Toxic trolls should have no hiding place

The conviction and sentencing of Frank Zimmerman, the 60-year-old man who threatened my children anonymously over the internet last summer, has aroused much comment. Mr Zimmerman, after having variously claimed that he was agoraphobic, too poor to eat (yet able to use a computer) and that his computer was hacked, was arrested when he failed to turn up for sentencing. He was finally given a suspended term with an extensive restraining order, barring him from contacting me and various other people in public life. If he breaches it, he will go to jail.

I thought the sentence fair. As a mother, it was terrifying to me when I received the email threat, referencing the film Sophie’s Choice in which a Jewish mother has to pick which of her children to send to the gas chambers. I have a Jewish surname, being married to a Jew. The threat was detailed, using photographs of the book and the logos of the hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec. Of course, the nature of the internet is that you don’t know who is behind the screen. Is it Zimmerman, with his filthy house and his record of targeting women online? Or is it some demented teenager with a gun? I arranged security via House of Commons and Northamptonshire police for my family, as at the time it was my ex-husband’s portion of the holidays with our children. But I felt helpless and attacked.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks Zimmerman escalated his campaign. He rang me: I knew it was him right away – the well-spoken, English voice, the menace – and hung up. He sent emails from various fake accounts, pretending to be a duke, a doctor, a student. He researched obscure material about my husband’s former address and even about my novelist sister.

Luckily, by this time I knew who it was. Terence Blacker of the Independent deserves much of the credit for catching Zimmerman, along with the police’s e-crimes unit. He recognised the use of the LulzSec logo and the sexually graphic abuse – abuse that had been heaped on him previously by Zimmerman, who had once been his next-door neighbour. Like me, at first he was concerned for his family, not knowing who was behind the threats.

In this case valuable police resources were wasted on a person who was not a physical threat. However, he was one who thought nothing of threatening sexual violence and death to various women and children, and researching families and relatives. Zimmerman, a typical troll, operated under the belief that if he hid behind an anonymous internet user name, nothing could happen to him.