A man accused of stalking Emily Maitlis, the BBC Newsnight presenter, said he broke a restraining order because he felt she owed him an explanation about the breakdown of their friendship after he declared his love for her.
Edward Vines, 46, who met Maitlis while they were students at Cambridge University, said he had exhausted all legal avenues before allegedly breaching the order by sending two letters to Maitlis and her mother, Marion, between 10 May and 26 June last year.
Giving evidence at Oxford crown court, where he was flanked by nurses from the psychiatric hospital where he is a patient, Vines said he had a reasonable excuse after his requests for an explanation were ignored by the “cruel and unkind” television newsreader.
He denies two charges of breaching the order, which was imposed in January 2009 to prevent him from contacting Maitlis or her family.
Vines met Maitlis in October 1989, during their first term at Queens’ College. “By Christmas I had fallen in love and I felt compelled to tell her that almost as soon as we got back to college,” he told the court. “We remained friends throughout the whole of the Easter term. She wrote to me over the Easter holidays - letters which I still have. But in April it changed dramatically, in my eyes. She appeared not to want to see me. She occasionally put me down in small ways, but nonetheless hurtful ways.”
Vines said the rejection triggered mental health problems, including manic depression. “Some days I would sink into a slump of despondency in relation to the scorn and belittling attitude I believe she has shown me,” he told the court.
Defence counsel Greg Foxsmith asked Vines if he accepted he was subject to a restraining order, which he said he did, but the defendant said: “I believe I have a reasonable excuse, in the circumstances, to breach the restraining order.”
After his arrest, Vines told police that he felt he had a right to contact Maitlis to resolve what he referred to as a mystery, because he had exhausted all legal means, including seeking to overturn a conviction for harassment in 2002 for which he was jailed for four months.
“Emily is a very complicated person herself and she was not forthcoming at all regarding the reasons behind her unkind behaviour towards me at Cambridge,” Vines told the court. “Her ambivalent attitude to me meant we didn’t resolve it. Emily and I have not sat down with other people to sort it out. I believe she is being unreasonable. I feel it’s reasonable to seek justice in this way and reasonable to ask Emily if she would undertake sensible discussions. It’s a mystery to me. Why would Emily, so warm and friendly to me, suddenly go cold on me solely because I was in love with her? If that was the case she would have done so in January.”
Prosecutor Julian Lynch had previously described the letters the case centred on as “long and rambling”. In one, read out in court on Friday, Vines wrote that he believed her treatment of him was due to the fact she was attracted to him and was dismayed he had not made the romantic overtures she had expected because he was too frigid.
Vines’ previous convictions also include breaches of restraining orders in 2008, 2010, 2013, 2014 and also earlier this year, for which he awaits sentence, jurors have been told.
The hearing continues.
