Brighton bodyguard jailed for tracking and threatening ex

A man who broke into his ex’s bedroom dressed in camouflage gear has been jailed for three and a half years.

Lee Warrent, 47, subjected his former wife Carole to a four-year campaign of harassment, hacking into her emails so he could turn up without any notice.

The bodyguard also told her he had once shot someone and boasted of his firearms training and access to weapons.

Prosecuting at Hove Crown Court this month, Jonathan Atkinson said the harassment began in 2014 after the pair separated. On one occasion when she was visiting a male friend, Richard Carter, he had started banging on doors in the street despite not having any legitimate way of knowing where Mr Carter lived.

In March that year, he assaulted Mr Carter at his ex’s home in Portslade, for which he was convicted the following month.

She had found software on her phone which appeared to be copying her messages. He would turn up at places she was visiting, without having any way of knowing her plans.

Mr Atkinson said: “He told her in 2018 that he had always been able to monitor her and that he knew where she was and who she was with.”

On one occasion, she had woken up to find him in camouflage gear, crawling on her bedroom floor.

The victim read out a statement about how the harassment had left her living as a recluse and even suicidal at times.

She said: “My whole life has been turned upside down by Lee. He took systematic steps to make sure I was scared.

“He’s not someone who will use small levels of violence. He once told me he shot someone in a bar in Guernsey.

“I do not feel that any length of restraining order will work unless it’s permanent because if it’s ten years, he will just reappear after ten years.

“It feels like he is always three steps ahead of me and I cannot have any kind of privacy.

“He has actively worked to drive a wedge between me and other people, first during our relationship and even after we were separated.

“Lee’s love is poison. It’s not real love, it’s an obsession.

“I honestly believe he might kill me. He has talked so much about being in the military and having access to weapons which is a different world to mine.

“I’m terrified that one day I will be walking down the street and shot in the head by someone driving past.

“I feel unsafe to talk in my own home in case I’m being secretly recorded.

“I lie awake at night listening for suspicious noises. I want to live my life, not think that Lee is monitoring me.”

Defending, Richard Reilly said a recent probation interview in which Warrent said everything was the victim’s fault and expressed what the officer called “worrying attitudes to women and the criminal justice system” had been a misunderstanding.

He said: “He explains to me his continual denial was down to his stupidity and thinking it was his opportunity to give his version of events.

“He thought the interview with probation went very well.”

He cited a letter Warrent had written to the judge, Her Honour Christine Henson, in which he said he had taken steps to understand his offending.

But when Judge Henson asked three or four times what he had actually done, and Mr Reilly took further instruction from his client, he was unable to point to anything specific.

Sentencing, Judge Henson said: “The most serious distress has been caused by your behaviour.

“The report describes you as someone who needs to be in control and having worrying attitudes to women.

“You appear to use violence when things don’t go as you want.

“It’s clear from the attitudes that you have displayed in your pre sentence report that there’s not any willingness to address your offending.

“The letter you wrote to me appears to be superficial and yet another step by you to manipulate and influence the outcome.

“When asked what steps you had taken your counsel was unable to identify any particular steps that you have undertaken.”

Warrent, of Warbleton Close, was sentenced to three years and a half years in prison, and given an indefinite restraining order preventing him from contacting his ex either directly or indirectly, and from going to an area of Portslade.

The area was reduced after Warrent, who is an operations manager for Newhaven-based Covert Protection, said it would prevent him from visiting one of the company’s clients.