BBC South Today‘s lead weather presenter Alexis Green is opening up about her experience with a stalker. After joining the morning show, Green was harassed by a man named Timothy O’Brien, per Hello!, who sent her more than 30 videos and 120 messages in a two- or three-month period beginning in November 2022. O’Brien is currently jailed after admitting to harassment.
Speaking with BBC Breakfast presenter Sally Nugent about the ordeal, Green revealed that she began to receive sexual messages, photos, and videos as soon as she joined BBC South. Her ordeal with O’Brien began when she received a message sent to her personal Facebook profile by a man she did not know, with several additional “inappropriate” messages quickly following, Green sharing that messages said “something like, ‘You are warming up my house tonight.’” Although the weather presenter blocked the profile, O’Brien created a new Facebook account just a month later and continued to harass Green, messaging her two or three times each day. He also began sending her explicit videos about his sexual desires.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Green said she was left “physically sick” by the harassment, which also affected her work. “My legs were shaking, my hands were shaking, I was trying to hold it together on air,” she said, adding, “Obviously you’ve got a job to do, you have to present something to the public. I felt I had a job to do but I also felt very anxious and scared at the same time.” Green also struggled at home.
“I am a keen runner so I’d go out and pound the streets on my own but I found myself looking over my shoulder, really scared to see if he’d been lurking in the bush. It got to the point where I’d go to bed at night and I wouldn’t sleep at all,” she shared. “The dog would bark downstairs and I’d be instantly opening the curtains, thinking there was someone out there or he was out there.”
Green eventually went to the police to report the harassment after showing one of the videos to her apartment. Within 24 hours, O’Brien was taken into police custody. He admitted to harassment, and on March 15, was jailed for 17 weeks and given a restraining order. Green called the experience, including the court hearings, “horrendous,” recalling how she “sat there in the dock shaking. It was really, really hard but at the end of it I had a result.”
Although her stalker is currently serving a months-long sentence, Green said the ordeal “has made me afraid, I am scared to do certain things – I won’t go for a run on my own anymore, I take the dog. I feel that there is that protection in place but it is not going to help me, it is not going to help my personal feelings, my anxiety, I’ll always have that with me.” Green added that she decided to open up about her experience in the hopes it will help others, telling Nugent, “I felt that being on the television, I was the voice of the people out there who are going through exactly the same thing. I wonder if sometimes there’s an element of acceptance – a certain level of harassment that goes on online – a lot of the time to women. Maybe we just accept it but maybe we shouldn’t.”
