In December 2020, reality television star Georgia Harrison received a chilling four-word message from a fan in America.
‘Have you seen this?’ the message read, alongside a video screenshot of Harrison and her ex partner Stephen Bear having sex in his back garden.
“As soon as I saw that, my heart just completely dropped … it was so awful, I felt so out of control of my own destiny and I felt so much fear,” the Londoner tells Róisín Ingle on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast.
To discover where the screenshot originated, Harrison put a call out to her one million Instagram followers, asking if anyone had seen a video of herself and Bear online, without specifying the exact content.
The response was immediate. “My phone was just pinging every two seconds,” she explains. People were messaging her: ‘have you seen this, oh my god, I’ve just been sent this of you’.
To her horror, the video was everywhere.”The amount of platforms it was on without me even having a clue was just shocking,” she says.
The screenshot that Harrison was sent was taken from CCTV footage, secretly recorded by Bear at his home three months earlier.
Bear, a reality star and former winner of Celebrity Big Brother had invited Harrison over for a cup of tea on an August morning in 2020. “What was the worst that could happen?,” thought Harrison who says she had been “feeling lonely” in the days leading up to their meeting.
The pair were neighbours, but had also known each other from the reality TV circuit and had been romantically involved in the past. “One thing led to another and we ended up at his and we ended up having sex… which was something we’d done multiple times in the past,” she says.
“It went on for about 20 minutes, around the garden, in positions that he put me in, and then into the kitchen,” she recalls. “Little did I know he had CCTV cameras around the perimeter of his garden and his kitchen”.
Harrison believes it wasn’t an accident that they were caught on the security cameras that day. “When you look back on the footage, it’s very obvious he was manipulating the intercourse, to be filmed at all different angles and to ensure it was all caught by the cameras”.
Later that same day, Bear admitted that their intimate moment was likely caught on his CCTV system, but promised a panicked Harrison that he would delete the footage.
“I ended up staying there that night and he managed to convince me that I had nothing to worry about and the footage wasn’t going to go anywhere…I did trust him to some degree, I thought he had respect for me, and I also thought that he valued his own career, because he was still on television and stuff like that,” she says.
The next morning, still cautious about what had happened the day before, Harrison warned Bear she would get the police involved if the video was shared. “When I got home the next morning the first thing I did was text him saying: no one can ever see that, it’s not something I want anyone ever to see,” she says. “I was very clear about what the repercussions would be if he shared it”.
Despite his promises, over the next three months, Harrison was told by a number of people that Bear had been showing the video to his friends. She was assured however that it had not been posted online. As we know now, the complete opposite was true.
Realising the video was online for the entire world to view, Harrison says the pain “came in waves”. “I was just so angry and fed up being bullied by this person, it really triggered me and made me want to stand up for myself”.
After reporting the crime of image based sexual abuse to the police, it took almost two years for the case to be heard in court, a process which retraumatised Harrison all over again.
Bear’s behaviour during the trial, Harrison says, was “offensive on every level”. The disgraced reality star, who at this stage had begun releasing porn videos on his OnlyFans account, made headlines daily, pulling up to court in a Rolls-Royce, draped in a fur coat, with a cigar hanging out of his mouth. His new girlfriend loyally by his side each day.
Despite the show of defiance outside the court, Bear was found guilty and sentenced to 21 months in prison. Harrison felt an overwhelming sense of relief when the verdict was read out, on the same day as her 28th birthday.
“I remember looking at the jury and being like ‘thank you, thank you for seeing through all of this’,” she says. “If he had gotten away with it, I would have lost everything”.
Not only did Harrison successfully secure a conviction in court, she also campaigned relentlessly for the UK law to be changed to address a serious flaw that she identified.
“What was a real issue was that you had to prove intent to cause distress,” she explains. “For me, because he had alerted me of the recording prior to posting it, we had multiple conversations where I made it implicitly clear that it would cause me distress and it would ruin my career. So I had a leg to stand on when it came to that, but that’s very, very rare”.
In Ireland, so-called ‘revenge porn’ only became a crime in 2021. It is a crime here regardless of the intent to cause harm, although if intent is proven, there is a larger sentence.
Harrison says that since her ordeal she has learned of many other women who have been let down by this requirement to prove intent and that fuelled her desire to change the law.
“It’s morally wrong and you shouldn’t have to prove it… anyone should know that it’s going to cause distress full stop. I just found it absolutely crazy … that there could be such a ridiculous loophole in such an important law,” she says. “For many of them when their cases do fall through, they are then deemed liars. They are shamed for it. That’s why I want to do everything I can to make it easier to convict”.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
