I know they will…and I know I’m not the only one that was deceived. Hell, I wasn’t even the only one who called him “daddy”, a few other girls did too. I can think of a couple of them who I know will tell me I’m full of shit, but sooner or later they’ll come to terms with it. I pretty much have.
Okay, that just sounds perverted and more than a little weird. I mean, WTF?!?!
I agree.
Several girls on my forum, including myself, had fathers worth less than the mud on the bottom of our shoes. We looked up to him.
Sorry, still creepy.
especially given the nature of the contact & length of time.
I don’t know what else to tell you.
See, here’s the thing: Manipulators like him are very very good at detecting and then using those kinds of vulnerabilities to gain their victims’ trust and control their thinking. They draw out their targets, looking for points of weakness, then exploit them. Their victims’ own neediness makes them uncritical of someone who appears to fill an aching void.
You really need to step back and question what’s going on whenever you find yourself baring the painful parts of your soul to a charming stranger. I’m not saying it can’t be legit, but be wary.
I just found something in my old archives. I’m posting on my forum tonight, fuck waiting for his explanation. He doesn’t even know how old his kids are, or even how many he has.
Since most of you know where my forum is, you’ll have no problem finding it. For those that don’t, it’s my user name dot com.
This whole thing hurts like hell, but it’s gonna be entertaining to see if he tries to explain it all.
you just found this?
I just went to your site and read what you posted, Spongemom. Good job – a calm, detailed point-by-point exposition of why you believe he’s a fake. He probably won’t dare try to come back and explain it all away, you’ve done too good a job of calling him on the bullshit.
It’s going to be a wild ride with your forum members, though – the ones who can’t bring themselves to believe it, the ones who are shocked and dismayed, and the ones who “knew it all along but didn’t want to say.”
Chin up! You learned a hard but necessary lesson without paying more than an emotional price. That’s bad enough, but it’s not the financial gouging or physical harm that it could have been.
Spongemom, I am sorry you went through all this. But you could have avoided all the grief you got here by simply being more honest in your OP. If you had said some guy you knew online told you he had been hurt in an accident, I would have never posted what I did. It was just that the tone of the post set off my BS alarm. Turns out you apparently got taken by a troll, for that I am sorry. But portraying the guy as a close personal friend when he in fact was not is the problem. The distinction between those we know in real life and those we know only online is an important one. I get the impression that you are just learning the importance of that distinction. I sorry it turned out to be such a painfull lesson.
Oh askepticI don’t think Spongemom’s was dishonest. Just too swept away by a con-man. He actually talked to her on the phone, creepy stuff.
I wanted to say I was pretty impressed with your turnabout Spongemom. I’m sure I’m not the only one so kudos from all the anonymous ones too. 
No, but borderline insincere.
To drum up sympathy for “Daddy, oh Daddy. . .will he ever play the guitar again” (and by extension herself) and then tell everyone, “well, he’s just a guy online who is ‘Daddy’ to a lot of girls” and to do so without even knowing if it’s true. . .and to do so after other questionable Spongemom forays into the Straight Dope.
Well, it’s just going to make it harder to take anything she has to say seriously. But at least she’s good for a train wreck thread. That doesn’t come naturally to everybody.
I don’t think it’s as bad as some of the newspaper story pittings we get around here.
And we politely call that “A flair for the dramatic”. Heh.
Yes. Last night I kept going farther and farther back in my archives, and found it. I don’t remember ages well, especially when told in passing, and it didn’t click until I saw the part from July, and decided to double check.
No, I’m waiting for one of his “daughters” to come on in the next couple days to tell everyone that Bard died in some horrible tragedy. It’ll end his plan (whatever his plan was) quite nicely.
That’s just the thing, he was a close personal friend. Or so I thought, anyway. He knows more about my childhood than most of my family does. He knows my inner thoughts and feelings, because he made me feel comfortable enough with him to tell him about it. I was thisclose to letting him fly me out to live with him and the rest of his “daughters”. Now I know he’s nothing but a worthless predator, but I’ll be damned if he’s not a brilliant one. All the regulars on my forum talked to him on YIM, if not on the phone, and most were opening up to him in the same way. There was even a trip planned with a bunch of us to go up to Nebraska for a surprise visit. That’s out the window now.
having a difficult time reconcilling this statement with
he was so close you talked about his daughters and were planning on meeting all, but didn’t remember him changing daughters ages? Maybe you have a different way of communicating w/“close friends” than I do. Especially ones you’re planning on moving in with.
Um. Anybody else getting a weird flashback vibe on this?
I generally cringe at the folks on this message board who post “You need to get some help” or something along those lines. In this case, though, I think it’s warranted. You were seriously considering flying to a different part of the country to LIVE with a person you’d never met in person?
To say I’m flabbergasted would be an understatement.
However, I gotta say, a part of me is sad that the surprise visit from a group of your friends didn’t pan out. I would’ve paid good money to have seen that.
I think “daughters” means women on Spongemom’s message board, not blood realtions to the creep.
No, the daughters he mentions in my yahoo archives were supposedly his four biological daughters. When he told another girl about them, he only had three. I don’t know why I didn’t catch it when he said it, but it was in the middle of talking about something else, and I wasn’t paying much attention to it at the time.