It’s the stuff of horror movies: The phone rings, a woman answers and hears nothing but slow, heavy breathing — and there’s no telling who’s on the other end. The true-crime docuseries Can I Tell You a Secret?, from Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare director Liza Williams, profiles three women subjected to harassment like this by serial cyberstalker Matthew Hardy. The women had no idea who was behind it all — Hardy’s modus operandi was to pose as people the victims knew on social media, using fake profiles to spread relationship-ending lies about them.
In the face of mounting evidence and an ever-growing number of victims, how did Hardy manage to get away with his crimes for over a decade?
Check it out at the top of this page.
Can I Tell You a Secret? follows three women — Zoe Jade Hallam, Abby Furness, and Lia Marie Hambly — and their accounts of being terrorized by the same online stalker. Each of their stories began the same way: a strange message from one of their followers, but the content was relatively harmless. Then, things escalated quickly — messages from multiple people across different social media apps. The messages went not only to Hallam, Furness, and Hambly, but also their colleagues and loved ones, weaving lies about the women and sharing private details and images. It was psychological warfare, and there was no end in sight.
The victims didn’t have much recourse — online abusers can be tricky to identify and criminalize. After months of being relentlessly taunted, each of the women finally found a champion: Police Constable Kevin Anderson, who — along with Hallam, Furness, Hambly, and others victimized by Hardy — was committed to tracking down the UK’s most prolific cyberstalker.
Yes. It’s based on The Guardian podcast of the same name by Sirin Kale and on Kale’s The Guardian article.
Hardy is a cyberstalker from Northwich, Cheshire, England. Before the events covered in this series, he’d been arrested 10 times, with charges related to impersonation and stalking.
Between 2018 and 2019, Hardy — who was 30 years old at the time — began harassing the victims interviewed in the docuseries: Hallam, Furness, and Hambly. The three women, along with Police Constable Anderson, eventually helped identify Hardy and build a case against him.
It’s estimated that between 2011 and 2022, Hardy stalked more than 62 women. Can I Tell You a Secret? investigates his victims’ path to justice.
