Janet Wendleken couldn’t wait to retire. The detective constable had spent a long career with the Nottingham police, working with victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence and stalking. But then, just a few years before leaving her role, she led an investigation that would haunt her long after her career had ended.
In 2019, she was placed on the case of former BBC presenter Alex Belfield, who had been reported for stalking and harassing Jeremy Vine, as well as seven other victims.
Belfield, 46, worked as a DJ for BBC Radio Leeds until he was sacked for misconduct in 2010. In the years that followed, he began harassing his colleagues on social media. Thanks to the tenacity and perseverance of Janet and her colleagues, in 2022, he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for cyber stalking. Happy that justice had been done, Janet, then 57, and her husband retired to Costa Rica expecting to hear nothing more about it.
In June 2025, however, all that changed when Belfield was released from prison. He swiftly returned to X (formerly Twitter) to continue where he left off. Writing that Janet was “corrupt”, his post was seized upon by multiple online trolls who proceeded to share his claim without evidence. Used to dealing with men like Belfield, Janet challenged this by posting links to the court documents detailing the evidence against him.
