At the end of January 2019, social media consultant Sam Wall posted a photograph on her Facebook page.

The smiling snapshot was of three people attending a networking event, being held at a Premier League football club, and had been edited with a starry filter and adorned with stickers, carrying the words ‘peace’, ‘humanity’, ‘love’ and ‘unity’.

‘A brilliant day,’ wrote Sam. ‘What a line-up of incredible inspirational speakers, it blew me away!’

Brad Burton has a copy of that image, too. He’s the man with whom Sam Wall wanted to be photographed that day, the event organiser and one of the line-up of speakers that she declared so incredible.

But he keeps it among the mountain of evidence documenting how this briefest of encounters, six years ago, turned into a terrifying ordeal that nearly destroyed his business and drove him to the brink.

‘It was literally 30 seconds,’ says Brad, a motivational speaker. ‘The lightest of conversation, there was nothing.’

But it was enough for Wall to subject him to years of abuse and extraordinary accusations. What started as allegations of using his business network to destroy her, accelerated through a string of increasingly bizarre claims – that Brad had been making death threats against her, that he’d smashed her window, slashed her tyres. He was even accused of poisoning her cat.

More damaging, perhaps, was the wider narrative she wove online – Wall’s tirade of bile was disseminated on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, where she has more than 30,000 followers alone – that she was the victim of harassment at his hands.

‘A brilliant day,’ Sam Wall captioned her post. ‘What a line-up of incredible inspirational speakers, it blew me away!’

As the Mail has discovered, ‘gaslighting’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘sociopathic abuse’ are all phrases and hashtags that litter Wall’s numerous and lengthy (one was 20,000 words long) posts in relation to Brad. She even went so far as to say he had been arrested and jailed for harassing her. 

All lies.

No wonder that Brad, 52, talking to the Mail last week, says: ‘I had some dark, dark times. It’s had an impact on all areas of my life and my family. My reputation has been trashed.’

In November last year, Wall pleaded guilty to charges of stalking and sending false messages against not just Brad, but a second victim, businesswoman Naomi Timperley – who, like him, fleetingly crossed paths with the woman who would become her online stalker. 

Wall had been due to be sentenced last month, but it was delayed after her legal team said a psychiatric report shows the 55-year-old has chronic delusional mental health illness.

While viewers of last week’s Panorama: My Online Stalker on BBC One will know something of Brad and Naomi’s ordeal, they won’t be aware that Wall was at Manchester Crown Court on Thursday, where she was forced to appear for breaching bail conditions – not to contact, directly or indirectly, her victims and not to post comments about them or the case on social media. 

She had ‘accidentally’ liked an Instagram post made by Naomi’s husband.

She has been warned she faces jail and Judge Neil Usher told her last week: ‘You are stretching my patience. I am deeply sceptical about the explanation you have given... dubious as to whether this really has been an honest mistake.’

It is little wonder that Wall’s victims remain fearful. 

Wall’s tirade of bile was disseminated on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, where she has more than 30,000 followers alone – that she was the victim of harassment at Brad Burton's hands

The Mail has spoken to Brad, Naomi and a third victim, Justine Wright, who did not pursue a criminal case but whose experience at the hands of Wall bares striking parallels, to gain a chilling insight into the devastation that can be wrought online by people you barely know.

Brad, a married father of four, is still struggling to comprehend how he came to be in Wall’s crosshairs. At the time of the 30-second encounter in 2019, he was running a vast network supporting small businesses across the UK.

As he says, it was one encounter among thousands and had long been forgotten when, two years later, reeling from the impact of the pandemic on his once million-pound-plus business, the name Sam Wall hit his radar. ‘Her first post was masterful,’ he says. ‘It was on Facebook, I think, and it said, “I’m being intimidated.” ’

As a networking businesswoman herself, Wall’s post garnered attention. Then, ‘as if she was dropping breadcrumbs,’ over subsequent posts she declared first that this mystery individual was a high-profile speaker, then a high profile motivational speaker.

It wasn’t long, says Brad – who is well known in his industry for business networking and motivational speaking – before someone asked, ‘Is it Brad Burton?’

‘Whoosh,’ he recalls. ‘It became a modern-day witch-hunt.’

Wall accused Brad of destroying her business and then of buying her house from under her.

He employed a solicitor and sent a cease-and-desist letter, but his efforts to rebut the flurry of allegations by, for instance, paying to look at the deeds to the property via the Land Registry to see who actually owned the property, only seemed to make it worse.

Brad, a married father of four, found himself at the centre of 'a modern-day witch-hunt'

Those who questioned Wall’s diatribes would be accused of what she called ‘gang-stalking’ (repeated harassment which comes from multiple people around a shared purpose).

Brad, who lives in Somerset, the other end of the country from Wall’s Stockport home, remains bewildered to this day.

‘She said I was sending her death threats. Daily. That I’d sent henchmen round to her house, that I’d slashed her tyres.

‘She would post pictures of windows I’d apparently smashed. You know how influencers paint a picture of perfection, she was “reverse influencing”, doing everything she could to paint a picture of me that was in the worst possible light.’

He shows me a Facebook post Wall shared in March 2021 and shared again as a memory this year. A post he considers another potential breach of those bail conditions. 

It’s a memory of visiting a Manchester cemetery, with her elderly father, to remember her late mother, who died 18 years ago.

‘A good day!’ she remarks, before adding: ‘Including a rare photo of mum and dad together in 2005. I don’t have many of her photos left, all her photos and jewellery was thrown into the local tip when I moved house (thanks to Brad Burton’s appointed henchman).’

It would have been laughable were it not for the fact that Wall was steadily and highly effectively attempting to destroy Brad’s reputation. 

And evidence of Wall’s onslaught is still there, online, which is just one of many deeply concerning features of the whole dreadful saga, which notably include the apparent powerlessness, some might consider it reluctance, of social media companies to intervene.

Wall appeared at Manchester Crown Court on April 3 after breaching her bail conditions

Perhaps the most extraordinary moment in four years of anguish came in 2023, shortly after Wall trumpeted to her followers that at last her harasser – Brad – was in jail. He wasn’t.

Entirely innocent, Brad had never been convicted of anything, let alone spent time in jail; as he went on to his own social media to prove with a video of him looking at the daily newspapers in a railway station branch of WHSmith.

What did Wall do? She didn’t back down but claimed she was the victim of ‘twin psychopathic brothers’.

Brad does not have a twin.

To listen to Brad in motivational mode (his business is now focused on this), it would be easy to downplay the impact this ordeal has had.

He’s a man who considers it important to find the positives amid the storm.

But be under no illusion about the damage done, both to his original business, now insolvent, and his own mental health.

‘No matter how big and strong you are, when you have a reverse influencer on your case 24/7, when you wake up every day to 20 notifications from people saying “Have you seen what she’s written about you?”, it has an impact.’

He admits there was, for the briefest of moments, ‘four seconds’ when he sat in his chair and understood, for the first time in his life why suicide rates are so high.

‘She divided and conquered, she sowed seeds of doubt,’ he says. ‘I’m the shaven-headed guy from Salford with tattoos... You’ve got people saying, “There’s no smoke without fire”.’

He’s wracked his brain for an explanation, some clue to why she targeted him, but as he says: ‘I’m as in the dark as you.

‘At first I tried to look at it rationally. Then you realise that this isn’t normal or rational.’

His pain is something with which Naomi Timperley and Justine Wright can fully sympathise.

Tech entrepreneur Naomi, 53, had only seen Wall in passing, at two business events, when she too found herself catapulted into the stalker’s sights.

Tech entrepreneur Naomi Timperley was another victim, despite only encountering Wall in passing at two business events

Justine Wright, a marketing consultant, is the only one of the three to have had meaningful interaction with Wall, whom she employed a decade ago to take on some freelance work

Married with children, she remembers following Wall on Twitter, and sending her a message one day about a particular rant the marketeer had composed about Justine Wright.

‘I just said, “I understand you do digital marketing; if you have a beef with people, you should take it offline”.’

What happened next in 2021 is remarkably similar to Brad’s experience.

‘I suddenly started getting messages from people saying “Have you seen the weird things this woman is saying about you?”’

Naomi was catapulted into the same barrage of harassment accusations as Brad, a man she knew of, but hadn’t spoken to for eight years.

The accusations were bewildering and came out of nowhere.

‘She was blaming me for losing contracts, for a multitude of things and then her narrative changed to saying we were stalking her and that we’d been arrested,’ Naomi, from just outside Manchester, says: ‘It was relentless and toxic.

‘I’ve been personally attacked on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and accused of really vile things and because it’s had such an impact on me, it’s also had an impact on my family. My kids were scared, even my husband was scared.

‘This whole thing has been incredibly distressing. When someone has, literally in black and white, said that they have attempted suicide because of what you have apparently done to them. Can you imagine how awful that is?’

Unsurprisingly, she is now hyper vigilant: ‘I have to look over my shoulder, I don’t trust anyone, my kids weren’t sure if she was just going to turn up at the house. It’s been hideous, really hideous and I don’t know why it happened.’

Motivational speaker Brad has tried to find an explanation for Wall's behaviour towards him but can't, conceding it's neither normal nor rational 

In another area of Manchester, fellow businesswoman and entrepreneur Justine Wright, 54, is equally baffled.

Her experience may not have formed part of the recent court action, but Justine, a marketing consultant, is the only one of the three to have had meaningful interaction with Wall, whom she employed a decade ago to take on some freelance work, posting social media for a client.

When she employed a staff member in a marketing manager role, Wall’s services were no longer required. All part and parcel of business; except it wasn’t for Sam Wall.

‘I started receiving multiple, quite abusive messages on Twitter, talking about the business, the team, the company’s culture, my clients,’ says Justine.

Once again, her words are familiar.

‘It was just relentless,’ she says. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it.

‘I knew that the things being said about me weren’t true, so that didn’t bother me too much. It was the fear of the damage to the business I had worked really hard to build up. I didn’t know what to do, and at the time, I thought it was just me, so my strategy was block, ignore and don’t engage.’

Remarkably, given what we now know, the strategy seemed to work.

Until years later – out of the blue – she got a message from a contact, along the lines of ‘what’s this on Facebook about you and Brad someone?’

Justine hadn’t seen anything on Facebook and didn’t know Brad herself so didn’t know who Wall was talking about, but with the help of her then teenage daughter, she soon found out. She had been swept up in the same ‘gang-stalking’ conspiracy as the others.

‘That was terrifying, that after all that time she could associate me with someone she’d met for just 30 seconds. That was terrifying, not knowing what she was capable of. There were pages and pages of it,’ Justine adds. 

‘We were conspiring, we’ve all poisoned her cat, we’ve all broken into her house, tapped her laptop.’

She served a cease and desist letter on Wall at the same time as Brad but it just served as fuel to Wall’s bizarre social media rants.

Justine decided to revert to her original strategy of block and ignore.

The impact, however, still lingers.

‘With so much fake evidence, it’s really difficult to stay positive,’ she says. ‘You know you’re innocent, but as Brad says there’s a view that there’s no smoke without fire.

‘There were times where I would be so anxious, so upset, but would just have to carry on, I remember one post coming up as I was going to a client meeting and my client saying “Are you ok?”. But you can’t say to a client, well you know, this person who has been harassing me online has just popped up with another message.’

Even now it still brings her to tears.

‘I’ve never been unethical to anybody, I’ve got clients and team members who have been with me for years, I’ve run the business for 30 years and I just think, why? Why me? What have I done?’

That Naomi and Brad went to the police about this back in 2022 tells a story in itself. That all three have made repeated efforts to get social media companies to remove Wall from their platforms, or force the removal of her posts – to no avail – tells another.

‘This could all have been so different’ says Brad. A keyboard warrior is of course only a warrior if they have their favoured weapon.

As Brad said in a message to followers last week: ‘There’s a reason 98 per cent of stalking cases never reach conviction. Because of the helplessness, unfairness and complete ambivalence from the social media platforms.’