Part two.
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).
Here we go!
In part one of this story, I had left off with finding out that CL had a long lost, estranged adult son. CL must have not long been out of high school when he found out he was going to be a father, and his ex-girlfriend had moved to the other side of Australia. CL did not have much to do with his son, but they did stay in touch.
Now, CL also had a younger son with another woman, a child that I knew about and had met many times before. CL expressed to me that he was very angry that he had to pay child support for his first born, for eighteen years of his oldest son’s life, and I heard that many times over the coming weeks. Both of CL’s son’s mothers, were painted as being promiscuous, deceptive, and mentally unwell or having issues with drugs and alcohol, I had met the youngest son’s mother, and she was lovely, and a beautiful looking woman, I never believed the things that were said about her.
One thing that really stood out to me about his youngest son’s mother, was that CL claimed she had run away with the DJ they were going to hire for their wedding, and that she left CL for this man. He claims that he was going to take the mother of his youngest to court, for a custody battle, and the night before court, that she agreed to his terms, and so CL dropped the case. He then claims that she packed up and moved two hours away, over-night, and took the son with her and her new boyfriend.
All these stories never added up and I always believed that those were the actions of a woman fleeing a dangerous situation, and an event I witnessed in my home one night confirmed this. CL had his son for the holidays, and his ex-partner had phoned to ask if he could come home a little early, I cannot remember why, maybe they had a trip away or the mother really missed her son, it was something to that effect.
CL LOST IT! He was screaming into the phone at his ex-partner, while his young son watched on, and then when his son wanted to talk to his mother, the amount of times CL’s ex-partner was saying “I love you” to her child seemed suspiciously over the top, it was almost in every second sentence, I honestly believe that she was actually worried about her son being with his father, as opposed to being an overbearing parent.
I will note here, I never witnessed CL be anything than what appeared to be a good “fun” father, but in saying that, one day he told his son who must have been about eight at the time, to say “dad, says you are a bitch” to me … so there is that.
When CL’s older adult son, who I am going to call “Alex” for the sake of this story, moved in with him, things escalated significantly. There was a lot of tension and a lot of aggression between the two of them, and I started to witness CL manipulating Alex and doing things to set him off, or rope him in to drama with other people, such as a friend of CL that I had never met … in fact, I never met any of his friends.
We were in a supermarket one day, and a man just looked in my direction, which was enough to make CL start spewing abuse, then telling Alex, that this complete stranger was looking at me “weird” then roping him into a fictitious confrontation at the checkout. Things like this were not uncommon, but compared to what was on the horizon … all of this was nothing.
I felt that the more boundaries I put into place, and the more that I was trying to create distance, the tighter CL was grasping on to me, he also started telling me that his mother was now dying of cancer, while I do know that she was unwell, I suspect that this was greatly exaggerated at the time. CL’s mother did end up in hospital for her broken ankle, that had completely distorted and was at a complete 90-degree angle, and she and CL seemed to create these huge barriers for her to get the proper treatment needed.
While CL’s mother was in hospital, we had to go and feed her two dogs … It was a horrific scene, the house was unbearable to be in, piled high with rubbish and boxes, food, and filth, but the back yard was something else. I had never been in the yard until now, and it was overgrown, filled with dog faeces and rubbish, I felt sharp stinging in my legs and realised that fleas were covering me to the knees! And I do not mean one or two, there were so many I could not count them, I had never seen anything like it in my life!
I wanted to get rid of this family so badly!
But here is where things start to get even weirder … Alex starts sending me strange messages, and flirting with me in a very overt way, which put me in an even worse situation than I was already trying to distance myself from. It gets to a point that he says to me in a message, “If you don’t send me nude photos, I am going to tell dad we hooked up.”
Could things get worse!
Yes, yes, they can.
By this point I am so tired, worn out, and feeling so trapped that I don’t know what to do, If I ignore CL completely and don’t take his calls, he shows up at my house and refuses to leave, it was getting to a point that I would take his calls and tell him whatever he wanted to hear, just so he would not come to my home.
His over-bearing jealousy also meant that he would start doing unpredictable things, I was forever on eggshells wondering what he was going to do next, If I even touched my phone after 9pm, to answer emails about work, he would be set off into a rage about how “inappropriate it is, to send work emails at night-time” he would then demand to go through my phone.
This person makes my skin absolutely crawl, I don’t think I have ever been repulsed by anyone this much before, but getting him away from me felt like a miliary operation, and I had to be careful.
The new element I was now facing of blackmail, continued for the next few weeks, and I had to keep replying these messages with, “if this continues, I am going to have to talk to your dad about this, and you know how bad that will be, do not make me have to do that” come holiday time, and I was having an orphan’s Christmas at my home, I had already celebrated with my children and they were with family for the night. I had CL over, Alex and another male friend, who for the story will be named “Judas,” that I no longer associate with. It was meant to just be a couple of drinks and dinner.
Now CL decides to go and have a nap, which I thought was very strange as he never leaves me alone, ever, to the point that if I were having a shower, he would pull open the shower curtain and sit on the bathroom floor, I remember one time I was on the toilet, and he just opens the toilet door! No knocking nothing! And just sits on the floor in my laundry! I was not even allowed to be in the toilet alone. It was so soul destroying to feel so angry, have my space and boundaries so violated and not be able to do anything to stop it, without having CL harass me even further.
So given what I just mentioned, being alone with Alex while CL took a day nap, was weird to me. Alex was polite and caused me no trouble, which given all the messages I had been receiving from him, seemed odd.
Come night-time, Judas had already arrived in the afternoon, we had all been drinking and having dinner together, everything seemed to be fairly calm. But while we were all watching a movie together, I mentioned that another friend had asked to come by to say hello, and CL just lost it! I was forbidden from having this friend drop in, because as CL stated “I do not know this person, so they cannot come over” which made me so infuriated, I, a grown woman was being told I cannot have a friend come over to my own home!
Then Alex also started backing up CL and refusing to let this person come over, that was it, I just lost it, I was so angry by this point. Alex came to sit with me and try to calm me down, kneeling on the floor and holding my arms, looking back on it, now I see that he wanted to bring this situation down before it got out of control. But CL was now in one of his spins, he ordered that Alex go to bed, and Alex was not having it, telling his father that he was going to stay up and watch a movie.
Judas, who they saw as non-threatening, because they assumed he was not interested in women, then somehow decided it would be an appropriate time to put his hand on my leg! What the hell! Someone who had never displayed this behaviour before, who I saw as a very close friend, was just another sleaze bag, at the time all I could think was, if CL saw this, I am going to pay for it, for attention I don’t even want!
I have since cut ties with this person, after a long healing journey, I started to see all my toxic friendships very clearly, and now remain extremely protective of my space.
Months of pent-up anger just exploded out of me, and no amount of manipulation or gaslighting, to make me think that I was over-reacting, was going to calm me down. I came out at some point and said that Alex was blackmailing me, and I would not stand for it, what kind of dysfunctional family were they!? And I wanted everyone out of my house.
Alex then started panicking, I tried to show CL the messages as proof, but Alex had deleted the most incriminating ones from the chat, although it was obvious that parts of the conversation were missing.
By this point Alex had disappeared to the back of my yard with CL following behind. After a time, CL came back into the house, he had been talking Alex of a ledge who was apparently saying he was going to take his own life.
So, this is where you might need to hold my tequila!
CL was very calm, and for a psychotically jealous man, who just found out his son had been pursuing the woman, that he himself was obsessed with … No, that was not making sense at all.
CL then comes out and says this.
“I asked Alex to send those messages to see what you would do.”
Oh nope! that is it! I wanted them out, right now!
CL refused to leave, and I got to a point I just said “fine, you stay, but I am leaving!” CL was chasing me down the road, and the more he tried to justify his actions and the more flustered he was becoming, because he knew that he had pushed Alex too far, and that a lot of truth was about to come out, and the more he started tripping over his own lies.
Was it Alex sending those messages?
It was not!
Turns out it was CL, sending those messages from Alex’s account! He himself, had deleted those messages from the chat, which is why he was not phased when I said that I had proof of my claims. That is why he did not look shocked when I said that I was being blackmailed!
I then went back to my house because CL was refusing to leave me alone, and I was going to get them out of my house and out of my life! Right now.
Things became so completely out of control, Alex snapped, and we had a showdown of an altercation, I felt like he should have told me the truth, he knew what his dad was doing to me, and he did nothing to stop it. Keep in mind, that Alex and I had never had the freedom to talk without being monitored by CL, so looking back now, he would not of even had an opportunity to do anything and he himself was being manipulated. His dad had painted me as a cheating girlfriend (even though we were not together!).
Alex had become so enraged, that CL had to take him home, I was so incredibly relieved that they were leaving my house!
I did not see Alex again for a long time, CL made sure that we had no way to speak to each other and I was not even to speak Alex’s name.
I also found out that CL is pretty sure Alex is not his son, but his brother’s!
You know the one? His brother that stabbed him! Yeh, that one.
I went on to believe that they had both been playing a really sick manipulative game, to keep me on extreme high alert, where I would be trying to end the secret blackmailing, but also for CL not to find out, because I would be the one to wear the blame and face the wrath over a situation, that I had zero control over.
Again, why did I put up with this? You will come to find out the degree of stalking and harassment I was dealing with, and was to come, that made reporting this seem like a futile act.
Things had calmed down for a week or so, Alex had found somewhere else to live, and because CL had his younger son with him during school holidays, he would be a little less aggressive, he was also busier, and had to divide his obsession with me, between caring for his child.
We were still caring CL’s mother’s dogs, and the last time I went there to feed them, we could only find one little dog, the poor thing covered in dreadlocks and fleas. We were looking everywhere for the other dog, and then behind a stack of rubbish we found him, dead and bloated … I felt a combination of disgust and sadness, but also fear. This was going to set CL off and give him another angle to spin more “woe is me” stories and put more pressure on me to be with him all the time.
Sadly, CL also had a dog, that he got from his mother’s dogs’ litter of puppies, and this poor thing was never allowed inside the house and was also covered in dreadlocks, it was confined to a tiny concrete yard that was just filled with faeces. I was constantly asking him to take this dog for a walk, or to the groomers, but conveniently, his groomer was always on holiday. In the end, a genuinely concerned neighbour intervened for the dog’s welfare, if they did not, I was going to have to.
Cl always had excuses as to why things such as his dog, were not taken care of. He had an old vintage car that he would talk about constantly, that to me looked like a shell, he would try and say that it was not running because his mechanic took a few thousand dollars and then went off on an extremely long holiday without doing the work … He would also try to say that a man passing by his house, tried to buy this car for fifty thousand Australian dollars, I believe all of this to be a straight up fabrication.
This particular lie has to be one of the most ridiculous of all. We watched a movie one day (he was obsessed with cinema, comic books, cartoons, and collectables) it was a foreign horror movie and in this horror movie, the characters were being haunted by a ghost, and they would wake up with burn marks on their mattresses, that left the perfect outline of a human body.
Not even a week later CL comes out with “My friend was being haunted by ghosts, and he would wake up, with burn marks on his mattress that looked like a body!”
My God! I wanted to say, “so you know you watched that movie with me, right?” but it was not worth setting him off.
He also claims to have partied with a famous Australian actress, and to have some secret dirt on her, along with kissing an American Rock Goddess … ok … sure.
There were so many lies that were starting to unravel.
Remember when I said that he claimed he was paying his mother’s mortgage? Well! On a shopping trip with her, I noticed that he was going to the bank and withdrawing money to pay his mother’s mortgage.
Withdrawing money from her account!
He was not paying it at all! All these times we had been to the bank, it was her bank! He was just withdrawing his mother’s money in cash to pay the bills.
CL must have realised that I was catching onto some of his lies by this point, as he was becoming fanatic about leaving me alone, and if I ever questioned anything he would go from zero to one hundred in terms of anger. One night I checked the door was locked as I always do, and because he had locked it earlier, felt that I was undermining and challenging him for doing that. These rants of rage would last for hours, and then he would wait until I am upset and snap back at him, before laughing and saying something patronizing and calling me a degrading pet name.
Around about this time he also started a mysterious bout of sleep talking.
The topic?
Me, always me.
He would be saying things like “oh yeh, I just feel sorry for her” “she is a whore” “she is ugly” and then hysterically laughing.
He was a bad actor; I knew it was all his desperate attempt at destroying me.
I started saying very firmly to him, “do not come over!” and then turning my phone off, which of course meant he would then just show up. On one occasion he showed up around dinner time, and I was finishing up an art project before starting to cook.
He then proceeded to tell me he was dropping in but would leave soon. I kept working on my project and said, “ok great, because I am busy and I asked you not to” he then offers repeatedly to cook, as I had a jar of butter chicken sauce and some chicken on the bench, I must have said twenty times, for him not to cook, and to go … he then starts making plans for the night.
Plans with me!
I had to keep repeating myself, “no! not now, I am busy, I told you this” but he would not hear me, and then starts cooking the dinner I told him not to touch, saying after he does that he will leave. I continue working on my project, and he finishes the chicken curry, walks over to me, and then starts yelling at me that I am not grateful enough … not grateful enough for the dinner I asked him not to cook … repeatedly.
I stood my ground and said “thank you, but you cannot stay here tonight” as you can imagine, he started yelling in my face, saying “bullf&ck, you just don’t want me here” … um, yes … that would be an accurate assumption.
After these outbursts, I would also start finding weird love letters in my mailbox, the number of trees that boy wasted on trying to drive me crazy … maybe it was time to take a leaf from his mother’s book and put a deadly snake in there.
It was around this time that my mother had come back to visit, and would be staying with me, I had told CL to give me some space, I was not asking, he was being told! He called me so many times, my phone battery would die, and I mean calling all day and night, I always had to have my phone on silent or turned off.
I always thought this was hilarious, because he would then block me out of anger, I would finally think I am rid of him, and then he would show up, or call me again, and then tell me that he must keep changing his phone number, because now I have seen the new number he has.
As if he were the one being harassed!
This time, I would not be backing down, occasionally I would pick up the phone because I needed to make a call, and I never could, because my phone would forever ring! He was begging to come over, and I had to keep saying “I am with my mother right now! We are going out, stop calling me!” and again, he would have every excuse to keep calling.
He took this so far that he said he was already halfway to my house, so therefore I am obliged to let him come over, I told him if he keeps driving, the police will be waiting here with me.
The next day, he messages me, claiming that he has a tumour on his spine, and needs surgery that day, claiming there is a high chance he will be a paraplegic …
Stay tuned for part three!
