Salon.com > Stalkers

I think this guy is stalking me

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I live in a medium-size metropolitan area and sometimes use dating sites and Craigslist to meet men for casual dating/hookups. Several years ago I was duped by a man who misrepresented himself by using 20-year-old photos. Which I discovered by meeting him in public.

Fast-forward a year or so and I again went to meet someone I had met online and lo and behold, he was in the establishment, which he quickly exited. Of course, no one matched the photo of the person I thought I was meeting. He followed me to my destination and then continued to send me messages, which I ignored. There was another incident as well, where he was in the same establishment as I was and again, he sent me messages. Fast-forward again until present day ... every site I go on, he contacts me, always using fake photos and different email addresses. I know this because I use Google image search and the photos always end up matching a scam artist or various profiles that contain a certain phrase or names the predator has used in the past. I experience a lot of anxiety now, while attempting to meet men online, always wondering if it is the wolf in disguise, yet again.

“Give Me Everything You Have”: Stalked!

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:00:00 +0000

With its eerie, pristine prose, James Lasdun's fiction distills the anxieties of contemporary life to their mythic core. In his remarkable 2002 novel, "The Horned Man," an academic estranged from his wife goes quietly mad while serving on his college's sexual harassment committee, imagining that the department's most legendary womanizer is secretly living in his office and sabotaging his life. Take a writer like this, one who specializes in the surreal, inward spiraling of paranoia, and make him the target of a clever stalker: It sounds like the premise of a James Lasdun novel, right? However, "Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked," Lasdun's new book, is not a novel, but a memoir.

My sister’s stalker

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

My younger sister is a 21-year-old college student who is "trapped" in an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who is 35 years old. She first met him when she was 19, fell in love with him and eventually moved in with him. After they started living together, she discovered that he was emotionally and verbally abusive, to the point that after six months, she had had enough, broke it off and moved out. The problem now is that for over a year, he refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Although he has not physically abused her, he has "forced" her into his car, screamed at her in public, in front of her professors and classmates, snatched her cellphone out of her hand to see if she has been talking to/texting other guys. He stalks her, physically, following her around town, staking out her apartment, and electronically, constantly checking her cellphone, email, Facebook, Amazon accounts, etc. (During the time that they were living together, he managed to get access to these accounts, and somehow manipulate the password access such that he continues to have access, despite my sister's attempts to change passwords, etc.)