I battled with a mentally ill stalker for years in a petty online revenge game that started as a joke on an IRC channel and a gamer forum when I was 14yrs old, and ended up being decided by the courts as both of us eventually resorted to highly illegal activities to screw each other over.
We went from crapflooding and email bombing each other to him constantly phoning and writing everybody I knew or worked for and my school in an attempt to screw me over through the years. Every girlfriend I had he tried to fake pics of me 'cheating' on her and spammed their social accounts and email/phone. In turn I stupidly escalated and baited him through side channel attacking his box, wiping his drive countless times, hacking his blog countless times, and destroying his credit score through fraud. This goes on for a few years each personal attack gaining in pwnstastic levels of revenge. He even had badly packaged illegal drugs sent to me from overseas hoping customs would intercept it and bust me but somehow they arrived safely and for weeks I wondered how I ended up with a bunch of drugs in the mail. I then countered by further driving his credit score into the grave to the point collection agencies were after him and his family, and was able to wipe all his sites faster than he could put them back up again.
At one point during this insanity when I was 17, he started filing fake police reports to have me purposely picked up on a Friday to serve time all weekend before I could see a judge and have the bogus charges thrown out start of business day Monday. For revenge I did something incredibly stupid with the 911 system and he landed in the state pen for almost 3 months.
When I was about to turn 18, after years of us going back and forth escalating our stupidity I came down with a sudden case of ethics, plead out to meddling with 911 so he would get released, plead out to fraud to reinstate his credit score, paid out compensation and received probation in family court forbidding me from touching a computer for 2 years. He also plead out to filing false police reports, fraud and harassment, was sentenced to time served, compensation and 4yrs probation in adult court. Both of us forbidden to touch a computer and go after each other. That was 8 years ago.
It should have been over but he's still to this day trying to track me down from half way across the globe as both of us don't use real identities anywhere on the internet anymore and our real names turn up a black hole. Once in awhile I'll meet up with some old friends or employers when I come back to my old city for holidays and they'll tell me about how this sweaty-toothed madman keeps calling looking for me. I will also from time to time see various articles or comments written in my name which is him trying to lure me out of obscurity to resume our epic battle of the ages.
Unfortunately this article is not an exaggeration.
We deal with stalkers on a regular basis, cam sites and stalking seem to go hand-in-hand. If you're ever in the position of being stalked please do the following:
- never ever respond to the stalker
- save each and every message
- pre-emptively alert everybody in your surroundings that they might contact, explain everything and make sure they also never respond, and ask them to alert you if they are contacted.
- formally alert law enforcement
- forward each and every message received, posting made and so on to law enforcement
(yes, that can be a nuisance, and yes it can be embarrassing but if you want them to sooner or later take action they have to be aware of how bad it really is).
Over the years this has dealt with the large majority of cases. The few that are not amendable (for instance, because you don't know who the stalker is!) are far more serious and will need a lot more work to resolve.
The most important thing to remember is that stalkers feed on your attention and your pain, the more feedback they get from you and your environment the longer it will go on.
If this happens to you (it has happened to me...) then I wish you much good luck and I hope that it will end sooner rather than later.
One tactic that we have deployed that is quite effective is to counter stalk the stalkers and to expose them publicly.
Stalkers are usually not first time offenders and likely will stalk again in the future. It helps to have them easily googlable.
"never ever respond" implies that you already know they're a stalker -- but by that point you've surely already had some correspondence with them, unless you never reply to anyone. So how do you tell when it actually crosses the line?
I've had peripheral contact with stalking on multiple occasions. I have two useful tips.
The first one is that stalkers try to convince themselves that the object of their desire would love them back if they only had a chance. When they learn otherwise, desire can easily flip to hatred, then to attempts to destroy a life. Therefore if you are being stalked and can avoid letting the stalker know how you feel about it, do that. You can see that one in play in this case where she pursued him for years, without the nasty behavior, until she realized that he didn't love her. Then she turned vindictive.
The second tip is that if you're going to stalk someone, don't stalk a psychiatrist. It is very, very hard for anyone other than a psychiatrist to get someone committed to an institution until after the stalker has committed a conventional crime. However if you're stalking a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist can, as a professional psychiatrist, evaluate you and decide to institutionalize you. And whatever institution you go to - which is generally associated with said psychiatrist - is likely to support the psychiatrist in that evaluation.
I've experienced that flip. It's scary. I should have never rejected the stalker.
I've been told, and believe, that the only course of action for the stalked is to COMPLETELY IGNORE the stalker, until something threatening and legally actionable happens.
Anything else you do, positive or negative, simply adds fuel to the fire.
It really sucks and makes you feel helpless, but the legal system simply doesn't offer any refuge for stalking victims unless it passes a certain threat threshold.
After about a year of ignoring him, my stalker got bored. But I still fear his return. I got a single tweet from him about 6months ago that made me worry for a bit, but it was just 1 single tweet and didn't continue.
As a corollary to your awesome "don't stalk a psychiatrist" tip — if you're going to stalk someone, don't stalk a federal agent!
A close friend was stalked for years by someone who sent increasingly threatening e-mails to him, his ex-girlfriend, and her family with varying From: lines.
Local police in three different states were pretty sure my friend was the culprit because he knew a lot about computers. He got a restraining order and a pretty harsh interrogation; under the stress, he ended up failing out of university. The stalker got away with this stuff for years and never got close to getting caught.
The bad guy's mistake was to start sending e-mail with a "From:" line of a Department of Homeland Security agent. Turns out the FBI knows their stuff and does not tolerate this nonsense, and they unravelled the situation within about a week.
It also turns out that "impersonating a federal agent" is much worse than ordinary stalking — the bad guy is serving a 15-year prison sentence.
>"...avoid letting the stalker know how you feel about it..."
No, this is not always the right answer. What you're saying is basically, "lead the stalker on."
How to handle the stalker depends on what kind of mental illness (if any) they are afflicted with. Depending on what's going on in the stalker's head, they may often fly off the handle, get angry, but then (fairly quickly) find a new target to focus their energy on. With many people, the longer you draw the rejection out, the worse it gets.
Here's some better advice: get in contact with a good lawyer and a good psychologist. Frankly, it's a little irresponsible for you to be handing out advice like this.
"Therefore if you are being stalked and can avoid letting the stalker know how you feel about it, do that."
I suppose it does keep it from progressing to the vindictive stages, but they'll still continue at that stage for years, possibly even decades. People that fixated don't just "get bored", especially after sunk cost.
It can be surprisingly hard to fight this. As the author notes, even if the ramblings of the stalker are so obviously crazy, it still requires people to evaluate whether you could have done said actions and whether it is a risk to associate with you regardless.
My wife got dragged into a situation a while ago. She merely commented on a blog article about a man who had travelled to another country, got a woman pregnant, and then when the woman got sick and needed treatment, claimed it was a scam. In his mind it grew into a giant conspiracy. Anyone who didn't take his side was involved in this conspiracy, including the hospital, local business people, even the British Embassy was in on it apparently. And then my wife, for commenting on an article. I worked out that if you divided the hospital bill by the number of people he alleged were involved, they'd all make about $3 each.
The local community rallied behind the woman who was disadvantaged and could barely afford the bill. They tracked her down, obtained proof from the hospital, took photos and posted them (with permission) thinking that would clear up the allegations. He started to look for evidence in every blog post, image, comment and forum posting. Where you look for a pattern, given enough data, you start to find them. He tweaked his conspiracy theory to fit the patterns he found, offering them up as evidence. My wife's name ended up on a "website of scammers" he created. He set up free websites on many services, created videos which he cross posted to every video sharing site (surprisingly effective), set up blogs dedicated to his ramblings.
Eventually the community he was targeting with his hate had enough. Being computer literate they beat him at his own game, set up a domain that matched his real name, used masses of SEO and inbound links from networks of blogs they ran, and listed what he'd done on the website. Now whenever someone Googles his name or something related, they can see exactly what he's done. Since he worked as a freelance professional with schools, theatres and companies, this really was not good for him, and after that he seemed to vanish. I presume this was only effective because his own reputation could be used as leverage. If they have nothing to lose it would be a pretty bad situation, as the author has experienced.
I have another anecdote about a friend who tried to raise money in his community for victims of a disaster, only to be character assassinated by a fake facebook account. He stopped raising money and cut himself off from the community which is a real loss.
The only workable solution I've found: maintain absolute transparency with everyone in your various networks, and never, ever, ever respond to the animal in any way. It literally takes years for them to break off from the hunt, and there is no protection from their predation as long as they can still smell your blood. Your attention fuels their hatred and their psychosis.
Notifying their family or friends is counterproductive - they have been programmed to treat their predator as a victim and will attack you as well, multiplying the threat.
A mentally ill person - even one who is criminally so - is still a person, and not "the animal". Maybe you're just trying to hammer home the predator/hunt thing, but it still sounds really wrong to me. Whatever bad thing happened to you, don't let it corrupt your own sense of humanity.
I kept thinking if her emails were as batshit crazy as the author states, why not just post all of them online. Buy a domain and make a big public display of what a whackjob this person is. Allow her to publicly hang herself.
I suspect, as suggested in the comments, some or all of this is possibly fabricated for book sales? Otherwise, many of his responses don't make much sense. I think most would very quickly, and correctly, attempt to sue for defamation.
Notifying their family or friends is counterproductive - they have been programmed to treat their predator as a victim and will attack you as well, multiplying the threat.
A large percentage of stalkers believe they are being stalked by their target. They interpret every interaction (or lack thereof) with this person, no matter how mundane, in the context of this illusory and perverse relationship existing in the stalker's mind.
One terrifying thing is that, when a man has a well-liked female stalker (and in many places, a woman just has to be attractive to be well-liked) she often succeeds in destroying his reputation. There has to be a social power differential (teacher / student) or the man is likely to come out ruined, because of the behaviors OP describes.
James Lasdun is a writer who ... This essay is adapted from his new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, to be published next month by ...
"He has no integrity. He sells students' fiction to half-assed writers for personal profit and political reasons and makes it obvious because he's a psychotic who hates women and loves money. He is a rapist and sadist."
Now, while there's always the slim chance that he could have defaced his own page back in 2008 just to make it support a fake memoir about being stalked, it sounds a lot more likely that the stalking was real.
This is a promotional excerpt from his book, designed to entice you to buy it. Yes, he leaves out the ending in order to get you to buy the book. That doesn't mean that the book is a work of fiction.
Essay != fiction. Magazines publish excerpts from books that are about to be published, or have recently been published. In addition, writers try to sell their work, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
I have to admit I had the same feeling. In the book that inspired a movie based on a true story, Nareen is James Lasdun writing a memoir while stalking a student named Nareen.
I'm surprised the article didn't address the possibility that there was some mental illness involved. I assume the woman was in her early or mid 20's, an age where schizophrenia can manifest.
My guess as well, and it's mentioned in the comments in the link. I suppose the author didn't want to speculate on her motives and so didn't mention this.
Basically, as Nasreen had discovered, you can pretend to be anyone you want when you forward an article, and she had decided to pretend to be my old program director.
Does the general public really not realise that this is true of any email?
Perhaps there's a need for some kind of campaign to remind the population at large that the From: address on an email is no more reliable than the sender address typed on the back of an envelope.
Yeah, the general public really does not realize this. Or, even if they do, it's frequently not the first thing that they think of when getting an email from someone they know. You generally assume that the person is who you think it is, even if you know, intellectually, that there's a possibility someone could be impersonating them. Do you stop and think, for every email that you read, "hmm, maybe someone could have forged this"? No, you generally read it as if the person in the "from" address were writing it.
Now, you might wind up being skeptical if it sounds ludicrously different from how someone normally sounds. But when it's someone you only know tangentially in a professional setting, and the stalker tones it down a bit and doesn't sound too outrageous, the stalker might be able to slip plenty of stuff by without you realizing; or even if you do realize it's not them, it may cloud your perceptions.
Even when people can consciously identify a lie, it can change their perceptions later.
I'd be surprised if most people know that. On the other hand, I do get spam from all manner of famous people who don't really seem like the type to be selling v1agra online... seems like people might connect the dots.
A coworker of mine met a guy from a dating site, had a lousy date at a TGIF/Applebees/etc's, decided not to pursue and ended up with a serious stalker issue.
- Hundreds of texts over the next few weeks
- She didn't provide her address to him, yet he ended up tracking her down over the next few weeks
- He would drive 60 miles or so every morning before driving another 40 miles to start his 6am shift so that he could tape or nail a 10 or 20 page hand written letter to her door frame
- She would routinely leave work to find him asleep in his car in front of her house
- In a fit of rage over being ignored, he drove into and smashed down her garage door causing thousands of dollars of damage to her home
- Several arrests later, his behavior hadn't changed
She finally had to get a restraining order and have him arrested for violating it, the police contacted his place of employment and he was fired (he held a position with serious privacy and security restrictions, which is probably how he tracked her down) and to this day, a couple years later, she still has to look out her window before heading out to work to see if he's there.
All of this over a single 90 minute meeting over food to discuss shared interests.
> A deluge of e-mails poured into my inbox over the next few months. I deleted most without reading them.
What's best practice here? Set up filters to route them into a special folder? You never have to read them, but you've kept them in case you need to go to the police and courts?
You have to check them periodically to make sure the situation isn't escalating. For example, if they start threatening physical violence against you, you now have something to use to take legal action. And it's good to know if someone is planning to show up on your doorstep.
In my case, once the stalker started hitting my work email, my employer could step in and filter & review the messages for me (yeah, that was actually someone's job).
I rememebr when I was about 13 years old my friends and I used ICQ to chat online. One of my friends had an acquaintance who thought it was amusing to 'hack' their chat client. It wasn't particularly complicated or malicious, but she would do it persistently every night and this made it impossible to chat. We knew who it was because they would quite openly brag about it. But we also knew who their dialup ISP was. So we faked an email written by the ISP telling this person to stop what they were doing or legal action would be taken etc. We just changed the 'from' address in the email from a throaway hotmail account. They could have easily worked out that the email was fake, but we figured they would be so mortified that they wouldn't get that far. We were right. The problem stopped immediately and never happened again.
I can't help but think that this category of solution would be useful here, although there is a fine ethical line to tread...
This article was riveting. It's rare that I read such a long piece, but it's really well written. Particularly when it occurs that disturbingly, I have no better way to check the veracity of the words here than anyone else would of the words written by "Nasreen". Reminds me of Ghost in the Shell.
I recall when I was in Wikipedia that perverted-justice.org (or PeeJ for short) accused me of supporting paedophiles, and a whole bunch more. Luckily, I had been against the "Childlove Movement" article and wanted it changed significantly, and when they saw that they published an apology.
Stalking can ruin reputations - it was a hell of a scary thing.
What resonated with me was the sinking feeling you get when you're defending yourself to a third party, thinking or knowing that the stalker has already put in place some counter-evidence to your rebuttal.
It's important to develop a strong emotional instinct of conviction based on your own beliefs rather than the natural method of holding convictions viz. based on what is popular knowledge at that time.
If such a story doesn't sell you on the ideas of rigor and corroboration, then there's probably no hope for you. Gripping, true or not, and a reminder that we often accept as truth far more than we should.
I used to think being a professor was a boring and safe profession. Boy was I wrong! I hope his student can receive the appropriate mental counseling to live a more normal and fulfilling life.
You never know what craziness is commonly found in the student population until it starts showing up in your office hours. Remember, if you deal with thousands of somewhat random people, you will have had to deal with dozens of seriously crazy people.
If anyone here is concerned that someone in their life might be a danger to them, I would encourage them to read 'The Gift of Fear' by Gavin de Becker: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0440226198
[+] [-] hexonexxon|13 years ago|reply
We went from crapflooding and email bombing each other to him constantly phoning and writing everybody I knew or worked for and my school in an attempt to screw me over through the years. Every girlfriend I had he tried to fake pics of me 'cheating' on her and spammed their social accounts and email/phone. In turn I stupidly escalated and baited him through side channel attacking his box, wiping his drive countless times, hacking his blog countless times, and destroying his credit score through fraud. This goes on for a few years each personal attack gaining in pwnstastic levels of revenge. He even had badly packaged illegal drugs sent to me from overseas hoping customs would intercept it and bust me but somehow they arrived safely and for weeks I wondered how I ended up with a bunch of drugs in the mail. I then countered by further driving his credit score into the grave to the point collection agencies were after him and his family, and was able to wipe all his sites faster than he could put them back up again.
At one point during this insanity when I was 17, he started filing fake police reports to have me purposely picked up on a Friday to serve time all weekend before I could see a judge and have the bogus charges thrown out start of business day Monday. For revenge I did something incredibly stupid with the 911 system and he landed in the state pen for almost 3 months.
When I was about to turn 18, after years of us going back and forth escalating our stupidity I came down with a sudden case of ethics, plead out to meddling with 911 so he would get released, plead out to fraud to reinstate his credit score, paid out compensation and received probation in family court forbidding me from touching a computer for 2 years. He also plead out to filing false police reports, fraud and harassment, was sentenced to time served, compensation and 4yrs probation in adult court. Both of us forbidden to touch a computer and go after each other. That was 8 years ago.
It should have been over but he's still to this day trying to track me down from half way across the globe as both of us don't use real identities anywhere on the internet anymore and our real names turn up a black hole. Once in awhile I'll meet up with some old friends or employers when I come back to my old city for holidays and they'll tell me about how this sweaty-toothed madman keeps calling looking for me. I will also from time to time see various articles or comments written in my name which is him trying to lure me out of obscurity to resume our epic battle of the ages.
[+] [-] veb|13 years ago|reply
I've been using the Internet, IRC etc since I was about 8. Not until I was about 21 did I ever use my real name, address etc.
You state the guy is "mentally ill", but can't the same be said of you if you're retaliating? It's just the same thing, really!
[+] [-] sgdesign|13 years ago|reply
It's scary to know you can send someone to jail for 3 month, but at the same time knowing how you did it would be quite interesting.
[+] [-] taproot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbmil99|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
We deal with stalkers on a regular basis, cam sites and stalking seem to go hand-in-hand. If you're ever in the position of being stalked please do the following:
- never ever respond to the stalker
- save each and every message
- pre-emptively alert everybody in your surroundings that they might contact, explain everything and make sure they also never respond, and ask them to alert you if they are contacted.
- formally alert law enforcement
- forward each and every message received, posting made and so on to law enforcement (yes, that can be a nuisance, and yes it can be embarrassing but if you want them to sooner or later take action they have to be aware of how bad it really is).
Over the years this has dealt with the large majority of cases. The few that are not amendable (for instance, because you don't know who the stalker is!) are far more serious and will need a lot more work to resolve.
The most important thing to remember is that stalkers feed on your attention and your pain, the more feedback they get from you and your environment the longer it will go on.
If this happens to you (it has happened to me...) then I wish you much good luck and I hope that it will end sooner rather than later.
One tactic that we have deployed that is quite effective is to counter stalk the stalkers and to expose them publicly.
Stalkers are usually not first time offenders and likely will stalk again in the future. It helps to have them easily googlable.
[+] [-] YokoZar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
The first one is that stalkers try to convince themselves that the object of their desire would love them back if they only had a chance. When they learn otherwise, desire can easily flip to hatred, then to attempts to destroy a life. Therefore if you are being stalked and can avoid letting the stalker know how you feel about it, do that. You can see that one in play in this case where she pursued him for years, without the nasty behavior, until she realized that he didn't love her. Then she turned vindictive.
The second tip is that if you're going to stalk someone, don't stalk a psychiatrist. It is very, very hard for anyone other than a psychiatrist to get someone committed to an institution until after the stalker has committed a conventional crime. However if you're stalking a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist can, as a professional psychiatrist, evaluate you and decide to institutionalize you. And whatever institution you go to - which is generally associated with said psychiatrist - is likely to support the psychiatrist in that evaluation.
[+] [-] mwetzler|13 years ago|reply
I've been told, and believe, that the only course of action for the stalked is to COMPLETELY IGNORE the stalker, until something threatening and legally actionable happens.
Anything else you do, positive or negative, simply adds fuel to the fire.
It really sucks and makes you feel helpless, but the legal system simply doesn't offer any refuge for stalking victims unless it passes a certain threat threshold.
After about a year of ignoring him, my stalker got bored. But I still fear his return. I got a single tweet from him about 6months ago that made me worry for a bit, but it was just 1 single tweet and didn't continue.
[+] [-] mherdeg|13 years ago|reply
A close friend was stalked for years by someone who sent increasingly threatening e-mails to him, his ex-girlfriend, and her family with varying From: lines.
Local police in three different states were pretty sure my friend was the culprit because he knew a lot about computers. He got a restraining order and a pretty harsh interrogation; under the stress, he ended up failing out of university. The stalker got away with this stuff for years and never got close to getting caught.
The bad guy's mistake was to start sending e-mail with a "From:" line of a Department of Homeland Security agent. Turns out the FBI knows their stuff and does not tolerate this nonsense, and they unravelled the situation within about a week.
It also turns out that "impersonating a federal agent" is much worse than ordinary stalking — the bad guy is serving a 15-year prison sentence.
[+] [-] ignostic|13 years ago|reply
No, this is not always the right answer. What you're saying is basically, "lead the stalker on."
How to handle the stalker depends on what kind of mental illness (if any) they are afflicted with. Depending on what's going on in the stalker's head, they may often fly off the handle, get angry, but then (fairly quickly) find a new target to focus their energy on. With many people, the longer you draw the rejection out, the worse it gets.
Here's some better advice: get in contact with a good lawyer and a good psychologist. Frankly, it's a little irresponsible for you to be handing out advice like this.
[+] [-] coryl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illuminate|13 years ago|reply
I suppose it does keep it from progressing to the vindictive stages, but they'll still continue at that stage for years, possibly even decades. People that fixated don't just "get bored", especially after sunk cost.
[+] [-] arcatek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomc|13 years ago|reply
My wife got dragged into a situation a while ago. She merely commented on a blog article about a man who had travelled to another country, got a woman pregnant, and then when the woman got sick and needed treatment, claimed it was a scam. In his mind it grew into a giant conspiracy. Anyone who didn't take his side was involved in this conspiracy, including the hospital, local business people, even the British Embassy was in on it apparently. And then my wife, for commenting on an article. I worked out that if you divided the hospital bill by the number of people he alleged were involved, they'd all make about $3 each.
The local community rallied behind the woman who was disadvantaged and could barely afford the bill. They tracked her down, obtained proof from the hospital, took photos and posted them (with permission) thinking that would clear up the allegations. He started to look for evidence in every blog post, image, comment and forum posting. Where you look for a pattern, given enough data, you start to find them. He tweaked his conspiracy theory to fit the patterns he found, offering them up as evidence. My wife's name ended up on a "website of scammers" he created. He set up free websites on many services, created videos which he cross posted to every video sharing site (surprisingly effective), set up blogs dedicated to his ramblings.
Eventually the community he was targeting with his hate had enough. Being computer literate they beat him at his own game, set up a domain that matched his real name, used masses of SEO and inbound links from networks of blogs they ran, and listed what he'd done on the website. Now whenever someone Googles his name or something related, they can see exactly what he's done. Since he worked as a freelance professional with schools, theatres and companies, this really was not good for him, and after that he seemed to vanish. I presume this was only effective because his own reputation could be used as leverage. If they have nothing to lose it would be a pretty bad situation, as the author has experienced.
I have another anecdote about a friend who tried to raise money in his community for victims of a disaster, only to be character assassinated by a fake facebook account. He stopped raising money and cut himself off from the community which is a real loss.
[+] [-] jpxxx|13 years ago|reply
Notifying their family or friends is counterproductive - they have been programmed to treat their predator as a victim and will attack you as well, multiplying the threat.
[+] [-] gosu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dickbasedregex|13 years ago|reply
I suspect, as suggested in the comments, some or all of this is possibly fabricated for book sales? Otherwise, many of his responses don't make much sense. I think most would very quickly, and correctly, attempt to sue for defamation.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|13 years ago|reply
A large percentage of stalkers believe they are being stalked by their target. They interpret every interaction (or lack thereof) with this person, no matter how mundane, in the context of this illusory and perverse relationship existing in the stalker's mind.
One terrifying thing is that, when a man has a well-liked female stalker (and in many places, a woman just has to be attractive to be well-liked) she often succeeds in destroying his reputation. There has to be a social power differential (teacher / student) or the man is likely to come out ruined, because of the behaviors OP describes.
[+] [-] geoka9|13 years ago|reply
James Lasdun is a writer who ... This essay is adapted from his new book, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, to be published next month by ...
I can't help but feel that I've been had.
[+] [-] lambda|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Lasdun&d...
"He has no integrity. He sells students' fiction to half-assed writers for personal profit and political reasons and makes it obvious because he's a psychotic who hates women and loves money. He is a rapist and sadist."
Now, while there's always the slim chance that he could have defaced his own page back in 2008 just to make it support a fake memoir about being stalked, it sounds a lot more likely that the stalking was real.
This is a promotional excerpt from his book, designed to entice you to buy it. Yes, he leaves out the ending in order to get you to buy the book. That doesn't mean that the book is a work of fiction.
[+] [-] projectileboy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klenwell|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalJack|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoPiece|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azakai|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|13 years ago|reply
Does the general public really not realise that this is true of any email?
Perhaps there's a need for some kind of campaign to remind the population at large that the From: address on an email is no more reliable than the sender address typed on the back of an envelope.
[+] [-] lambda|13 years ago|reply
Now, you might wind up being skeptical if it sounds ludicrously different from how someone normally sounds. But when it's someone you only know tangentially in a professional setting, and the stalker tones it down a bit and doesn't sound too outrageous, the stalker might be able to slip plenty of stuff by without you realizing; or even if you do realize it's not them, it may cloud your perceptions.
Even when people can consciously identify a lie, it can change their perceptions later.
[+] [-] monochromatic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|13 years ago|reply
- Hundreds of texts over the next few weeks
- She didn't provide her address to him, yet he ended up tracking her down over the next few weeks
- He would drive 60 miles or so every morning before driving another 40 miles to start his 6am shift so that he could tape or nail a 10 or 20 page hand written letter to her door frame
- She would routinely leave work to find him asleep in his car in front of her house
- In a fit of rage over being ignored, he drove into and smashed down her garage door causing thousands of dollars of damage to her home
- Several arrests later, his behavior hadn't changed
She finally had to get a restraining order and have him arrested for violating it, the police contacted his place of employment and he was fired (he held a position with serious privacy and security restrictions, which is probably how he tracked her down) and to this day, a couple years later, she still has to look out her window before heading out to work to see if he's there.
All of this over a single 90 minute meeting over food to discuss shared interests.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
What's best practice here? Set up filters to route them into a special folder? You never have to read them, but you've kept them in case you need to go to the police and courts?
[+] [-] mwetzler|13 years ago|reply
In my case, once the stalker started hitting my work email, my employer could step in and filter & review the messages for me (yeah, that was actually someone's job).
[+] [-] iloveponies|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|13 years ago|reply
I can't help but think that this category of solution would be useful here, although there is a fine ethical line to tread...
[+] [-] marvin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neltnerb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|13 years ago|reply
Stalking can ruin reputations - it was a hell of a scary thing.
[+] [-] acak|13 years ago|reply
It's important to develop a strong emotional instinct of conviction based on your own beliefs rather than the natural method of holding convictions viz. based on what is popular knowledge at that time.
[+] [-] damian2000|13 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Give-Me-Everything-You-Have/dp/0374219...
[+] [-] yock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantankerous|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarou|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btilly|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pja|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betelnut|13 years ago|reply
https://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/former-u-of-texas-stud...