The presenter said: “There will be one person out of 500,000 who wants to hurt someone who comes out of my house. If it’s me, fair enough. If it’s my daughter, no.”
He added: “It felt like I had a fishhook in my face and my flesh was ripped and the only way to avoid further pain was to remain completely still.
“I’ve been brought so low. I just thought, ‘There’s no point in broadcasting if the effect is that I’m having this’.”
Mr Vine collapsed when he described being called a “thief toe-lap” by someone after a “totally untrue” accusation by the defendant.
The jury was shown videos in which Mr Belfield accused the BBC presenter of stealing £1,000 in BBC license money to spend on a memorial service for his friend, the radio director John Myers, in 2019.
Mr Vine explained that one of the comments read, “What would your father have said if he had known his son was a thief?”
Sobbing, Mr. Vine said, “I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t handle it.”
‘Stalking at Olympic level’
He said he contacted the user who posted the comment, who was later removed and told they had seen Mr Belfield’s YouTube channel.
Asked how he felt about being accused of stealing money in honor of a friend, he said: “It couldn’t get any worse. It’s disgusting.”
He said: “All I have is my reputation to be honest. That’s all a journalist has. Once that’s over, you can’t be a journalist anymore.”
Vine said he had spoken to other broadcasters about stalking but “no one had seen anything like it”.
He added: “This is absolutely Olympic-level stalking — even for broadcast.”
Mr Belfield denies the charges and the trial continues.