On Thursday 5th 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.’
What’s Happening Now?
Since the plot was uncovered, Scotland Yard police officers have been guarding Holly’s London mansion where she lives with her husband and their three children, (aged 8, 11, & 13), 24/7…
Plumb will appear in Chelmsford Crown Court for a plea hearing on the 3rd November, and has been remanded in custody until then.
Now, a very bizarre situation and an ongoing one at that (we don’t yet have all the facts), but one that, I can’t help but think ‘incel’- a very real (& increasing) terrorism threat towards women- could be to blame for… This suspicion being supported by the comment of prosecuting solicitor Shefa Begum regarding Plumb being part of a ‘vast network of like-minded individuals…’
Is Gavin Plumb An ‘Incel?’
Incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, are heterosexual men who blame women and society for their lack of romantic success/for their own inability to form attachments.
There have 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…
But… Why Hollie Willoughby?
Plumb, with him spending so much time in his house- ‘The last time I went out unaided was 2014… I hate sitting indoors’– most likely watches lots of TV (TV which Holly Willoughby stars in every weekday morning)…
A very ‘bubbly’ personality, it wouldn’t be farfetched to assume that Plumb has developed a ‘Why me?’ mentality, with his deep rooted sense of anger towards the world seeing him viewing Holly Willoughby as having everything which he is lacking- Misogyny at its core, for which Holly Willoughby has become the ‘scape goat…’
While I might be way off the mark here, there’s every possibility that Gavin Plumb is simply a sociopath, I always lean more towards thinking that anyone who commits crime that inflicts harm upon someone else has more going on in their brains than them simply being ‘evil.’
Whilst yes, there is evil in the world, undoubtedly, I don’t believe that humans are inherently evil. The whole ‘nature vs nurture’ debate, I don’t believe that anyone is born evil. I just don’t think that’s possible. As literal embodiments of love (we were brought forth into the world, in the majority of cases, through love), how can ‘evil’ be our natural state?…
(And, for a less ‘hippy dippy’ reason, I also lean more towards this ‘theory’ because, really, what rational reason would Plumb have to kill Holly Willoughby, someone whom he doesn’t even know?)…
You see, this ( ^ ) is the problem with celebrities like Holly who we see, sometimes every day, on our TV screens… Because we see them every day, in some cases more than we see our own friends, we think that we know them. But, we don’t. We know a version of them, the person whom they want us to see, a ‘persona’, perhaps. But we do not really know them.
Thinking that we do know celebrities though, it makes it easy for people to attach assumptions to them/for people to impose their own ideologies onto them. Could this be what Gavin Plumb has done? Has he imposed his own warped misogynistic ideology onto Holly Willoughby, viewing her as being a representative of all women (again, as I said previously, a ‘scape goat’), for which he is ‘owed’ something?…
I genuinely cannot see any other reason why, if not for this, someone would feel that vehemently against someone they don’t even know to the extent that their ‘distaste’ towards them has led them to formulate a detailed plan for their kidnap and murder… It just doesn’t make sense…
I really hope that Holly Willoughby is getting the support that she needs right now, not just in terms of having police outside her house, but support with regards to her mental health, too. I can’t imagine the fear that she must be feeling, and this is bound to leave a mark on her, bearing in mind that, this wasn’t just some fanatical ‘would be’ criminal who was arrested here… It wasn’t just another woman-hating man texting his mates that he’d ‘love to kill Holly Willoughby’ (although, to be fair, that alone is bad enough)… No, Plumb had actually made detailed plans to carry out the murder next week. He’d made a ‘restraint’ kit. He’d booked flights to and from the UK for the hitman he had hired from America to carry out the murder. Chilling, really, and testament to just how far some people will go in an attempt to lessen their own pain…
‘Hurt people hurt people’ and all that- proof of this well-known quote in action but, to the extreme.
Holly, the nation stands with you ❤
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