Part three.
I will start off by adding a trigger warning to this story as it contains details of abuse, harassment, gaslighting, stalking, intimidation, and domestic violence.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please contact 1800RESPECT or 1800 737 732 (Australia) or 000 in an emergency.
Do not hope that it will go away, or that people who do this will stop, because they will not, do not give someone the freedom to harass and intimidate you, please tell the police or someone you trust, so that this person can be held accountable, put your safety first.
I have chosen to leave out the most traumatic parts of this story, possibly I will write a piece on this in the future, but now is not the time, it may never be. I have also left out identifying details about my abuser’s appearance along with specific dates, to protect their identity (to my abuser, if you are reading this, and I know you seek me out online, do not think I will not press charges if you begin to harass, threaten, or stalk me again, I know everything! Do not even go there. I will come at you with the full force of the law and with the support of friends and family who love me and care for my welfare).
At this point, I had worked up the strength to ignore CL’s calls and threats to show up at my house, he acted exactly as I knew he would, he went from condescending and patronizing, to making me seem like I was being unfair, to screaming at me and calling me non-stop for hours on end, to then threatening me, getting in the car, and heading over anyway. At that time, he did not live close by either, it was a good 45-minute drive away.
When I made it very clear to CL that if he continues to keep driving, I will be calling the police, for the first time, I did not feel fear when laying down this boundary, but anger. I was so sick to death of this constant drama in my life, I felt like I had not slept for months, because of the incessant phone calls, threats, and unwanted visits.
CL then went from aggression to crying hysterically … now this is where CL started trying to guilt trip me, into spending the night with him, because he had surgery the next day. I held my ground and flat out refused.
To give context, about CL’s now desperately pressing medical issue, he had a large lump on his back, and tried to get attention and sympathy from me over this, quite early on. I was familiar with this sort of lump already, as a friend of mind had one in a similar spot years earlier, and I accompanied them to the doctor, as they were so concerned it was something serious.
When I saw this mass, I just said “Oh, it is a lipoma, my friend had quite a few of them, and even the doctor he saw, had a very large one on his own hand.” I do not think CL expected me to react like this, so he then claimed he had a smaller “tumour” sitting under the lipoma, which was pressing on his spinal cord, and surgery would be highly risky, and he was likely to become a paraplegic.
He got especially fixated on this lump, (and stories of multiple attempts by doctors to unsuccessfully remove it) around the time that I was recovering from my own very real, life-threatening medical complications (that I later found out were the direct actions of CL when he attempted to put me back in the same situation again, in the weeks after I cut him out of my life).
The next morning, after CL had told me he was already half way to my house, and that I had told him to turn around and go home, he called me hysterically crying, and saying that he was so worried he would be paralysed from this surgery he was having that day, I replied with “you won’t be able to drive there and back, I will pick you up and take you to the hospital, and also take you home”. I do not think he factored in my offer, when he told me about this surgery, because he then started tripping up on his story, refused to allow me to take him to the hospital, and told me that he will drive or take an Uber.
It also seemed very odd to me that such a risky surgery, with a team of specialists, would only be a day procedure …
I was calling his bluff; now I was angry!
After his waterworks, and not long after getting off the phone to me, he calls back and says, “I am so poorly, they cannot do surgery on me, my iron is too low, and I lost too much weight, so it has been cancelled.”
Bullshit.
The trauma of me refusing to let him come over the night before made him loose a significant amount of weight?, I do not think so, the comment about the iron deficiency … now that was a desperate attempt to gain sympathy, as I was in a deep recovery after significant blood loss and was dealing with anaemia from that.
The comment about being too “poorly” made me want to vomit in my mouth, the acting was terrible! I felt like I was living one of those mid-day soap opera TV shows, that I wagged school to watch in the early 2000’s, in a country town with only two TV stations.
I knew CL was getting desperate. He was doing extremely irrational things, like messaging to say that he was getting tattoos of my designs that very day, trying to put all this stress and weight on me, ironically the same designs he tried to force me to re-work.
Around this time CL started telling me that “your friends are threatening me on social media, and now I have to change my phone number again, and you need to do something about it.” That sounded extremely off to me, my friends would never do that for a start, they have their own lives and don’t partake in petty drama, and even if they were messaging him, they would of run it by me first … most of my friends did not even know about him or this situation.
This progressed to CL sending me screenshots to my email (as he was blocked on all my social media), in these screenshots it showed multiple conversations with friends of mine and even an ex, with their profile pictures clearly shown, as these were all conversations that were taking place on Facebook.
The chats showed CL being threatened, and then him replying with condescending one liners, and his own threats of legal action. It got to a point that I stopped reading these emails, as they would have been about two pages long each, telling me how ugly and stupid I am in intimate detail, nothing was off limits, with threats against my family also. I received so many of these emails over such a long period of time, that I always expected to log in and see more.
CL liked to continuously say in these emails, that he hoped I get raped and murdered, because that is what I deserve.
He then started adding more attachments to these emails, showing that he was sending nude photos of me to my friends and ex-partner through Facebook chat, I used to do art nude modelling when I was younger, so he was really grasping at straws by sending these photos. This was right before the new revenge porn laws came into effect, and I had been close to taking copies of all these threats to the police station.
I also started getting message requests from a man I do not know, he said that he had heard I had problems with CL, and that he was going to take care of it. I replied with something to the effect of “I do not know you, and I have not told anyone about my problems with CL” remember in part one, when I said that CL liked to call me things like “champ”, well this mystery vigilante, liked to use that word too, in fact all of the language he used was very familiar.
I rarely returned any of these emails, but I did reply at some point to say that I had never in my life, received so many messages from random people I do not know, and never have any of my friends ever threatened anyone. I told CL so many times to leave me alone and stop contacting me, but nothing deterred the harassment, and getting so many threatening messages, and screenshots of things he had sent to friends and my ex, along with the conversations he was having with them, just induced the most horrendous anxiety, this person was trying to destroy my life by any means possible, and he went to great lengths to do so.
I had ignored all these messages for a little while and of course that meant CL was going to just invite himself over, I dreaded hearing a car pull into my driveway and was always worried that it would be him. One day my worst fears eventuated, and he pulled up when I did not expect it, stormed down my driveway, and let himself in to my home, demanding money he thought I owed him, and going through my personal belongings looking for anything he had ever bought me.
I am not going to detail the rest of the events that transpired that day for my own wellbeing.
This prolonged assault on every aspect of my life made me feel like a prisoner, not only in my own home but because he was using technology to harass me too, it was relentless. I permanently had my curtains and blinds closed, music or the tv had to be low, so I could pretend I was not home in case he turned up again. I did not even want to leave my house in case he was waiting outside or following me.
CL had also mentioned many times, that he knew how to easily break into houses, and had those crooked police friends I mentioned earlier, So I was on such high alert, that at one point I almost considered changing my legal name.
After this last visit from CL, I had called my service provider to block CL’s number, but I had an old phone that did not allow me to do so. The tech support person that I had spoken to, told me to go out right that moment, and to buy a new phone, get a new number, and to contact the police, I was thankful to speak to someone who showed compassion and that understood the gravity of the situation … it was a real wake up call to have someone from a mobile phone provider, break their usual script and tell me to go and take action.
I went and bought a new phone, changed my number and all my passwords (because CL always seemed to know where I was, or knew details of private conversations I had, I came to the realisation that I was most likely being monitored) I forced myself to become more tech savvy and to start protecting myself in any way that I could.
I also decided it was time to contact his ex-fiancé (his youngest son’s mother) and to ask her how dangerous he really was, because I bet, she has faced the same harassment, I was going to contact his mother too. But of course, I could not find them anymore, and it was clear that CL had made sure that everyone blocked me. He was one step ahead and knew I was going to start asking them questions.
But the one person I could contact… was Alex … who was more than willing to meet with me and talk to me.
So, this is where the truth pin dropped, and CL’s house of cards started to crumble.
I told Alex about the emails I was receiving, the phone calls, and that CL was messaging all my friends and my ex.
He then replied, “You know dad has multiple work phones, right?”
My heart just dropped.
Alex had been kicked out, and we had been barred from contacting each other, because CL knew how much I was going to uncover.
All those 2am phone calls, the ones where a concerned friend, of a man I was supposedly hitting on, contacted CL to tell him?
That was CL on another phone (which was given to him by his neighbour) … calling himself.
All those messages with screenshots of my friends threating CL on Facebook? That was him on duplicate accounts of my friends and ex, that he created, messaging himself … which is why the language used, looked off to me.
That vigilante contacting me, to say they would get CL to leave me alone, the one who liked using the word “champ” … that was CL too.
Do not forget that CL had also been using Alex’s social media account to blackmail me, as mentioned in part two of this story.
Remember how enraged CL was, that he had to pay child support for 18 years of Alex’s life?
Well, he had never given Alex’s mother a dollar, which leads me to believe that his claims of paying an absurd amount for his younger son, were also fabricated.
I knew in my gut this was all him, but until that point, I never thought someone would go to this kind of effort and detail to harass someone over a prolonged period. I did hear from CL every now and then, but I would ignore him completely, and was ready to bring all of this to the police.
CL tried to bait me into meeting with him, using excuses such as finally returning all the sentimental things he had taken from my house, like old books I had had since my teenage years and jewellery I had designed and had made years earlier, he then said he would post these things to me when I refused to meet, but I now realise he would have been fishing for details about where I was. I never got these things back, and by this point, I did not care.
I thought that he was finally completely out of my life, when not that long ago, he found me on a new social media account … and messaged me… he found it so fast, that it was like he continually looked for me.
He told me he stumbled across it, and he was doing me a favour by telling me I “should make the account privat” yes, that spelling error was intentional too. He misspelled a few specific words all the time, so it was getting easy to catch him out.
Within that message, he mentioned that he has seen I now have a new baby, and I felt so violated that he would even talk about her, I blocked him immediately, and told my partner to be aware of anyone matching CL’s description, coming anywhere near us, and to just call the police right away, without engaging with him.
But again, he found me on another business/art account and started his weird act of making out like he now must change his details, like he is being stalked, and said something to the effect of “Just block me again on this one too” … which of course I did. I do not think I even read the whole message, because people like him thrive on causing immense stress for others, and I was not going to put up with it for another minute!
I felt for a long time that I could not do anything to stop this harassment, let alone act, because the more drastic measures I took, the sneakier he got at trying to ruin my life, such as all the manipulation where he used technology as a tool. It was incredibly suffocating and damaging.
After speaking with a councillor that was offered to me through a clinic, I was made very aware how dangerous this situation was, the councillor I had been speaking to, when hearing the full details of this story (especially the worst parts I have left out) told me that she also works with men, that have been court ordered to seek counselling related to domestic violence, and what I had been going through was one of the worst accounts of harassment she had heard, and that CL was extremely dangerous.
People who have never experienced this sort of intimidation and harassment, really do not understand, the effects that is has on the victim. They do not understand, how you are made to believe, that any attempt to get away from it, will result in an even worse situation, or that you have been gaslighted into thinking that you are making a big deal over nothing.
It is truly soul destroying.
It is also extremely isolating, but you do not have to tackle it alone, I tried to combat this by myself, and really thought that I could get it under control, I wish that I had of told more people about it while it was happening, but I did not want CL to start targeting anyone who tried to help. I now realise how much support I would have had, and that he would have been charged.
It was a big deal.
This is happening to so many people whose story will never be heard, and it is something I think about often, if you are reading this, and someone tells you they are being abused, take it seriously, because I guarantee you are only hearing a tiny fraction of what is happening, and please …
Enough of the victim blaming … take a step back and really think about that.
I will be writing the final instalment of this story in the coming days, centred around healing after abuse.
