The first time Anne McAlpine realised something was badly wrong, it was dark and she was still in the car.
The BBC Scotland presenter had just been dropped off. As she prepared to get out, she noticed a man, holding a carrier bag, walking straight towards the vehicle while locking eyes with her. He wasn't smiling. He didn't look lost. He didn't look as if he was about to ask for directions.
'Something just felt off,' she recalled. 'He came right up to the passenger side window and just looked in, which felt really uncomfortable and strange and I said to [my friend]: "I think you should drive off."'
Her friend did. But the man, and the chill he brought with him, did not disappear. Instead he became the centre of a four‑year stalking campaign which a Scottish court has now described as so serious that he must be kept away from McAlpine for the rest of his life.
Last week, a Scottish court issued a lifetime harassment order against 71‑year‑old Robert Green, after years of unwanted and escalating contact with McAlpine. Under the order, he is banned indefinitely from contacting her or approaching her, or from engaging in behaviour that would amount to harassment under Scots law.
Green avoided a prison sentence, something that will jar with many people who have followed the case. But lawyers point out that lifetime orders are still relatively unusual — and are reserved for situations where the court is convinced there is a persistent risk that cannot be managed by a short‑term ban.
In other words, the system has finally recognised what McAlpine says she has known for years: this was not a misunderstanding or an awkward fan who overstepped a line. It was, as she put it in a BBC interview, 'sinister' and 'terrifying'.
Speaking publicly about what happened to her, McAlpine described not one shocking encounter, but a pattern that wore her down over time. The man with the carrier bag, the unbroken eye contact, the sense of being watched by someone she did not recognise — all of it was part of a campaign which invaded both her physical space and her digital life.
'It was actually terrifying, it was really disconcerting because whoever it was, I didn't recognise him,' she said. The carrier bag, she added, was the small, awful detail that later tied the moment in the car park to other incidents. It was the thread that made her realise this was not random.
Her account undercuts a stubborn myth about stalking: that it is only truly dangerous when it involves explicit threats. In reality, much of the damage is done by that drip‑drip of unease — the stranger who always seems to be nearby, the repeated messages, the sense that your ordinary routes home and routines are no longer safe.
Source: International Business Times UK
