Coronation Street's Nicola Thorp recalls terrifying moment her 'grim reaper' stalker was 'close enough to smell her' during two-year ordeal
The actress, 36, who played Nicola Rubinstein in the soap, was stalked and terrorised for two years between 2018 and 2020 by a man who called himself her 'personal grim reaper'.
He used 27 different online aliases to contact Nicola, making sickening threats to choke and rape her.
However, even after his arrest police refused to reveal his identity, leaving Nicola feeling 'powerless' until she came face-to-face with him in court.
Her stalker, schizophrenic Ravinderjit Dhillon was finally sentenced to 30 months in jail at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London back in December 2023.
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Speaking in a new interview with The Sun, Nicola explained: 'To this day, I don't know if I was being stalked in real life, there were messages that he sent saying that he was following me on the Tube and had got close enough to smell me.
'I felt powerless because the police wouldn't tell me who he was. That's when I got really scared because he knew I'd reported him.'
She recalled how he had sent her messages that included details about her home which made her 'really concerned.'
Recounting one message, Nicola said: 'I remember one in particular saying, "I'm your Grim Reaper. I'm never going to leave you", And that really chilled me.'
She revealed that she still doesn't know what sparked the ordeal or how it began, but the first contact she's aware of was when the stalker sent her a photograph of his genitalia.
As a women's rights campaigner, Nicola keeps her direct messages open to the public in case anyone messages her for help.
Elsewhere in the interview, the actress revealed that the first time she ever saw her stalker face-to-face was when they appeared in court together and she was behind him in the security queue.
Nicola faced her stalker, schizophrenic Ravinderjit Dhillon at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London back in December 2023 with her fiancé Nikesh Patel by her side - before he was sentenced to 30 months in jail.
In an emotional witness statement, the actress told of her paranoia as the stalker referred to himself as the 'Grim Reaper' as he used 25 different identities to target her and made sickening threats to choke and rape her.
'I lived in fear that this anonymous man who had hounded me for years was in fact someone I knew,' Ms Thorp told the court, as reported by The Sun.
'If you don't know who the person behind the keyboard is, he becomes everyone you meet and everyone you've ever met.
'All that time he knew exactly who I was and I knew nothing of him.
'When I was shown a photo of him it meant I had some freedom back, and only the freedom to run away if I saw him in the street.'
She said that she had grown terrified about what her 'committed' stalker would do as she starred in a play last April - realising that he would know exactly where she would be.
And her terror did not end when Dhillon was arrested - as she recalled that an abuser's victims are most at risk when their tormentor is 'cornered'.
Dhillon began his warped campaign when he sent her an intimate photo of himself in October 2018.
Sentencing Dhillon, Judge Rosa Dean said that she was 'quite sure' he had targeted Ms Thorp because of her celebrity alongside her 'determination to call out abusive and misogynistic behaviour'.
She called the messages he sent to Ms Thorp 'deeply offensive and very violent' - saying they caused his victim to live 'in constant fear'.
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