The reality star’s life was almost destroyed when an ex secretly filmed them having sex and posted it online. He went to prison – and she waived her right to anonymity to help the many women similarly affected
asked herself one Sunday morning in August 2020 when Stephen Bear, who lived opposite, invited her over for a cup of tea. They knew each other through the reality television and influencer circuits. She had been on and Love Island; he had done Shipwrecked, Ex on the Beach, then won Celebrity Big Brother. They had hooked up before and he hadn’t treated her well.
Harrison found out when a fan in the US sent her a screenshot asking: “Have you seen this?” Her reaction was to gag. But she picked herself up and went to the police. Bear was arrested, charged and convicted. In March 2023, he wasin prison for voyeurism and sharing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress. Now, she has written a memoir about it, Taking Back My Power.t is hard to overstate the impact of this case.
The next time Harrison saw Bear was in August 2020, when he invited her over for that cup of tea and secretly filmed them having sex. Afterwards, she felt certain he had planned it. “We’d been in every angle that his CCTV covered,” she says. “He’d made sure we were never outside the lines.” Even so, she didn’t see what lay ahead. “I was really upset and he seemed to understand. I never for a second thought he’d be stupid enough to send it to people.
“If he was found not guilty, I think I would have had to shave my head and move to Bolivia or something,” she says. “The career I love would have been over – that’s definite. But aside from that, my faith in the universe would have been so shattered. It would have drained all the hope and faith and love and life out of me. To see someone act in such an awful, evil, manipulative way and then walk away … I felt it might just ruin me – and it seemed possible. Bear could play things so brilliantly.
Women come up to me crying; they message me on a daily basis. Intimate-image abuse happens much more than people think After the trial, Harrison continued campaigning, initially to make cases easier to prosecute. At present, the sharing of intimate images without consent is not illegal – unless done “with intent to cause distress”, however hard that is to prove. In June, the government announced amendments to the online safety bill that will remove this requirement if the law is passed. This will mean that sharing intimate images without consent, whatever the motive, would become a criminal act.
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