A staff member at an island high school has spoken of the anguish he suffered after being made the subject of a malicious online message.

Gavin Lucas says he was forced to work in a separate part of the school building and was approached by strangers in the street after being targeted in a menacing and baseless social media post.

In a summary trial, Nicholas Crowe, a former MHK candidate and Sidecar racer in the TT, was found guilty of sending an indecent, obscene or menacing message.

The trial heard that Crowe had posted a picture of Mr Lucas online alongside an image that read: “Exposed Danger Nonce” on Friday, February 10.

The next day Crowe sent an email to the school that Mr Lucas works at. In the email, Crowe said: ‘Mr Lucas has a serious habit of trolling Facebook pages, trying to destroy people’s companies and good reputations.

‘Mr Lucas was trolling the wrong person last night and a favour was returned to him, the post I put did not look good on him and if parents and pupils saw it...’

Speaking about his ordeal, Mr Lucas said: ‘I was out for dinner with friends and didn’t have my phone on me. When I got home I had message after message, loads of friends asking “What are these? What is going on?”

‘I called the police, and they came to my house at about 1am, I showed them the photos, so they said they would investigate. When I went to work on Monday, before I had the chance to tell my boss, I had been emailed to go to the office, where they asked about the letter and photos.

‘I told them the police were already investigating it, which was all they needed.

‘The police also came to the school.’ Mr Lucas says he was forced to work in a separate part of the school until the end of that term while the messages were being investigated.

‘That period of time was horrendous, it was like I am getting punished and I’d done nothing wrong’, he said.

‘One or two weeks after it had been posted, I was approached by strangers on Strand Street who brought it up.’

The same thing happened the next week in Peel, according to Mr Lucas.

‘I did regress, and even when I came back (to work at the school) the following term (Summer term), I didn’t really associate with anyone, I just tried to keep to myself.

‘I didn’t go out many places because of it, I didn’t want to, I didn’t go to town for five or six months. I just don’t see why people think it is acceptable to say this about people. It was a full on attack to create these images, and then go email my employer the next day.’

Mr Crowe was fined £1,500 and was ordered to pay costs of £1,275. The name of the charge was ‘sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that was grossly offensive or of an indecent obscene or menacing character’.