What to do about an e-stalker?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi all

4 years ago I was teaching a post-graduate academic writing course at a university in London. The students were between late 20s and middle age (and I was 32). We all got on well, and on the last day of the course (which coincided with my leaving that organisation to work elsewhere) they all wrote their email addresses on the board so that those who wanted to could stay in touch. Someone asked me to write mine, and - stupidly - I did. I know, I know, that wasn’t wise…

You can see where this is going. ‘O’, a Nigerian lady in the class who I’d guess was in her 40s, sent me an oddly affectionate email a few days later where she detailed minutiae about her family life and how much she ‘missed’ me. This was unexpected, as O was painfully quiet in the class and had not shown any particular friendliness or affection towards me (or anyone else). I wrote a polite email back, mentioning my wife and how busy I was, and hoped that that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t. She has continued to write to me ever since. Her emails are bizarre monologues where she writes about us loving each other and being destined for each other, exhortations to go to Church, and tiresome recitals of everything that she has eaten. At first they were usually sent at night (like 3:00am), and often coincided with public holidays like Christmas - which made me suspect that alcohol might be a factor. But now her communications have become a lot more frequent, and they have gone from ‘her being deluded about us being a romantic thing’ to full-on-psychotic-nuts. Recently, for instance, she wrote that she knew that I was staying in the same hostel as her (?), and that I had been asking the other residents about her. She told me that she would wait for me in the common room - a little while after that (presumably after my no-show), she wrote again saying that she knows that I stand outside her window to watch her getting dressed, and that I should stop hiding from her.

As far as I know, the only way she has of contacting me is my gmail address. She knows my full name (which, if googled, does give out a bit more information (if you sift through my nomenclatural dopplegangers), but there is no indication that she has bothered to ‘track me down’ IRL. She has never indicated that she wants to harm anyone, or that she wants to ‘act’ in some way which would be dangerous or illegal. This doesn’t seem like an issue that the police would be interested in.

So, my strategy is to read the emails, but never respond to them (and show them to my wife, who is both amused and concerned in equal measure). I don’t simply block her/delete them, for fear that I might need them as some kind of record for if the yet-unspecified-shit hits the fan later.

My feelings are conflicted, though - on the one hand I am concerned that there is a mentally ill woman out there who needs help, but on the other I am disconcerted that there is a big bundle of crazy in the wilderness with her sights set on me. I have a career and family and all the stresses that come with that - I don’t need a stalker too, however [relatively] inoffensive she might be at the moment.

What is the rational way to respond to this?

Thanks in advance

2

Set up a rule to send her emails to the Spam folder, and stop reading them.

You are giving this more than it is worth. She’s nuts. Ignore her, and she will go away.

Regards,
Shodan

3

Print the emails out, too, so you have hard copy in case your computer crashes or something. Make sure they have the full header so all the technical mumbo jumbo is included.

I’d forward the emails to the TOS of your service provider and hers.

Finally, make sure your family, coworkers, neighbors have her physical description and know to call the police in case she starts showing up in person.

Edit: Shodan, he’s been ignoring her and she hasn’t gone away. A few minor butt-covering maneuvers won’t hurt.

4

Along with Shodan, I vote SPAM folder and forget about it.

5

Keep all the emails on file. Never, ever respond, not even to tell her to leave you alone. It sounds like her brand of crazy can interpret anything you say as meaning anything she wants it to mean, including “My wife is watching over my shoulder, but I want us to be together as soon as possible.” Or even some kind of code, where words stand for other words.

However, I would keep doing what you are doing, and maintain a dated file of the emails-- not just the body, but the headers, so the IP address can be traced-- so that you are documenting a pattern of behavior. Also, letting your wife read them is good. It probably won’t come up, but if you are even accused of doctoring the dates, your wife can say she read them.

If you were keeping track of the behavior of an abusive spouse, I’d tell you to buy a spiral-bound notebook, and log incidents in ink, with dates, and don’t leave any more than one blank line between entries, but I doubt you need to do that. However, If you are advised to keep some log that is more secure than the file on your computer, get a spiral-bound notebook, and every time you get an email, write the date, the header, and the first line in quotes, verbatim, plus anything in it that is extra-significant, like “she said she really wants to meet FTF, and just Googled my home address,” then sign your name.

The moment she says anything that could possibly be construed as threatening to you or a member of your family, or says she is coming to see you face to face, even for non-nefarious purposes, OR, says something that could possibly be construed as a threat to harm herself (eg, “My life is not worth living without you”), notify the authorities. If she says something a little more blatant that could be construed as a threat to a third party, you should probably report that too, whether it is in regard to her landlord, her mother, or Prince Charles.

If you were in the US, I’d tell you there’s nothing the authorities could do without an explicit threat or overt act, but the laws in the UK may be different. I don’t know what it takes to get a restraining order that includes “no contact over electronic media, phone, or mail,” but you need that.

Do you know where she lives? If you can find out without alerting her to the fact that you are doing so, it might not hurt to know whether she’s 10 minutes by cab, or 3 hours by train.

She might be bipolar, and in a depressed state when she was in the class, then became manic later, and that’s when the emails started.

She probably needs help, but not from you. If you approach her with the intent to try to talk her into seeing a therapist, or going to the hospital, it will turn out badly. She is not prepared to deal with you in reality, if that makes sense.

I have worked with disabled people, and once in a while, someone would go off meds (there was a guy in town I wanted to string up by the scrotum who thought that people with mental illnesses or autism were “gifted,” and used to try to talk people out of taking medications*; he’d get his clutches into my clients once in a while). One of my clients started stalking someone after being off meds for a couple of months, and I had to get her involuntarily committed for 72 hours. She ended up spending 2 weeks in a psych ward before she was willing to go back on meds.

This guy also talked someone else into wanting to go off his meds, and the client called me in a panic-- OMG! his meds were bad for his mind and his body! Now this guy was taking medication as a condition of probation, because he once assaulted someone when off them.

I know that last bit isn’t terribly relevant to your problem-- just giving you my credentials, so you know I’m not making up my answers out of whole cloth, but I actually have dealt with this stuff before.

*He probably needed to be on meds himself. He once told me that if we are even contacted by “a higher intelligence” (I don’t know if he meant aliens or the deity, but it doesn’t much matter), unmedicated bipolar and schizophrenic people are the ones who will be able to communicate with them and translate for the rest of us. Dude was a published poet, and actually quite good. Go figure.

6

So you want something that is a minor irritant to totally consume his life? Interesting.

7

This is all good advice too, which I second.

Shodan would be right if she had sent one or two emails, but this sounds like some real crazy. It’s not just going to stop, unless she fixates on someone new, and then the problem hasn’t really been solved, and occasionally they do return to old targets.

One of the following things will happen:

  1. a relative will notice crazy in other parts of her life and get her help;
  2. she will hit rock bottom emotionally, and either become catatonic (maybe not literally, but she might stay in bed all the time) or try to harm herself, and then she might get help, or she might continue on a downward spiral in her life;
  3. she will fixate on someone else and forget about the OP, but nothing has really been fixed;
  4. she will up the ante with the OP, and if he’s lucky, he will get to dial 999 before anything bad happens.

That this will just stop is highly unlikely.

8

If I’m reading the OP correctly, it’s not a minor irritant. I doubt he’d post over a minor irritant. He used the term “stalker.” That’s a crime in the US. I don’t want a crime victim to treat the crime as a minor irritation.

If I’m misreading the OP, and this is something he considers a minor irritant, then I stand corrected, but “stalker” is too alarmist a word for what is happening.

9

I would block them and stop reading them. Ignore her. If she pesters you in some other way, call the police.

10

That actually sounds kind of interesting.

In your shoes I’d tell her my email address was changed, and I’d send her my buddy Mike’s email address. (I’ve done similar things to Mike before, he still hasn’t caught on it is me)

11

She’s somewhere between ‘minor irritant’ and ‘bewildering concern’; perhaps ‘stalker’ is the wrong word, as it belittles those who have to put up with real life stalkers.

12

Possible solution (to stop the emails, at least) : create a fake and anonymous but official email-ey sounding email address with “MAIL-DAEMON” in the title, and send her an email from that address as a reply to her latest email to you, instructing her that the email is undeliverable because this email address is no longer in service (find some examples and copy them). Do this for every email she sends to you until she stops.

13

Yeah but. Might turn her into a real life knock on the door stalker.

14

“Dear Nigerian lady, this is MrLee’s wife. He has died of crotch gangrene. Goodbye”

15

Ask for her help getting the US oil minister’s money out of the country.

Regards,
Shodan

16

I find myself in agreement with Shodan on this one. If all she’s ever done is send you crazy emails, blacklist her email address and move on. She hasn’t said or done anything dangerous/threatening/illegal.

17

You’re not responding now, so blocking her will be the exact same thing, as far as she’s concerned. It will give you peace of mind.

Is there any way you can contact the university and see if they can provide some assistance?

18

I was waiting for when she’d ask for money for plane tickets… or for money to pay for her brother who is ‘in the US army on a base in Nigeria so he can pay his commanding officer so he can leave the country’. :dubious:
Sent by Western Union, Of Course. :dubious:

The OP is not a love-sick girl’s Fap-Icon; OP is a Mark. SPAM folder & forget. Your email got forwarded back to the Motherland to Scam Central. No response or money and they’ll get bored and move on.

19

MrLee, she’s still a stalker even though she hasn’t gone fully Kathy Bates on you. Rolling into someone’s bumper at a stoplight is still a car accident even if it’s not the same as plowing into a schoolbus full of toddlers at 100 mph, and cataract removal is still surgery even though it’s not a heart transplant.

I was stalked online myself circa 2000 over something completely stupid. It never escalated, but it was nerve-wracking and upsetting.

20

So you’re projecting. Interesting.