JEREMY VINE: Joey Barton’s vile social media hate marketing campaign made me concern for my security – these are ‘disturbed’ and ‘cowardly’ bully’s sinister makes an attempt to hurt me and why I HAD to tug him by way of the courts

It was on the day that Jeremy Vine had a safety expert follow him on his bicycle to work, assessing where the TV presenter might be vulnerable to personal attack, that the enormity of a calculated and systematic online hate campaign against him by the former footballer Joey Barton struck home.

Vine had not remotely appreciated the dangers attached to offending Barton when in January last year, he saw him comparing Eni Aluko to the serial killers Fred and Rose West on Twitter/X – simply because the former footballer didn’t like her commentary. 

Amid the pile-on against Aluko that Saturday morning, Vine fatefully decided to stand her corner – tweeting to ask if Barton was suffering from some kind of brain injury. 

Barton’s reply denigrated Vine’s Channel 5 TV show and the presenter imagined that a second insult – ‘bike nonce’, with its paedophile inference – would be the end of it. He, like many in the media, have learned to live with such ‘hurricanes’, as he describes them.

But then the tide of vicious abuse came spewing out of Barton – message after message directed at him, with explicit, disgusting references to Jeffrey Epstein, Rolf Harris and others, which left him in fear of physical attack and led the BBC and ITV to co-ordinate an assessment of when he might be vulnerable to attack during his daily routine.

‘I realised that Barton has got a screw loose because he won’t just stop,’ Vine tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘He has to actually batter the person to the ground. They’ve got to be on the ground unconscious. And that’s what he wanted to do to me. He’s got to “win”.’

When the individual putting out such abuse has three million followers on X, all being asked by Barton for dirt on Vine, including details of how his first marriage ended, there is a multiplier effect. ‘It presented me with a real risk,’ Vine says. 

‘A reputational risk, but also physical risk because somewhere in that three million there’s somebody who’s got a spare day off from work. 

‘This is what we see happening in our society now: a real social media thing where you don’t pose a direct physical threat to your target, but you inflame all your followers to hate the person so much, risking that one person breaks out of the crowd and takes their kitchen knife.’

Today, Barton was sentenced to six months in custody, suspended for 18 months, and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work in the community. Last month, he was convicted on six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety – to Vine, Aluko and co-commentator Lucy Ward.

For a BBC broadcaster like Vine, who has a lunchtime Radio 2 show, the dangers attached to that paedophile slur are particularly dangerous in these times. ‘Because we’ve had these situations in the BBC with Huw Edwards and (Jimmy) Savile and all that, it’s very easy for people to say, “Oh, he’s BBC, therefore…”,’ he says. 

As a current affairs broadcaster, he’s also more aware of how fake news and conspiracy theories can bring the forces of hell down on those casually branded a ‘paedophile’. 

A Washington DC pizza restaurant was fired on by a gunman because of the fake theory that it was a front for a child sex ring run by high-profile politicians. ‘I remember seeing that story and thinking, “Sh*t, these things can be real”,’ Vine says.

When he testified at Liverpool Crown Court last month to the terror he had felt as Barton’s abuse escalated, Vine was close to tears – his voice breaking as he described the ‘cloud of filth’ which had left him fearing for his two young daughters and unable to communicate this living nightmare to them.

As the hate campaign escalated, he decided he had no choice but to take Barton on, meeting this attack with a libel suit rather than let him bully and abuse with impunity.

‘At some point, I’m a bit of a sort of… what is the word?… a sort of weakling,’ Vine says. ‘I was never picked for the school team. I got bullied at school. But sometimes we are the ones who suddenly decide we’re not going to take this any more. 

‘And it was a bit like in that Kenny Rogers song, The Coward of the County, where it says, “You could’ve heard a pin drop when he stopped and locked the door”. I thought, “I’m just not accepting this. If I have to sell my house to take legal action, I’m going to fight it”. I don’t know why, but the iron entered my soul.’

Vine engaged Devon-based defamation lawyer Judith Thompson, from Samuels Solicitors, to take up his case, though that initially escalated the situation. 

The libel legal process entailed sending Barton’s lawyers documents which included the presenter’s address. Barton held these up on Twitter, thus making the address public, though he later claimed this was a mistake.

‘We gave him so many off-ramps to settle it,’ Vine says. ‘He was able to pay £10,000 to a charity and apologise, take the tweets out – all kinds of things. On and on it went for weeks, with all of these offers, which are very important in law to prove that you’ve shown that all you want is for the libellous content to be retracted.

‘By the time we told his lawyers, “All right guys, we’re going to have to do this”, he was Tweeting these brash comments saying, “We’re locked and loaded. We’re ready to go. I’ve got deep pockets”. 

‘At the same time, he was appealing to all of his followers to give him money. But he also says, “Your money will go to the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital”. It was baffling. Either he needed the money for the case, or he didn’t. I did have a sense of a very disturbed soul.’

Vine took a day off to attend the preliminary one-day hearing in the libel case, with Mrs Justice Steyn presiding at the High Court King’s Bench Division. ‘I put on a suit and went,’ he says. ‘I thought, “The judge needs to see me in court”.’

Barton, who was not in court for the hearing, was ordered to pay Vine £75,000 plus costs and make a public apology on Twitter. Bizarrely, he responded by tweeting a clip of himself teeing off on a golf course, captioned: ‘Who’s really winning?’

When he issued the enforced Twitter apology, Barton included a double space between each word. 

‘That meant the actual nub of the apology was below the line where you read the tweet, invisible unless you open it,’ Vine says. ‘It was just pathetic. 

‘He also paid out the money so it dropped into my account at 9.30pm on General Election night, when I was working on the BBC’s coverage. He was obviously hoping to pay at the very moment I’m not going to be looking. It’s so cowardly.’

Barton initially said he would not pay full legal costs. ‘So I think, “Oh my God, here we go”,’ says Vine. ‘And we grind on. A separate legal case for costs. In the end, my total costs were £190,000.’ 

It was when the libel case was ongoing that Cheshire Police began investigating Barton on suspicion of offences under the Malicious Communications Act, with his abuse of Vine, Aluko and Ward.

At his Crown Court trial, Barton exuded extreme self-confidence. He repeatedly Tweeted about the case during proceedings, despite being warned by the judge not to. He used the witness box as a soap box, attempting to present himself as a free speech crusader. He addressed the jury directly, in a way that court reporters have seen new defendants do. But that jury saw through his bluster and showmanship and convicted him.

Vine recalls when Barton, having been released from prison for beating a man up in the street in 2007, was given a stage by the BBC on Newsnight, Question Time and the Today programme, allowing him to project himself as some kind of football intellectual. 

‘This guy was a violent offender, yet there were claims he read Dostoevsky and everyone fell for it,’ he says. ‘He must have just been laughing at us, I think. Remember this is someone who has been convicted of kicking his wife while she was on the ground and punching a man in the head 20 times while he lay on the ground.’

Though today’s sentencing can give Vine some kind of vindication, he acknowledges that not everyone has the resources to mount a libel action when a ‘star’ with a big social media profile launches a disgraceful attack. And he does not believe the Barton case will make platforms like X more willing to protect users from such terrifying co-ordinated attacks.

‘Someone rang my show the other day and said social media was the new asbestos,’ Vine says. ‘He said in 20 years’ time, they’re going to be ripping it out of ceilings and walls, asking: “How did we ever allow a guy with three million followers to say something like that, unmoderated?” I thought it was a shrewd analogy.’