📰 Last week, actor Colin Salmon stood in a London magistrates’ court and made a simple request.
He asked that his home address not be read aloud. His lawyer explained he had been stalked before. His family would be at risk if the details were published.
⚖️ The magistrates dismissed the application.
The bench chairman told him that if fans “overstepped the mark” and turned up at his property, he should call the police.
🧠 I have spent over 35 years in this field.
That response tells you everything about how poorly understood personal threats remain—even by those making decisions about them.
🚪 Here is what that advice means:
Wait until someone is standing on your doorstep.
React after the fact.
Hope the police arrive in time.
❌ That is not protection.
❌ That is wishful thinking dressed up as procedure.
⏳ The moment someone appears at your home is the end of a process, not the beginning.
The pathway begins much earlier—with access to personal information, predictability, and opportunity.
📢 Once Mr Salmon’s address was spoken in open court, it became public record.
🔍 Once reported, it became searchable.
♾️ Once searchable, it became permanent.
None of that improves justice.
All of it increases risk.
⚠️ The argument that “nothing has happened yet” is not a safeguard.
It is hindsight waiting to happen.
🏛️ We learned this lesson with politicians years ago.
Prospective candidates were once required to publish their home addresses on ballot papers. That practice stopped after it became apparent that it created a foreseeable danger to candidates and their families.
✔️ Democracy did not collapse.
✔️ Accountability did not vanish.
✔️ The only thing that changed was a reduction in avoidable risk.
🔁 The same principle applies here.
We just seem reluctant to apply it.
📜 There is no operational requirement for a home address to be published for justice to be served.
The magistrates already knew who the defendant was and where he lived. That satisfies the legal process.
🗞️ Publication serves no judicial function.
It serves only transparency theatre—and, more bluntly, copy.
📰 The press often hides behind the phrase “public interest.”
What they usually mean is “interest in the public reading their article.”
Those two things are not the same.
🚨 The Holly Willoughby case showed this with uncomfortable clarity.
A man was convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, rape, and murder the television presenter.
🔗 The investigation revealed he had assembled everything he needed from publicly available sources—addresses, routines, images, and associations.
No hacking.
No insider access.
No criminal ingenuity required.
⚖️ Everything he used was lawful.
🔓 None of it was secret.
❗ That did not make it safe.
🧯 The media rarely intend harm. But intent is irrelevant.
Publishing personal details lowers the threshold for those already on a pathway towards fixation or violence.
🔥 Every address printed, every routine revealed, every family connection exposed adds fuel to fires already smouldering.
Media organisations may not like that responsibility, but they cannot opt out of it.
🔐 Privacy is not about becoming invisible.
Complete anonymity is neither achievable nor desirable for most people who maintain public profiles.
🎯 It is about control.
Information about you should exist because you chose it to, not because nobody was paying attention.
🌐 More than 200 data broker sites operate globally, harvesting and reselling personal information from property records, company filings, electoral rolls, and commercial transactions.
🔎 That information can be identified, suppressed, and monitored.
🛠️ It requires ongoing attention rather than a one-off fix, but it can be done.
This is why we created The Privacy Package—to address exposure methodically before it becomes a problem.
🚔 Telling someone to “call the police if it happens” is not a form of prevention.
It is an admission that prevention has already failed.
🧩 Until courts, media, and individuals start thinking about threat as a process rather than an event, public figures will continue to carry risks created by other people’s decisions.
📩 To better understand your own vulnerability and exposure, please get in touch.
Sometimes knowing where you stand is the first step to fixing it.
Philip Grindell has more than 35 years of experience in law enforcement, intelligence, and private security, including creating Parliament’s threat assessment team after Jo Cox MP’s murder. He works with globally prominent individuals and is the author of Personal Threat Management.
