NATALIE PIKE has opened up about her stalking hell after a man showed up to the Etihad while she was broadcasting pitchside.
The broadcaster instantly recognised it was the man who had been tormenting her and the ordeal led to her having a panic attack in the announcer’s room.
Speaking to The Telegraph , she said: “I stood in a corner, burst out crying, and I just couldn’t catch my breath.”
Just eight days earlier, the former FHM model was on a spa day with a friend when she noticed lots of missed calls from her hairdressers and the school her son Reggie, 8, attends.
The salon said two men had turned up in a van and demanded to know where Natalie was as they knew she was a customer.
The hairdresser quickly alerted Reggie’s school which was just down the road.
Natalie said she just turned white, adding: “I had no idea what it could mean. So I did what we tend to do as women, and I started investigating myself.”
Looking back through her Instagram messages she noticed a lot of messages from one account.
She said: “They began in the usual way: ‘Happy birthday’, ‘You’re beautiful’, that kind of thing. Then they started deteriorating.
“So I took a screenshot of this person’s profile, sent it to my hairdresser, and she instantly confirmed it was the same man she had seen.”
Just a week later, Natalie was pitchside presenting for City against Newcastle when she noticed a man hovering metres away.
“I just had a sense that something wasn’t right,” she said.
Natalie continued: “So I looked over my shoulder, and I instantly saw him – the man from the picture.
Panic set in and Natalie said she ran from the pitch and had her first ever panic attack.
Thankfully police pinpointed the man through CCTV and tracked him through the stadium as he made his way towards Natalie.
The presenter said the footage was “harrowing”, adding: “he never took his eyes off me.
“He came in at the back of the stand and then, over a 20-minute period, moved down and stopped several times until he was about a metre away from me.”
The suspect was arrested the next morning and police took Natalie’s full statement.
She said the investigation went “full steam” from there.
Detectives went to his house where they found photos of him sitting in the pub around the corner from her home and of her ex-husband’s car.
It was later revealed he had been messaging her best friend, husband and other people she knew.
He was handed a 12 month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, at the end of September bringing the eight-month ordeal to a close.
Natalie said she considers herself fortunate as only about six per cent of recorded offences end in a charge and under two per cent see a criminal conviction.
The pundit chose to forgo the option of a screen separating her from the stalker in the courtroom and instead delivered her victim impact statement directly to him.
She said: “I thought, ‘I don’t need to hide. I’ve got nothing to hide about’. Seeing him sentenced, and hearing the judge emphasise the seriousness of the case, I felt strong.
“And I felt an overwhelming relief that I could now get on with my life.”
This included spending time with her mum who has stage four bowel cancer.
When Natalie told her about the stalking, her mum collapsed and was in hospital for five weeks.
A stalking protection order was issued banning the man from the village Natalie lives in and the Etihad.
But Natalie still tried her best to be untraceable including changing her car number plate, avoiding local shops and switching her routes home.
She added: “One of the sad things about this is that it has really affected my enjoyment of going to the Etihad.”
Natalie was a fan of the Citizens during her youth and got her first season ticket to watch the club when she was 15.
She would head down to Maine Road to watch the club compete in the third tier of English football, well before the successful team that regularly picks up trophies in more recent times.
She juggled her love of football with a full-time modelling career for nine years, during which she won the FHM High Street Honeys competition.
The stadium “would always be my place of safety. I was there throughout my divorce, the pandemic, all the awful things that happen in life, and I could still be happy there. I feel like that has been taken away from me.”
After modelling for the 2008/2009 Manchester City kit she started as their in-house presenter.
Now she is recognised as the voice of the club’s Match Day Live alongside the City Square Live broadcasts and she has interviewed a host of famous faces.
This summer she broadcast Scotland‘s takeover of Boston for the World Cup.
Born in Edinbrough, Natalie said the opportunity restored her “faith in human nature”.
She continued: “It makes me emotional thinking about it, because it came at the perfect time, and it was such a release from everything else that was happening.”
In a post to Instagram today, Natalie revealed her experience and wrote: “This has been incredibly difficult to share, but I hope that by doing so it might help someone else.
“If you are experiencing stalking, please report it and seek specialist support. My experience of doing both has shown me just how important that can be.”
She directed people to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust National Stalking Helpline which she used for advice herself.
It is not the first stalking ordeal suffered by a high-profile female sports presenter in this country.
Last year by an obsessed female Liverpool fan, who would send her birthday cards that read: “Today’s the day you were born and tonight’s the night you’re going to die.”
The woman was later jailed for 14 months.
