I have the email that FB sent with the message, and a print screen of it while it was in her account, of course she has deleted it already but I was quicker than she checking her account today.
That’s exactly what I thought…this is an admission of him doing it! He seems to have been so careful to stop short of actually saying what he wants to do in direct messages to my daughter so I worried that it wouldn’t be considered enough, but now that I basically have a 14 year old girl flat out saying that she did…well I am hoping that will be enough to make this a short and easy case for the authorities.
The vacation thing is tricky. When did you say you were going? If it’s a few months away, there’s a good chance this guy won’t be a threat at that point, OTOH, the FBI may be planning to string him along until then since that’s when they plan to meet, in which case they may want to keep her in the dark until after the meeting is supposed to have taken place. So, you could (and might have to) still take her along, but you just can’t let her out of your sight. It should be interesting to see how many excuses she makes to try and get away for a little while, and watch her phone blow up with texts as she keeps changing plans with him.
Also, if you send her off with the relatives, you’ll have to fill them in since there’s a chance she’ll make excuses to get out of there too.
Oh, I know what I wanted to say, if you have the password for her email account, you could go in and set a filter so that all messages from FB get forwarded to one of your email accounts, whether or not she’ll notice that, I don’t know.
ETA, I get the feeling that what might happen is that the day or or before the ‘meet’ the FBI will ask you to tell her what’s going on and take away any and all means of communication for her to get a message for him. It’s gonna suck to be you that day…sorry.
EETA, now that I think about it, you probably shouldn’t do the email thing since you don’t want her knowing that you know. With how quickly she’s deleting this it wouldn’t surprise me if the FBI asked for access to her email account or maybe even have a way to work with the email provider to covertly forward all email to them (same thing might go for text messages), but I assume they would need a warrant for all that, isn’t it wiretapping?
But this is all speculation at this point, the FBI are on the case, and they know better then anyone how to handle it properly, they’ll tell you what you need to know and do from this point forward, do they know you have a Wednesday meeting with the local PD?
I think you’re wise to put your daughter’s mental health concerns first. You’ve certainly done the right thing by reporting this guy to the FBI and turning over the information you have right now, but if your daughter’s doctor says you need to cut her off from contact with this guy ASAP, then you’ll have to tell the FBI that you can’t let the communications go on any further. The FBI may have enough at this point to charge him with something, and even if they don’t you’ve alerted them to someone who appears to be a dangerous predator who may try to hurt other girls. You don’t have an obligation to continue to provide them with more communications if maintaining this “relationship” isn’t in your daughter’s best interest. Good luck to your family in this tough situation.
Oh God! I hope that is not how it goes…I’ll do whatever I have to at this point of course, and whatever I am told to do, but our vacation isn’t until June (and we aren’t sure yet which exact week of June, it depends on husband’s vacation request being approved) and I just don’t know if I can do this for that long. I’m liable to end up in the psychiatric hospital before all is said and done!
Incoming messages are no problem. Her email account already forwards to another account so that we can monitor them (which we obviously had not been doing for a while!) and she knew about that when we set it up, but I think she must have forgotten. I don’t plan to remind her any time soon. It’s the outgoing messages that are more difficult because she sends and deletes almost immediately so unless I can pick it up from the keylogger (which is a simple keylogger that only records keystrokes so it is difficult to decipher) I am in the dark about what she is saying. Fortunately I got a good recommendation for new monitoring software so when she comes home, we will have better records of what she is doing on our computer at least.
I wish they would. I would hand over the password in a second if it meant that I didn’t have to read all of this! The anger, hurt, frustration and just basic helplessness that comes from looking at this is almost too much for me.
Yes. It is out of my hands now (mostly) and I just get to do the grunt work of making printouts and what have you… I am not going to do anything or suggest anything or…anything…except on the say so of the FBI or PD at this point. So feel free to speculate. It does make for interesting conversation and it also helps to prepare for what might (or might not) be the next step(s).
The FBI knows I am talking with the PD, I think they either plan to work together or to decide who should do what…I am not sure but both sides got the full story about the other.
Absolutely! The whole point of any of this is to protect and take care of my little girl, so her health and safety comes first even if it means the legal aspect may not go as planned.
To tell the truth, I am kind of hoping that someone will say that soon so that I can just crack down on it and put a complete stop to all of it at least from home. That wouldn’t do a thing to protect other girls or to get Predator off the internet (and hopefully in jail) and in the long run it may not be the right thing for my daughter either, but it would be such a relief at this point if I could just get them to stop right now.
Bio Mom never was much of a mother. I try not to bring it up too often because I am liable to go off on a rant, suffice it to say that she lost custody of the kids when my daughter was just a baby- and for good reason. There was joint custody for a while, then she lost all legal custody but still had visitation, then she lost visitation and went to supervised-only until she got it back, then she got more visitation, then lost most of it, then got some more then got it taken away and now we are in a “more” phase, unfortunately. All was for good reason. In the meantime while all of that was going on, I was awarded legal guardianship (not that it is usually an “award” but bio-mom fought it) and I was included in the custody orders as being the next in line behind my husband but before bio-mom as having decision making and physical custody.
As it stands now, bio-mom has every other weekend and one dinner a week visitation, the judge was trying to get us moving toward a 50/50 split of time because he thought bio-mom was doing well, but up until now, mom’s visitation has been sporadic at best, sometimes she just blows off the whole weekend because something more fun came up and up until recently she had gone for months without using her visitation (those were the good times!). Then she decided she needs her daughter, but she wants to be friends with her and the way she thinks she can do that is to put down her dad and me and do everything in her power to make my daughter as paranoid and delusional as she is. She wants to have something in common with her daughter, and I am just saddened that she chose mental instability to be that common ground.
It should also be noted that bio-mom is a 40 something year old woman who is trying to pass herself off as a teenager- literally, she believes she looks like she is 18 and tries hard to act accordingly. She would never think of disciplining her child, instead she will teach her the “bad” things to do that are so darn much fun! She is divorcing her most current husband (there have been a few over the years) who is more 10 years younger than she, and the reason she gave (to our daughter) was that now that he is in his 30s, he is too old for her and she needs to be “out there” and “have some fun”. That’s great for her, but just shows her immaturity, IMO.
And as long as I am ranting…bio mom has diagnosed mental illness(es) for which she is supposed to be medicated and in therapy. But she feels fine, so has decided that the medication is unnecessary and dropped the therapy sessions too, so now her paranoia, delusions, and manias are running the show and possibly (definitely according to my daughter’s therapists) affecting our daughter as well.
ETA
If my earlier posts seemed harsh, I apologize.
I sympathize with you and wish you and your daughter the best. I see the predator as a threat, but also as a [family] distraction. I hope you can nail him to a wall, and get down to the business of healing your daughter.
Have you considered that this girl is sending out a message to you, in an acting out, sort of way?
How can this child, with the complicated issues swirling around her, dysfunctional relationship with bio Mom, possibly process all the crappy messages being downloaded into her life?
Perhaps she’s screaming for someone in her universe to demonstrate they give a damn that she doesn’t run her young life off into the ditch out of confusion, developing hormones and the desperate seeking of some kind, any kind, of ‘love’.
Perhaps relationship with screwed up Bio Mom is making her feel confused with ‘growing up’, since Bio Mom seems to have avoided it, except for attracting partners, which she seems into. Maybe she’s just trying to send a signal she’s not feeling ready to deal with the issues that Bio Mom is encouraging. Maybe she wants to be protected, from this creep and from these issues, for a time. Perhaps she’s really screaming for someone in her universe to protect her ‘childhood’ for her, a little longer. Sounds like she’s had to grow up fast, she may long to be protected, as a child would.
I’m just saying, maybe on some level, in some mixed up way, she wants you to step in and save her, to take it very seriously, to act parentally, even if it brings negative consequences to her.
Make sure to take your daughter to the doctor and have the doctor do the “birth control/STD” talk. Even if this scumbag doesn’t get his hands on your daughter, she THINKS she is ready for sex - gets all the positive reinforcement about it from bio-mom, and it will come before you are ready for it.
(My cousin - before facebook - had a ‘relationship’ at 13 with a 20 some year old guy. Got pregnant, had an abortion, watched the ‘love of her life’ do some jail time - then, having learned a LITTLE at the school of hard knocks, eventually graduated from nursing school and is a four year RN.)
One argument is that if she does love him, she wouldn’t want to put him in a situation where he’ll GO TO JAIL. And if its TREW LUV he will wait until that isn’t a risk. Not that I’d bother - she sounds deep into her Romeo and Juliet fantasy.
Mitzi, as a parent I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for calling the FBI. I don’t pray, but I am willing you all the good luck and strength you’ll need to get through this. I don’t think it really comes across in my posts, but reading this thread has wrung tears out of me several times. You’ll be on my mind.
I strongly agree with elbows’ post, as well. I really think kids are happier with strict parents.
As a fellow parent, I’m definitely keeping my eye on this thread, waiting for the exciting conclusion in which our heroine (kid) sees the light of day* and our villian gets throw into the slammer with people who don’t take kindly to child abusers.
*you mentioned older sis earlier. Is she close with her? I’m thinking if peer isn’t geting through to her, older sis probably won’t, but hey.
Just to let you know…when I was 14, I was a lifelong straight-A student with super awesome parents and no weird childhood drama. I was a regular on BBSes and almost got caught up in a similar sort of scandal. With me, I would participate in naughty chat with older guys and got really mad when my folks said I absolutely could not go to this one guy’s house to “babysit his kids.”
Puberty just makes you stupid sometimes. You lose your mind. Your daughter having the influence of the bio-mom certainly doesn’t help one bit.
You guys have done the best you can. You’re doing the best you can in the situation now as it stands. Having all of this “evidence” and doing all of this snooping is much better than a lot of parents can manage to do.
Your daughter has had a traumatic life and you do keep her safe. You are going to be able to stop this before something bad does happen. Other than some tears and maybe some “I hate you”, it’s going to work out fine because you ARE good parents.
Or it might be a lack of experience in this kind of situation. We’ve all done dumb things in a situation we’ve never experienced before. When I was a kid, I used to think that grown-ups always knew automatically what to do in any given situation, and that eventually I would know that stuff too. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works (or else you get all that knowledge at some age older than I am now). You get experience in more situations as you get older, and can apply that experience to similar situations, but you still might flounder just as much in a totally new situation as you would have as a kid.
She doesn’t have much experience of dating. She hasn’t learned how to spot all the red flags in this situation that are so obvious to those of us with more experience. She needs someone with more experience of dating to tell her this isn’t cool, and why, and to protect her from someone who would use her inexperience to take advantage of her.
Not for nuthin’, but I agree totally with you on what you said earlier. And I don’t think it came off as harsh at all. I don’t have kids, but if I did that’s exactly the way I would handle it. I am (figuratively) standing up and applauding.
Mitze, I think your daughter should know that you love her enough to protect her. She can have whatever reaction that she’s going to have, and you let her know you heard her, and you’ve made your decision. Straightforward statement of fact is effective when panic and anger is not. And maybe make it clear that this is a standard teenager thing, it’s not because she’s in therapy and has been in the hospital and she’s crazy and she’s so fucked up she can never take care of herself. She will be able to take care of herself as she grows, like any other kid. Part of developing into an adult is the gift of loving guidance from caring adults.
TSS is right. The mayor of our town (we now refer to him as “Mayor Kid-toucher”) was busted by the FBI for that very thing. He went to get “counselling” from a cell-mate named Bubba. Blow him in!!!
