A jealous boyfriend who sent vile threats to his then son was accused of ‘stooping into the gutter’.

Ben Dixon, 25, was originally charged with coercive behaviour towards the woman and attacking her last year.

But prosecutors dropped the case part-way through the alleged victim’s evidence, after she felt unable to continue.

Before the trial, the Cholsey man had already admitted leaving abusive messages on his girlfriend’s phone, sent over a matter of days last September.

Those messages revealed the depths of Dixon’s jealousy, alleging – falsely – that there was another man in her home. Dixon threatened: “I’ll stab him in his f***ing face.”

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He said he would burn the woman’s flat down. He added: “You don’t deserve kids. You don’t deserve f*** all.”

His threat to burn down the house was repeated later on. In another message he demanded she call him so he could tell her ‘what I’m going to f***ing do to your f***ing son’. In a further indirect threat, he claimed to know where the baby was.

Prosecuting, Charlotte Bégué said the threats – particularly those referring to the young child – were intended to ‘maximise fear and distress’ in the mind of the victim.

The court heard that the abusive phone calls put him in breach of a 15 month suspended jail sentence imposed in April 2022 for assaults on a different partner.

During one of the assaults, having punched the woman in the face ‘multiple times’ he picked up a dumbbell and said ‘next time I’ll use this’.

Mitigating, Christopher Pembridge accepted that the messages were ‘horrific’. “Looking back on this as a sober man, he says he does feel regret for sending those messages.”

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Dixon had spent four-and-a-half months in custody on remand, the equivalent to a prison sentence of more than eight months.

Jailing him for 22 months, Recorder John Bate-Williams said the defendant had ‘really stooped into the gutter’ with the veiled threats towards her son.

“You lowered yourself to threaten [your victim] with violence, threatened to stab anyone she was with in the face, threatened to damage the house she shares with her small child,” he said.

The judge described the threats she had received as ‘disgusting and vile’.

A five-year restraining order bans Dixon, of Newlands Way, Cholsey, from contacting the woman to whom he sent the messages.

Breaching the restraining order would be a separate offence carrying a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.