SPO). She had not.

In truth, Sally Ann had agreed to an Interim Order while Taylor’s claims were investigated. You’d hope that someone who claims an ability to ‘unravel the psychology of stalking’ would at least unravel that the implications of an Interim vs. full SPO are different and significant. An Interim SPO is a temporary measure designed for immediate protection, whereas a full SPO is a final, long-term order served upon a person only after a full Court Hearing.

In any case, by this point, the police were preparing to drop the whole matter. Not only was there insufficient evidence of stalking, but the legal file also shows that Taylor made several proven false statements to police during the course of the complaint. The posts naming Sally Ann as a stalker nevertheless remain published today, unretracted and oft repeated.

“I am not obsessed, nor have I ever been. I have never stalked Dr Jessica Taylor or her family. I am terrified of her. She makes me feel powerless and vulnerable. I am tired and drained from all of this. I want to spend my time focusing on my recovery with the services already supporting and helping me, who understand how retraumatising and damaging her actions have been.”

Sally Ann

The gossip forum full of ‘stalkers’

Over recent months, Taylor has been waging a public war against Tattle Life - an online gossip forum centred on social media influencers. She even appeared on Good Morning Britain to discuss a defamation case in the High Court of Northern Ireland in June 2025, in which Tattle’s owner, Sebastian Bond, was ordered by default to pay damages of over £300,000. The ruling was overturned when it turned out that Bond hadn’t had any notification about the lawsuit, a little matter that the plaintiffs had failed to mention to the Court.

Taylor claims that the site hosts organised gang-stalking by its female members, against both herself and others. Imagine ‘doxxing’, false complaints made to social care, private documents retrieved from wheelie bins and put online, contact lists compiled to isolate targets, private medical information shared systematically, and child abuse openly encouraged. It is, in Taylor’s telling, essentially a stalking franchise operated by nurses and social workers in their spare time.

Sebastian Bond tells me that the website can “get catty” but that it has strict rules against abusive or harmful content, operates good reporting systems and uses moderators to oversee threads and remove anything illegal or hateful. For journalistic integrity, I have, of course, had a look and typed my own name into the search bar. Insignificant as I am, all I get is a handful of actually quite nice comments and somebody who says that she only watches me on television to see ‘how big [my] hair is and how shiny and taut [my] face is.’ Hey, everyone has their opinions. I am just pleased that she enjoys watching.

*Breaks into a quick chorus of I Am What I Am*

“Jessica Taylor has continuously spouted demonstrably untrue statements about Tattle Life, as it keeps receipts of what she wants to hide - such as whistleblowing from former employees. Tattle Life is no more problematic than any user-generated content on the internet, despite what influencers would have you believe. Everyone should be deeply troubled by how she can hoodwink Labour MPs into repeating claims with no truth behind them, and present biased ‘research’ that has faced zero academic rigour. She exploited the fact that my bank accounts were frozen due to a private, cloak-and-dagger court case that had no defence and in which the judiciary were misled. That judgment has now been set aside, with costs awarded to me, and I am looking into taking action against those who have defamed me and Tattle Life.”

Sebastian Bond

The clinical picture

False stalking allegations are not a myth invented by people who dislike accusers. A peer-reviewed 2004 study by Sheridan and Blaauw analysed 357 cases from anti-stalking charities in the Netherlands and the UK and found a false reporting rate of around 11.5%. Of those making false reports, 70% were experiencing distressing delusions. A further study in the British Journal of Psychiatry identified five categories of false claimant, one of which is the ‘instrumental’ accuser, who fabricates victimisation to secure a deliberate objective. The authors also note that public interest in stalking can inadvertently generate false claims in those with paranoid beliefs or who don’t fully understand what stalking really is.

So, the majority of stalking reports are genuine. But the false claim phenomenon is real, clinically recognisable, and causes serious harm to the people on the receiving end of it. It is also worth saying plainly that using false allegations and vexatious complaints as a tactic is itself a well-documented feature of stalking and/or abusive behaviour. Stalkers weaponise the very systems designed to protect victims. Any honest assessment of a situation like this one requires looking at the whole picture, not just the loudest account of it.

‘Gang stalking’ i.e. the belief that a large, coordinated group is conspiring to destroy one individual requires particular care. Real group harassment exists, particularly on the internet. I am sure we have all witnessed the ‘pile on’. But the pure gang stalking presentation, involving thousands of strangers coordinating anonymously to target a single person, is something the research treats very differently. Paul Mullen’s direct comparison of gang stalking claimants with verified stalking victims found the former scored significantly higher on measures of paranoid ideation and delusional thinking. The terror and misery these individuals experience is entirely real. What it requires is careful clinical assessment, not a platform, a hashtag, and a pre-order link.

What has caused the last remaining ounce of patience for Dr Taylor to leave my body are reports that she has dismissed guidance that victims should report every incident to police as “utter garbage”. She has misrepresented a research report compiled by Professor of Cyberstalking, Emma Short and others for 2025 National Stalking Awareness Week to mistakenly or falsely claim that 95% of stalking victims will receive a mental illness diagnosis if they seek professional support.

My position is simple: this advice could prove fatal.

Stalking escalates. Victims who don’t report have no official record when the situation worsens. Victims frightened away from mental health support may be managing serious trauma entirely alone. We have excellent services - the National Stalking Helpline at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, Paladin, Action Against Stalking, the Hollie Gazzard and Alice Ruggles Trusts and more. We have regional support groups and trained specialist stalking advocates. None of which can be replaced by a book or an online course. Directing people away from them is not radical or empowering. It is bloody dangerous.

Does the police response to stalking need to improve? Yes. Considerably. The National Stalking Consortium exists precisely because it is not yet good enough, and we work to change that every day. But the answer to an imperfect police response is better training, better resourcing, and better oversight. It is not telling victims to censor themselves, leave no record, and trust instead in someone selling them a range of products.

Victims already come to us uncertain, worn down by trying to make sense of something designed to make no sense.

The last thing they need is someone with the ‘social proof’ of a large following and a set of unregulated companies telling them the police are against them, professional help will get them labelled mentally ill, and the real answer costs just £22.00 in hardback.

If you or someone you know is being stalked, the National Stalking Helpline is available on 0808 802 0300. Report every incident to police. Documentation is protective. If you need mental health support, please don’t be afraid to ask for it.

This article has been read by lawyers. A copy has been sent to Dr Jessica Taylor’s publishers for comment and will be updated accordingly. Sally Ann has been provided with specialist legal advice.