On Thursday the 5th of October, one of Britain’s most high-profile television personalities, Holly Willoughby, was unexpectedly forced to pull out of ITV’s talk show, ‘This Morning…’ The reason being that a plot to kidnap and murder her was brought to light just moments before she was due to appear live on air.
The suspect? 36 year old father of two, Gavin Plumb, from Harlow in Essex.
How It All Unfolded
Plumb was arrested on Wednesday 4th October when his flat was raided after a plot to kidnap and murder the star was foiled. Essex Police found ‘sinister messages’ threatening ‘serious harm’ on his phone (which has since been seized)…
Plumb, as well as having weapons and a restraint kit which he intended to use to kidnap Holly, had also contacted a hitman in the US, David Nelson, with this hitman being set to fly to the UK next week to murder Holly (Plumb had already arranged flights to and from the UK for said hitman)…
Appearing in court on Friday 6th October, accused of offences including soliciting to commit murder and incitement to commit kidnap, prosecuting solicitor Shefa Begum told the court Plumb was part of a ‘vast network of like-minded individuals’ and had a ‘detailed plan.’
Who is Gavin Plumb?
A bit of background information on Plumb…
Gavin was the ‘star’ of a BBC feature on weight loss in 2018, writing a diary for the corporation after he hit 35 stone, and appearing on Radio 5Live twice.
Plumb told the BBC:
‘My weight has always fluctuated. At my heaviest, I was 35-and-a-half stone. When the weight started to pile on, that was when my mental health really went down.
I’m pretty much in pain everywhere. I get chest pains and I’ve just been told it’s because of my weight.
The last time I went out unaided was 2014 — it was my parents’ wedding vow renewal.
I hate sitting indoors. I hate looking at the same four walls 24/7. I hate being the size I am.’
Is Gavin Plumb An Incel?
Incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, are heterosexual men who blame women and society for their lack of romantic success.
There has been several cases of so called ‘incels’ committing the most abhorrent acts against humanity, particularly women since this is where their anger really resides. One example can be seen in the horrific case of the Plymouth mass shooting in 2021. Jake Davison, a twenty-two-year-old man, killed five people following an argument with his mum (his mum was his first victim, as well as a three-year-old girl)…
Davison was an active member of many online forums which promoted the incel ‘ideology’, and within which Davison shared his own hate-filled, misogynistic and violent views via…
On social media, Davison twice likened himself to an ‘incel’, and he would frequently complain about a lack of friends and support network, with videos posted online prior to the mass shooting seeing him describing his life as being ‘just me against the world’.
This is a common theme amongst the incel ‘community’- a feeling of loneliness, a feeling of ‘failing’ at life, and of needing an outlet to direct those feelings towards, an outlet which, unfortunately, can all too often end in tragedy, as it did with Jake Davison and the mass shooting in 2021, and as it could’ve quite easily done, again, with Gavin Plumb and Holly Willoughby had the plan not been foiled in time…
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