Agent, 60, is CLEARED of dangerous driving over CyclingMikey incident
Celebrity talent agent, 60, who drove 60ft with ‘CyclingMikey’ on his bonnet is CLEARED of dangerous driving – after footage showed vigilante jumping in front of his Range Rover to confront him over illegal turn
- Paul Lyon-Maris made illegal right turn when he was blocked by Mike van Erp
- ‘Jumped’ onto Lyon-Maris’ Range Rover, as he agent continued to move forward
- A London jury cleared the agent of dangerous driving and assault by beating
A celebrity talent agent accused of trying to use his Range Rover to bulldoze a cycling vigilante out of the way was today cleared of dangerous driving after a court heard he was ‘surprised and intimidated’ when the activist ‘jumped’ onto his bonnet.
Paul Lyon-Maris, 60, was said to be fuming when his route was blocked by Mike van Erp, 50. The YouTuber, known as CyclingMikey, is well known for his videos catching out drivers including celebrities Guy Ritchie and Chris Eubank.
Lyon-Maris, who has represented Alan Rickman, Sir Ian McKellen and Warwick Davis, found Mr van Erp standing in the road while filming on a head-mounted camera and using a selfie stick.
He had taken an illegal right turn to avoid a queue of traffic at the junction by London’s Regent’s Park dubbed Gandalf Corner while his way to a physio appointment on September 9 last year.
Footage showed the moment the Mr van Erp came down on to the bonnet of Lyon-Maris’ Range Rover, which continued to drive forward for some 60ft before turning the corner.
The Dutch cycling campaigner could be heard yelling: ‘Why are you driving into me?’ Lyon-Maris then shouted back: ‘I’ve got an appointment at half past eight. Get out of the way!’
Following a short argument, Mr van Erp is heard saying ‘Hey Siri, call 999’ before officers arrived at the scene.
Paul Lyon-Maris, 60, (left) was said to be fuming when his route was blocked by Mike van Erp, 50 (right). The YouTuber, known as CyclingMikey, is well known for his videos catching out drivers including celebrities Guy Ritchie and Chris Eubank
Lyon-Maris said he felt ‘surprised and a little intimidated’ when the cyclist jumped on his bonnet holding a selfie stick.
He told jurors it was simply not true that he drove purposely at Mr van Erp in a ‘fit of rage and anger’.
A jury at Southwark Crown Court took three hours and 51 minutes to cleared the agent of dangerous driving and assault by beating.
Lyon-Maris, a director of the Independent Talent Group with clients including Singing Detective star Sir Michael Gambon, X-Files actress Gillian Anderson, denied the charges.
Giving evidence Mr van Erp said Lyon-Maris had warned him to ‘get out the way’ during the confrontation.
‘I think it started as I stood in front of him and made him come to a stop. Then the driver drove into me, and I fell onto his bonnet for the first time,’ Mr van Erp said.
Michael Epstein, defending, had asked the YouTuber how many interactions with motorists he had uploaded.
‘I’m not sure of the most accurate account, but I have been YouTube-ing since 2006, since 2018 there has been more than 1,000 uploaded,’ Mr van Erp said.
‘I say 2018 because the transport police were rarely charging dangerous drivers just warning them.
‘I have about 1,000 reports of bad driving. But my concern is far more with justice than with social media.’
The barrister asked: ‘The truth is that this is what you do isn’t it? If cars don’t adhere to what you’re telling them to do this is your sort of fall-back position?
‘If cars don’t adhere to the orders, you are giving them, If the drivers of those vehicles don’t comply, you have a default position of getting on the bonnets of those vehicles and claiming they have driven into you.’
Mr van Erp replied: ‘I’m not giving drivers orders I’m just infringing on them going forwards. I have no authority, I’m just telling them to go back. I’m just an ordinary member of the public.’
Lyon-Maris had taken an illegal right turn to avoid a queue of traffic at the junction by London’s Regent’s Park dubbed Gandalf Corner while his way to a physio appointment
Footage showed the moment the Mr van Erp came down on to the bonnet of Lyon-Maris’ Range Rover, which continued to drive forward and turned the corner
Mr Epstein asked: ‘Do you genuinely think the risk you were taking walking into the road posed a risk only to yourself, you don’t believe the actions of yourself posed a risk to other road users?’
Mr van Erp replied: ‘I don’t see how a pedestrian poses a risk to other road users.’
Lyon-Maris admitted driving around the keep left sign but said he told the cyclist to ‘please’ get out of his way after he jumped on his bonnet.
‘A man stepped right in front of my car. I wasn’t going very fast, I applied the brakes and stopped in front of him,’ said Lyon-Maris.
‘I didn’t know who he was or what he was trying to do. In his left hand he had a long stick.
‘I was met with an intimidating figure. I came up with something to calm him down. I said I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment. I said it because I thought it was a calming thing to say.
‘He then, with the stick, banged it on the windscreen, at which point I said: ”What the hell”. Before I knew it he was on my bonnet.’
Following a short argument, Mr van Erp is heard saying ‘Hey Siri, call 999’ before officers arrived at the scene
‘A man stepped right in front of my car. I wasn’t going very fast, I applied the brakes and stopped in front of him.
‘I didn’t know who he was or what he was trying to do. In his left hand he had a long stick.’
‘I was met with an intimidating figure. I came up with something to calm him down. I said I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment. I said it because I thought it was a calming thing to say.
‘He then, with the stick, banged it on the windscreen, at which point I said: ”What the hell”. Before I knew it he was on my bonnet.’
Mr Epstein asked: ‘How did he come to be on your bonnet?’
Lyon-Maris replied: ‘He jumped on it, fell on it. He was on the bonnet. I had to make a decision about what to do.
‘It was a time of heightened nerves due to Covid. There was a stranger on my bonnet with a stick in his hand.
‘I did decide to move forwards out of the way of any traffic and pull over. He was calling the police, it was clear the police would arrive.’
Mr Epstein asked: ‘The allegation is that in a fit of rage and anger you purposely drove at him and he ended up on your bonnet.’
Lyon-Maris replied: ‘Simply not true.’
Mr Epstein asked: ‘How would you describe your feelings?’
‘Surprised and a little intimidated,’ Lyon-Maris said.
James Dean, prosecuting, asked him: ‘Why were you gesticulating wildly at the windscreen?’
Lyon-Maris replied: ‘Because someone was on my bonnet. I was very polite. I said please get out of my way.’
Mr Dean: ‘You became instantly enraged.’
Lyon-Maris: ‘I don’t become enraged.’
A jury at Southwark Crown Court took three hours and 51 minutes to clear the agent of dangerous driving and assault by beating
Summing up the case the judge, Mr Jonathan Bellamy said: ‘The defendant is a man of previously good character.
‘The fact that he is 60 and of good character could mean he is less likely to commit the offences with which he has been charged.
‘Mr van Erp has been a road traffic safety activist since at least 2006. Lyon-Maris came to a stop a short distance in front of him.
‘He says the defendant was agitated and gesticulating from the driver’s seat.
‘Van Erp’s evidence was that he [Lyon-Maris] drove at him and struck him on two occasions.
‘He describes the contact as being at or around the bottom of his ribcage. Mr van Erp did not sustain any physical injury.
‘The driver described Mr van Erp as an intimidating figure. He said he told him he was on the way to the doctor rather than the physiotherapist because he thought this would have a calming effect.
‘He said he did not drive at Mr van Erp, but that he jumped onto the bonnet of his vehicle. He said that Mr van Erp struck the windscreen of his car with a selfie stick. The defendant’s evidence was that he was not enraged at the time of the incident.
‘He said he had to make a decision about what to do, and that this was his instinctive decision.’
Lyon-Maris, of Belsize Park, north London, denied and was cleared of dangerous driving and assault by beating.
He earlier admitted failing to comply with a road sign and was fined following a magistrates court hearing.
Road safety hero or menace on two wheels? Mike van Erp cycles the streets with a headcam to catch motorists including Frank Lampard, Guy Ritchie and Chris Eubank using phones — then shops them to police… So what drives his very divisive crusade?
By Kathryn Knight for the Daily Mail
The middle-aged man at the wheel of the smart Volkswagen convertible is so engrossed in his mobile that he fails to see a cyclist approaching on his right-hand side.
In fact, it’s nearly a minute before he spots Mike van Erp, the cyclist, who has been filming him texting and has now drawn up to point out that he’s breaking the law.
What’s more, Mike explains, he’s recorded him doing so on the small professional camera strapped to the top of his bike helmet.
Enraged, the man unleashes a stream of invective and nearly mounts the kerb as he steams off, craning his neck to continue his volley of abuse.
It’s little wonder he’s cross; when Mike uploads the footage to the Metropolitan Police’s online crime reporting forum, it’s likely he’ll be prosecuted, given a six point penalty, £200 fine and hike in his insurance premiums.
Raised in Zimbabwe, when he was 19 his father was killed by a drunk driver while on his motorbike. Mike arrived at the site to see his father’s body in the road, covered by a rug
He wouldn’t be alone: since Mike, a genial 50-year-old, started using his ‘helmet-cam’ back in 2006, he has snared about 2,000 offenders — mostly people illegally using their mobiles.
Around 1,000 have been in the last three years alone, after it became easier for civilians to report crime via the internet.
Some 600 have been prosecuted, with many more in the pipeline. What’s more, some of them are well-known.
This week it emerged that former England footballer Frank Lampard had been caught on camera by Mike holding a phone while at the wheel of his car.
Lampard was filmed driving his £250,000 Mercedes G-wagon holding a cup of coffee and his mobile but escaped prosecution because the CPS said there was ‘insufficient evidence’.
The ex-Chelsea midfielder had employed the services of Nick Freeman — the lawyer known as ‘Mr Loophole’ due to his success at getting famous clientele off — to defend him.
He’d denied a charge of ‘using a handheld mobile phone/device while driving a motor vehicle on a road’ and Mr Freeman successfully argued that it could not be proved that Lampard was interacting with his phone.
It left a sour taste in Mike’s mouth. Of Mr Loophole, who has also represented stars including Ranulph Fiennes, Van Morrison, Jimmy Carr and Jeremy Clarkson — he said: ‘He’s a smart man but if I met him in person I might ask him how do you sleep at night,’ he says.
‘I believe in the legal system even with all its flaws, but even so I wonder if it’s being pushed too far.’
Others have not been so fortunate. In the summer of 2020, film director Guy Ritchie was given six points, fined and banned from driving for six months after Mike, a YouTuber known as CyclingMikey, filmed him using his phone while driving his Range Rover through Hyde Park.
Since Mike, a genial 50-year-old, started using his ‘helmet-cam’ back in 2006, he has snared about 2,000 offenders — mostly people illegally using their mobiles.
Since Mike, a genial 50-year-old, started using his ‘helmet-cam’ back in 2006, he has snared about 2,000 offenders — mostly people illegally using their mobiles
‘I respect him more than most as he was very calm, he wasn’t rude and he didn’t deny what had happened,’ Mike recalls.
In September that year, former boxer Chris Eubank was given three points and fined for running a red light after trying to flee from Mike, who had challenged him for trying to connect to his hands-free phone system.
‘Apparently he said he was worried that I was a stalker,’ Mike reflects. ‘Although I can’t imagine Chris Eubank really being scared of anyone, can you?’
As for Mr Lampard — he drove off without engaging with him at all.
Either way, Mike insists he’s an ‘equal opportunities’ crime fighter; it’s not celebrity profile but behaviour he’s interested in.
That’s why, after his day job working as a carer for a boy with Down’s syndrome, he patrols areas of central London close to his commute home, which is also in the capital.
His only ‘equipment’ is the GoPro attached to his helmet.
Sometimes he does it several days at a time, other weeks only once. ‘It’s as the mood takes me,’ he says.
He’s one of a new breed of ‘cycling vigilante’ pushing back against what they say are endemically dangerous levels of driving on Britain’s streets.
Father-of-two Mike vehemently dislikes the term vigilante — ‘I’m not dealing out punishments, just trying to highlight behaviour,’ he insists — instead seeing his efforts as doing his bit to improve road safety.
The statistics are certainly sobering: each year 1,800 people are killed on our roads, and 24,000 are seriously injured, while DVLA statistics show that more than 90,000 drivers have been caught driving while distracted in the past four years.
‘Studies have shown that phone driving is worse than drink-driving in terms of the way it delays your reaction time,’ says Mike.
That said, Mike claims he has spoken to police officers who admitted cases are being ‘binned left and right to reduce the massive backlog’ in courts caused by the pandemic.
So what drives, as it were, a man to devote hours each week, putting himself at risk on congested roads, to police motorists’ behaviour?
Amiable and friendly, he insists he is not a cycle obsessive. Nor does he seem to have much interest in fame, although following a successful prosecution he does upload footage to his YouTube channel, which has 71,000 subscribers, much to the bemusement of his teenage sons.
However, his crusade is more personal, for Mike has experienced first-hand the devastation caused by careless motorists.
Raised in Zimbabwe, when he was 19 his father was killed by a drunk driver while on his motorbike. Mike arrived at the site to see his father’s body in the road, covered by a rug.
‘I dealt with the grief a long time ago and I didn’t think much about road safety at first,’ he tells me. ‘But, of course, it stays with you.’
Having moved to the UK in 1998, aged 26, with his then-wife — they have since divorced — to work in IT, he became acutely aware of dangerous motorists as he cycled to work.
‘I was commuting in from Kent to London and there would be at least one incident a day where my personal safety was at risk,’ he says. ‘People driving right up behind me or within a whisker of me.’ So, by 2006, when chat on cycle forums turned to the availability of helmet cameras, he decided to buy one.
This week it emerged that former England footballer Frank Lampard had been caught on camera by Mike holding a phone while at the wheel of his car. Lampard was filmed driving his £250,000 Mercedes G-wagon holding a cup of coffee and his mobile but escaped prosecution because the CPS said there was ‘insufficient evidence’
Back then, reporting an offence was a laborious process. ‘You’d have to burn a DVD and go to the police station to fill out a long form, so you only did it for the really serious ones,’ he says. ‘For a long time, it was purely to try to stop people from driving recklessly around me.’
That changed in 2018 with the emergence of online reporting. ‘It made things much easier — you just edit footage and upload it with a few more details,’ he says. ‘I got a few of those to court and I thought “wow I can really make a difference”. That’s when I started focusing on people more generally.’
Just an hour on my bike in Mike’s company reveals almost too many offences to count. We’ve met at a busy thoroughfare cutting through London’s Hyde Park (the very spot where he caught Guy Ritchie) and as we head off down the slow-moving queue there is plenty of evidence of what Mike calls the ‘WhatsApp gap’ — the tell-tale delay when moving forward in traffic because people are engrossed in text messaging.
We spot a lady in a blue BMW with her head down, oblivious to the large space that has opened up in the queue ahead of her. Mike draws up alongside her to find she is busy sending emails — meeting what he calls the ‘gold standard’ test for prosecution, which currently requires proof of interaction communication with a phone.
‘She was tapping away, so that’s pretty much a guaranteed hit,’ he says.
What becomes abundantly clear, as he moves down the queue of traffic, is that most people don’t seem to think they are breaking the law if they are using their phone while stationary.
They are; the law states that your car must be parked for you to legally engage with your handset.
Moreover, as Mike points out, research has shown that it can take up to half a minute to regain full attention after using a phone.
‘I see it all the time — they drive off still looking at their phone and they don’t see people,’ Mike says. ‘If you imagine these people only use their phones when queuing at traffic lights you’re terribly naive — they’re constantly using their phones, but it’s easier to catch them when they’re in the queue.’
‘I’ve seen it all,’ he adds. ‘People eating and texting while the car is moving, women applying make-up. I even saw a man driving a Rolls-Royce while looking at a website for people with a shoe fetish. He had his kid in the passenger seat.’
Of course, drivers are not the only offenders and many motorists — and pedestrians — have tales to tell about dangerous cyclists ignoring road safety rules.
‘I do tell off cyclists as well,’ Mike insists. ‘I bray like a donkey at them if they run a red light. But the reality is that cyclists are less law-breaking than drivers.’ (Indeed, a 2019 Danish study showed that fewer than five per cent of cyclists broke traffic laws while riding, yet 66 per cent of motorists did so when driving.)
‘Moreover, drivers are far deadlier to others: the risk of injury or death per mile is 28 times greater for cyclists than for those travelling in cars.’
Nonetheless, he believes too many of us fail to take road crime seriously. ‘People die, or are grievously injured all the time because of it,’ he says. ‘That’s what I am trying to get people to understand.
I am doing this so others don’t have to experience that death in the family — although they don’t see it that way, of course.’
‘They certainly don’t. The actions of “cycling vigilantes” have split public opinion, with many uncomfortable with the idea of such ‘citizen patrols’.
Mike says there’s a growing tribe of like-minded souls.
‘I don’t think I’m even in the top ten most prolific cycling camera guys in London,’ he insists. ‘And there’s tens of thousands of us throughout the UK.’
It’s a risky undertaking. Motorists caught red-handed often unleash verbal abuse, which sometimes spills over into something more sinister.
Mike has been attacked four times, including one occasion last year when a man driving a Mercedes repeatedly rammed his bike at a busy London junction, incandescent with rage at being caught red-handed on his phone.
The latest frightening incident happened only last week, when Mike was assaulted by a man in a white Transit van in Hyde Park after informing him that he should put his phone away at the wheel.
‘He leaned out to grab my helmet camera then got out of the van, dragged me off my bike and onto the bonnet,’ he recalls. ‘He was a very big guy, so it wasn’t nice.’
Mike managed to wrestle free but was badly shaken and sustained deep grazes to his legs.
The footage has been sent to the police. Meanwhile, an upcoming court case centres on a well-known name who rammed him from behind in his car and then carried him forward on the bonnet.
‘I can’t identify him as proceedings are ongoing, but he has been charged with dangerous driving and assault by beating,’ says Mike.
So why do drivers become so aggressive behind the wheel?
‘I think it comes down to “I pay road tax, therefore I pay for the road, therefore I own the road — so know your place”,’ he reflects.
As to whether there is a typical profile of the reckless phone-using motorist, Mike insists not. Although he admits that those with the most expensive cars are often offenders.
‘I think there is a sense of entitlement there,’ he says. ‘Range Rover drivers in particular are pretty bad.’
On balance, he thinks that women are better drivers. ‘But they can still be crazy too,’ he says.
‘The reality is that something bad seems to happen to people when they get behind the wheel.’
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