Driving instructor who stalked teen pupil, 17, after 'falling in love with her' is jailed
A driving instructor who stalked his 17-year-old student that he had “fallen in love with” by travelling 200 miles to her university has been jailed.
Obsessed Graham Mansie, 53, breached a restraining order within days of it being imposed, after he stalked Maisie Relph, now 19, over a four-month period between July and October last year.
He travelled from south London to York where Ms Relph was studying.
Mansie took blades with him and a flatmate of Ms Relph spotted him at 11.20pm sitting under a tree outside their campus accommodation on 27 May this year.
University security and the police attended and found him sobbing and saw he had been self-harming, inflicting superficial cuts.
This happened just nine days after magistrates in Bromley, Kent, had handed the driving instructor a two-month jail sentence, suspended for a year, for stalking her.
Judge Simon Hickey, sitting at York Crown Court, jailed him for 20 months and imposed an indefinite retraining order, warning him the sentence for any future breach would be measured in years, not months.
Mansie had become “infatuated” with the teenager, creating a TikTok account called ‘For Maisie’ which featured a red heart emoji and the bio "my favourite".
Mansie asked the teenager out for drinks and showered her with unwanted gifts, posing on WhatsApp as a male first-year student.
He also lost hundreds of pounds trying to pay dark web fraudsters to hack her social media accounts.
Ms Relph made a victim statement in court, saying: “This crime has impacted me both emotionally and psychologically.”
The student said the stress of being stalked has led her to be diagnosed with severe anorexia and she was undergoing therapy.
“I think about what has happened every day, constantly worried and paranoid about what could happen,” she said.
“I thought things genuinely could not get any worse after the previous incidents. However, when Mr Mansie breaks a legal order just nine days after sentencing, it leaves me to question if this will ever end.”
After he was arrested in May, Mansie told police that news and social media coverage of his case led him to go to York with the intention of killing himself.
Graham Parkin, defending Mansie, who appeared via a prison videolink, said his client was withdrawn and isolated and he had pleaded guilty to breaching the restraining order and possessing a blade at the first opportunity.
Ms Relph was supported in court by around 10 friends and after the hearing she thanked them, her university and the police for their support.
She said: “Hopefully now he (Mansie) will learn his lesson.
“I think I can now get my life back on track and enjoy university.”