In 2024, mental health advocate and content creator Jazz Thornton was terrorised by an obsessive stalker who flew 18,000km to get to her. She soon discovered there was little the police could do to help her, as stalking is currently not a crime in New Zealand (thankfully a new law comes into force at the end of this month, criminalising stalking behaviours). It’s a cause Jazz has become passionate about and this week a new doco-series, Stalked, hits our screens which sees Jazz share more about her experience, as well as those of other brave Kiwi women. Here, Jazz opens up to Capsule about the distressing experience which left her fearing for her life, and feeling extremely guilty for putting her friends at risk – a guilt she says she still carries today.
TW: Stalking, suicide
It doesn’t happen all that often anymore, but every now and then it seems the whole world can be stopped and united by watching the same crazy thing on the telly.
In 2020, that show was Tiger King (remember Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin?!) which we all wolfed down as we baked our banana bread and got our heads around using Zoom. In 2024 the show was Baby Reindeer – a confronting black comedy/thriller series based on real life events, where Richard Gadd’s character Donny has his life upended by an obsessive stalker.
The show was shocking and disturbing – and that’s exactly what Jazz Thornton thought of it when she binge-watched it with her flatmates.
But little did Jazz know, just two weeks after finishing watching the show, she’d find herself in a very similar situation.
It started – as stalking stories often begin – rather innocuously. One of her flatmates got an Instagram message from a man in the Netherlands who wanted to meet Jazz. She had a look at her own inbox – Jazz receives thousands of messages – and discovered she had a lot of messages from this guy too. Still, she didn’t feel worried – this guy was literally on the other side of the planet.
Still, she kept an eye on the messages, which were from a man named Pieter. One day he said he was booking tickets to New Zealand. She took it with a grain of salt. Surely he wouldn’t come. And if he did… maybe he’d always wanted to visit New Zealand. Maybe he had family to visit, or was planning to do one of the Great Walks.
A few weeks later Jazz was alerted to the fact that his Instagram stories showed him in New Zealand. Her heart sank a little. And even more when she checked her DMs and read the disturbing turn his messages were starting to take. One said: ‘I have done something really bad that involves you… I can’t promise not to do something with the information I have gathered.’
She told the police. She took solace in the fact he didn’t know where she lived. He’d never work that out.
But the next day she came home with her flatmate to find a paper bag by their letterbox – inside were gifts and a card from Pieter. They ran inside, which is where they made another horrifying discovery. When they looked out their windows they could see Jazz’s stalker, sitting on a park bench, staring right back at them.
“It wasn’t until that moment, when I looked out my window and he was sitting outside my house looking at me that I realised, this is really, really bad,” says Jazz.
Jazz and her flatmates called the police, who were kind, compassionate and helpful – sending out officers to the park where Pieter was. Unfortunately, by the time they got there he’d moved on.
That’s when they delivered the truly bad news to Jazz.
As Capsule have highlighted over the last few years with our own push for legislative change, there was actually nothing they could do, because there are no laws against stalking in New Zealand (a bit of good news here though – a new bill was introduced that comes into effect at the end of this month).
“I’ll never forget that moment, being told that stalking isn’t illegal,” says Jazz. “I remember there were three officers in our house – one of them, the senior guy, kept going in and out because he was on the phone. You could see the panic in their faces, this concern and confusion. Yes, they were confirming he was in the country, he’s flown from the other side of the world and he’s sitting outside, sending these crazy messages, and there’s nothing that can be done. It was horrible – I felt like someone ripped the floor from underneath me.”
The police told Jazz and her three flatmates they strongly advised they find somewhere else to sleep that night, so Jazz and her friends began making arrangements to stay at a hotel. Jazz felt terrified – but also incredibly guilty for the situation she was putting her flatmates in.
“It wasn’t just me who was violated – all of their lives were put at risk and that’s something I don’t think I have yet been able to forgive myself for,” says Jazz.
The messages from Pieter kept rolling in. That night, he threatened suicide.
The next day a criminal forensic behaviour psychologist, Dr Nathan Brooks, was brought onto the case. He told Jazz of his serious concerns about the situation.
“There was a line at the bottom of the suicide message that I just glazed over and didn’t even realise was particularly bad,” says Jazz. “It said ‘I hope to see you in the next life soon’. The psychologist believed he was potentially intending to take me out with him. Based on that, they arrested him and served him a criminal harassment notice and a trespass notice.”
But from there there wasn’t anything else that could be done, so Pieter was released. Jazz had a conversation with Dr Brooks about what to do to protect herself.
“He called me, instructing me what to do to avoid being taken or to avoid being severely hurt by this guy,” she says. “That was a conversation I will never forget and never wish to have again.
“I knew things were bad, but that conversation was like, ‘holy crap’. He said things like: ‘You have to look at every single car when you leave your house, and then when you get to your location.’ ‘It’s cheap to buy a tracker, he might use them.’ ‘Don’t leave anywhere by yourself. You can’t do any of your normal routine, because he already knows every single thing about you.’ I remember saying, ‘Can I still go see my therapist?’ and he was like, ‘No, he’ll already know where your therapist lives.’”
She said Dr Brooks quickly taught her a number of different ways to try to say safe. He explained that Pieter needed to be taken seriously because of the nature of the messages he had been sending, but also because he now fell into a different mindset of category of stalker.
“My stalker went from being an ‘intimacy seeker’ to ‘rejected’, which is one of the most dangerous, he said,” says Jazz. “He said that I should be nice to him if I saw him in public – like if he came up to me, I had to be grateful that I saw him.”
Being nice – or even cordial – to someone who is destroying your life feels completely backwards, but it was explained to Jazz that this was seen as the safest way to deal with this type of stalker, to best avoid a violent encounter.
Jazz’s stalker eventually left the country and hasn’t been in touch since, but the fear and the experience of having to be so hyper-vigilant hasn’t left her.
“I do all of those things Nathan told me to do, basically to this day,” she says. “I don’t even know I’m doing it now, but when I leave the house I’m just so hyper-aware of everything. I see every car when I leave, when I go places – my anxiety has never gone down since.”
The day after Pieter left the country Jazz was alerted to a petition that had been created, to try to get a stalking bill off the ground in NZ.
“The timing was just insane,” says Jazz. “I remember talking to my flatmates and being like, ‘it’s so early to talk about this’, because it just happened. We’re all traumatised as hell, but the only thing that’s going to get this petition through is public pressure – and I have this platform. I literally told the story the day after he left the country and the people who created the petition said it went from a few hundred signatures to 20,000.”
The process took years, and Jazz continued to throw her support behind getting a bill in place. When she got the good news last November that it had been passed in Parliament, she says she dropped to the floor.
“I literally fell to the floor in tears, and so did my whole house,” she says.
On May 26 the new law will come into force. The Crimes Legislation (Stalking and Harassment) Amendment Act 2025 creates a specific criminal offence for stalking, punishable by up to five years in prison. It defines stalking as a pattern of behaviour – at least two acts within two years – that causes fear or distress and covers both physical and digital harassment.
It’s fantastic news for all Kiwis – that finally, stalking is illegal and we’re able to pick up the phone and call the police who will now be able to act on these behaviours.
It’s hugely important because stalking is often the first step in more violent crimes. An R U OK report stated 15% of stalking cases worldwide result in homicide. Research in the US indicates that 76% of all homicides of women started with stalking.
Jazz is now sharing more about her own experiences – and the experiences of other brave Kiwi women in the new documentary, Stalked. In this shocking and absolute must-watch documentary, she hears the story of several other Kiwi women who have had their lives turned upside by a stalker and are lucky to be alive to tell their story.
“I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever cried so much in my life, first hearing their stories and then just going through this whole process with them,” says Jazz.
She says it also made her realise how lucky she had been with her experience with the police, because not everyone has had such great encounters.
“My experience with the police was so incredible – they were so fast,” she says. “But then there’s an amazing woman Zeni, who has this stalker saying he desires to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. He wants to be a serial killer. And the police did nothing – that guy is still out there today.”
Jazz says it’s been cathartic to talk about the experience too with women who have been there and understand what it’s like.
“I think being in New Zealand we have this ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, where you don’t want to be a drama queen,” she says. “I remember thinking, it’s outrageous to think that someone would fly for over 24 hours to want to find me. That’s ridiculous. I had a conversations with the other girls and we all felt really guilty and unsure about getting the police involved. We all had that kind of nurturing concern for their mental well being too. Like, why are they doing this? What if they’re not okay. We all had a built in instinct to take care of other people, when really, the main thing was that we were not okay.”
Now that the stalking law is so nearly in place, Jazz has a message for all women who are wondering if what might be happening to them could be considered stalking and if they should do something about it:
Do it. Make use of this new law.
“I think the first thing is, if you’re wondering if it is stalking, it likely is,” says Jazz. “I think as New Zealanders we tend to downplay a lot of things, but your experience is so valid. There is no world in which someone has the right to infiltrate your life like that and it’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to tell your closest people what is going on. Stalking is so isolating – it puts you away from everyone you care about because it’s difficult tot alk when we naturally have this fear of not wanting to drag people into it and not wanting to not be believed. But we believe you and we know this happens literally every day in our country and it’s okay to ask for help. And as of the 26th of May the law will protect you as well! You don’t have to look after the stalker who is doing this, it’s not your responsibility – their mental health isn’t your responsibility. Your mental health is your responsibility, so it’s okay to speak up.”
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