Everyone in radio knows that stalking is a very real possibility for on-air talent, especially because the one-on-one medium is so intimate. Listeners consider us friends, family even and we get to rub shoulders with members of the media and celebrities.
But what happens when admiration and adoration turns into something else? What do we do when the attention is hostile, life-threatening even? Veteran radio announcer Jamie Dunn has opened up to A Current Affair on Channel Nine, describing a two-year-ordeal during which he became the target of a vicious stalker.
At first, Dunn started getting bombarded with hate-filled mail, emails and Facebook abuse. Not unusual for a radio announcer. Then, he discovered it was all coming from one person. The talented jock doesn’t hesitate in admitting that he was rattled.
“When someone’s gone to the trouble of cutting out certain words and sticking them to a piece of paper and then jamming it in your letterbox, two or three things go through your mind,” he told A Current Affair. “One’s they’ve had a sharp implement, two they know exactly where you live, three they’ve been to where you live and they are watching now.
“For the first year it started as abusive and you know, sort of just name calling and occasionally quoting my children. At the end of the year – I’d kept them all on file – and the file was (that) thick,” said Dunn.
He put up with the abuse for two years, even after the stalker placed a letter in his mailbox at his home. Then, his children were threatened. The father-of-six went straight to the police.
Dunn says he was shocked by the abuse. After all, he’s been in the industry for over two decades. “The radio that I do is, I just relate where I’ve been, what I’ve done, who I’ve seen, what I liked, what I didn’t like. But that’s the sort of radio I’ve always done…including my family.”
His stalker has now been identified, arrested and is on bail and in court early next year. She can’t be identified but ACA said she is a journalist, a mother and has met Dunn professionally on a number of occasions, although they don’t know each other well. She is facing multiple charges of stalking and using a carriage service to menace, harass and offend.
Dunn is most famous for playing popular TV character Agro, a role for which he won several Logie Award. He and Agro were part of the award-winning breakfast show on Brisbane’s B105 for fifteen years. He is now on Brisbane’s 98.9.
He says being stalked and threatened is like being in a natural disaster. “You have no control over it. It’s like an earthquake. If you’ve been through an earthquake, everything around you moves and all of a sudden you go, ‘I have no control over this’.”
Dunn isn’t the first radio announcer to be stalked and he certainly won’t be the last. In the mid to late nineties, radio star Helen Razor was in her early twenties and landed her dream gig as a presenter on triple J. Then, for no apparent reason, she became the target of a deranged ‘fan’ who mailed a jar of his urine to the station with a note saying ‘Die slut.’
As her fame grew, so did the abuse. Following the death of Australian celebrity Charlotte Dawson – who committed suicide after being attacked by Twitter ‘trolls’, Razor wrote about her experience for justbaustralia.com.au.
She said, “I don’t like to recount this stuff. Not the years of death threats, vicious insults or the very persistent, very unpredictable stalker. Moreover, I don’t like to talk about the way I ‘dealt’ with it. Or, rather, didn’t. But I’m moved to talk about it all because of – here she is finally – that other girl. I want to talk, in as much as I can, on behalf of Charlotte Dawson.”
Most incidents of trolling and harassment go unreported in radio. After all, it’s part of the job. But sometimes a very real line is crossed and in these cases, they well and truly were.
Do you have an experience you’d like to share? How did the experience affect your career? Were you happy with how your employer handled the situation?
