Our neighbour blasted music through our walls and poured water through our ceiling in garden row – now we’ve got revenge
A MUSIC producer who made his neighbours’ lives hell during a six year harassment campaign has escaped jail.
Mark Arthurworrey, 70, who has worked with Earth Wind and Fire, blasted loud music to disturb a family and their two young children.
He even poured water through the ceiling and hurled rubbish into the garden in Dalston, East London, so they could not use it.
His victims were telly director Misha Manson-Smith, 49, who has worked with Borat star Sascha Baron Cohen, and his journalist wife Alexandra.
They bought the ground floor flat which was part of a house formerly owned by Arthurworrey’s mother.
But the producer – who converted the house and continued to live in a flat there – disputed the Manson-Smiths’ rights to use the front garden.
The Manson-Smiths had claimed Arthurworrey allowed water to pour through the ceiling into smoke alarms and lighting which left the flat without power for five days.
After returning from a holiday in 2018, the family found pigeon droppings on the outside patio and a maggot-infested dead rat in the bin.
Giving evidence Misha Manson-Smith told a first trial how, as well as music, his family had to suffer constant noise from the flat upstairs.
Describing on of a raft of incidents, he said: “It was the sound of sawing, or something bouncing over the floor boards.
“It sounded more and more deliberate. Like someone who wanted to cause upset.”
And when the family asked Arthurworrey to fix broken glass and broken window frames dangling over their garden, he ignored them.
Following the claims, Arthurworrey was given a restraining order in 2017 but ignored it.
He admitted one charge of breaching a restraining order on the first day of his retrial.
According to the charge, between May 28, 2018 and July 7, 2020 “without reasonable excuse” he let builders carry out work on his flat.
This work – which left “a sea of paint scrapings and building debris” in the Manson-Smith’s garden – made noise “which interfered or may have interfered” with the rights of the ground-floor flat.
Arthurworrey denied 18 further charges of acting in breach of a restraining order and the prosecution offered no evidence on those counts.
When the Manson-Smiths moved out in 2019, he harassed their tenants.
Mr Manson-Smith and his wife were awarded £273,000 at the High Court in 2021 after a judge ruled Arthurworrey carried out a “serious course of harassment” against them.
Arthurworrey, now of Worthing, East Sussex, was sentenced to 16 months imprisonment suspended for two years and he will have to pay a victim surcharge of £140.
Judge Matthew Gullick had ordered Arthurworrey to pay damages totalling £273,475 to the Manson-Smiths with £32,000 in costs at the High Court in July 2021.
He said: “Even a criminal conviction for harassment, a period of imprisonment…
“And the imposition of a restraining order have not been sufficient to dissuade the defendant from continuing his harassment of the claimants.”