Woman discovers her new live-in boyfriend used to cyber-stalk her. What to do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s another one of those lunchtime hypotheticals; length & detail entirely determined by how long it takes the food to get here.

Today’s story is about Heather, age 35, currently a physics grad student a model who did fashion, boudoir, and artistic nude shoots; she used the pseudonym “Ebony Snow” for such work. Heather’s current blog is a continuation of the one she maintained during her model days; even then it was as much about her travel, science, comic books, and literature as it was pictures of her scantily clad form. But it was that last one that began driving people to her site. Twenty-year-old Heather was 30 pounds of hotness in a 10 pound bag at 35, she’s barely lost a step.

A few years ago, when Heather had started to think about winding down her beauty-based career in favor of searching for the Higgs boson, she was in Spain on a modeling trip when she chose the wrong cafe to wind relax in. The place got attacked by terrorists whose motivations and ethnicity I am too lazy to make up. These nebulous ne’er-do-wells shot up joint and, not caring about Heather’s beauty or brains, would have ventilated her as well had not a bystander intervened: a seemingly-nebbish American tourist, Michael who tackled the villain about to shoot Heather and got shot himself for his trouble. At the point the police came in to settle it, and Heather escaped unscathed.

Heather was also mightily impressed with Michael. She rode with him to the hospital and kept in contact with through his rehabilitation, during which she discovered they had a great deal in common: interests in science, computers, literature, and so on. They started a long-distance relationship, and when Heather decided to start grad school, she chose a university near the company he worked at. After six months of a short-distance relationship, they moved in together.

Which bring us to today. At home alone this morning, Heather found herself in need of a thumb drive. Rooting through drawers for one, she came across one labled E.S. Idly curious, she inserted it into her laptop and found that it had pictures of her. Hundreds of such pictures, all predating her relationship with Michael and taken from her blog posts and other such pictures. Disturbed, she confronted Michael when he came home. He confessed that he knew who she was long before they met. He’d been following her blog and had become obsessed with her. In her modeling days, Heather always mentioned where she would be travelling in hopes of getting extra work after a booked shoot was over. Thus Michael had known she would be in Madrid the week they met, and he had gone there in hopes of meeting her – though admittedly he had not planned on so dramatic an introduction. In short, he had been cyber-stalking her for years.

This revelation leaves Heather even more disturbed than she was that morning. Is she right to be? What should she do now?

No poll, my food’s here.

2

Yes, she should feel disturbed and end the relationship. I bet the stalker set up the attack to look good.

3

It doesn’t seem very stalker-ish when Heather did it all on purpose. She wanted people to see her, and she wanted people to know where she was. She made it very public in the hopes of someone paying attention, and someone did pay attention. Just not the person she expected, I guess. The fellow also didn’t do anything untoward either, he didn’t send her notes, or sneak around her, quiz her family, follow her friends, make calls to her, do things in her name, break into her house, steal her stuff, set up the terrorist attack (he’s not lying about that right?), etc. He just booked one plane trip at the same time she did after following her blog for a while.

Now, it does show a little bit of an unhealthy obsession to spend money on a trip for the express purpose of trying to meet someone that doesn’t know you exist, but it’s not necessarily a write-off. People do this for famous actors, writers, and other celebrities all the time (though usually at conventions). I guess some more unhealthy mental stuff could come out down the line, but he’s had a normal relationship with her and lived with her so far without her being put off by him. I guess I’d just have her ask if he has had a history of obsession, or if it was just her. If he routinely gets sucked into other worlds and people, that’s a red flag. Just her, and this scenario could be called simply “love”.

4

He has pictures she put out for the public, he didn’t hide with a camera to take them. He used information from her to give himself a chance to meet her, he didn’t go tracking her down. Doesn’t sound like stalking at all, if he had just told her he went to Spain to meet her to start with it would be romantic. If that’s all there is to this and she likes the guy then I don’t see the problem.

5

I’d say that Heather isn’t crazy for being disturbed by this. Especially considering it sounds like Michael would have had to lie either a bit or a lot to cover up his stalking before:
[ul]
[li]Assuming she doesn’t keep her former pictures a secret and that she might have mentioned something about them while dating, and he would have said something like “oh really, that’s interesting” and pretended not to be familiar with them[/li][li]Any of her other interests that she listed on her blog that would naturally come up in conversation and he would have to pretend that this was the first time he was hearing about it [/li][li]The natural discussion when you meet someone on a trip is “so what brought you to X” or “what were you planning on doing here in X” and he’d have to dance around it that his main plan was to try to meet her[/li][/ul]

If I were her friend and talking her through this, I would want to know more specifics if she knew them. Did he actually have common interests with her in science, computers, literature, or was he playing all that up to try to impress her. Was the trip to Madrid something he had honestly thought about before, and just planned it because that would be so cool if he somewhat accidentally ran into her, or was it a huge expense and effort for him that he never would have made if it wasn’t to “accidentally” run into her and have a romantic meeting story.

It’s common nowadays to look up people online to find out more information about them. Maybe even to use that information in a casual way in conversation, like saying “oh my god what a coincidence that Radiohead is your favorite band, I love them too!” when actually you only somewhat like them. It’s maybe not ideal, but it happens. I don’t know exactly where the line is and when it would be crossed, but having read her blog and cyber-stalking her for years, and assembling the pictures for years is definitely over the line.

Also, that he had been cyber-stalking her going on for years is troubling, because it’s inevitable that he has all the expectations and plans for their relationship before she even knows that he exists. It puts them on way unequal footing. It’s like the guy in some bad romance movies that has a huge crush on a girl for years and years and never asks her out or even talks to her. It’s creepy.

I don’t think that Heather should run for the hills immediately, especially if she and Michael have an otherwise great relationship. I think she needs to take a little breather for a minute, and then talk with Michael about why he never told her, and find out how much he was hiding, and how much he used the information to impress her. Then she can see how much she believes him, and how much she can trust him now, and go on from there.

6

I’m not going to speak for all women, but I would have to say that if he had told her he went to Spain to meet her it would NOT be romantic. It’s like one of those grand romantic gestures that are in some movies, but it’s not romantic from a guy she doesn’t know. In general, a husband or boyfriend doing a grand gesture can be romantic. A guy a woman has talked to a bit and maybe gone on a date with doing a grand gesture could be romantic or creepy, depending on how their past interactions have gone. In almost all cases, a grand gesture from a total stranger to a woman will not be romantic, it will be weird at best, creepy or terrifying at worst.

7

Then Iron Man pooped in his armour and they all laughed and went home.

8

I don’t come into your threads and start stuff, dude.

9

That may be. Traveling all the way to Spain is different from hanging out at the coffee shop she goes to. However, at this point she does know him, so couldn’t she now interpret his grand gesture in that light? I guess one thing to consider is what that trip cost him, if he’s got money and travels anyway it seems less obsessive, if he sold his car to get there it’s getting weirder. Anyway, I can’t speak for any women, so you may be entirely correct. If movies have this down right he should have met some other women while trying to meet Heather in Spain, fallen in love with her and forgotten about Heather, who would have turned out not to be a very nice person.

10

Mostly I agree with Sam Lowry, though I’ll word it my way here:

I don’t think I’d be disturbed by him merely being a fan, but people who become obsessive about things are dangerous. This is red flag number one. It’s perhaps not a deal-breaker, since some fans are harmlessly a little obsessive, but she needs to be cautious.

But there’s another red flag or two, probably: if they’ve now been together long enough, surely they’ve had conversations along the lines of “So why were visiting Madrid?” or “Did you know that I used to be a model?” If he has lied about his reasons for being there, and lied about his knowledge of who she was, that’s an ongoing deception. Being deceitful is bad in and of itself, but it would also show that he knows his stalker-ish behavior was bad.

11

Maybe I didn’t make it as clear as I could have in the OP, but my intent was that Heather was only thinking about stopping modeling during the Madrid trip, and only stopped when she started grad school – i.e., after the relationship with Michael had started, though perhaps before it became intimate, since it was long distance. Given that, and the fact that she obviously isn’t shy, there is simply no way Michael could not have known about her career, even if he’d been up front from Day 1.

As for knowing his stalkeriah behavior being bad: well, I think so. But since they seem not to have spoken before the gunmen started stirring up shit, and since he got shot saving her, I can understand him thinking, “Yeah, I have totally atoned for being an obsessive stalker on account of these bullets in my abdomen. Would’ve preferred to do so with chocolates and flowers, but I think I’m entitled to keep my yap shut.”

(Not that I agree.)

Am I unique in finding it unsettling that Michael kept the flash drive after he had the actual live Heather sharing his bed?

12

She’s free to interpret the grand gesture in whatever light she wants. She could think it’s sweet, or still think it’s weird, either reaction is justifiable. I agree that how much the trip cost him would affect my reaction. If he travels often and wanted to travel to Spain anyway, it’s less weird, but if it was a big expenditure that he otherwise wouldn’t have made and didn’t really have the money for, it’s more unsettling.

You are absolutely correct also in how the movie version would go, with him meeting another woman and realizing he was acting crazy in pursuing Heather.

Maybe he can justify his stalking, thinking that being shot makes up for it. But that doesn’t make up for the lying about it since then. There would have had to be times since then that he would have had to lie or fudge the truth to cover up his past stalking. That’s the troubling thing. If he had admitted the stalking at the hospital, Heather probably would have been creeped out but maybe gotten over it because of the circumstances. But now that it’s a substantial time later, she’ll have a harder time.

I don’t necessarily find it unsettling that Michael kept the flash drive. I have all sorts of flash drives and CDs and even a few floppy disks with things on them, and it’s not because I’m obsessive about what’s on them, but it’s just because I’m not super organized and don’t always clean things out. I guess it depends on why he kept the flash drive or didn’t clean it off. Really it could be weird if he wiped the flash drive now that he’s with Heather; like it would be equating Heather and pictures of Heather as the same thing.

13

Hmm. I don’t think Michael was cyber-stalking her. As others have pointed out, Heather freely plastered her thoughts, images, and travel plans all over the Internet for all the world to see. For me to think he truly stalked her, he would have had to sneakily accumulate and hoard non-public information about her.

Was he obsessed? Yes, but he’s admitted to that. There are a lot of fans of various people out there that do all sorts of weird shit in hopes of meeting their idol. OK, so he went to Madrid in hopes of meeting her. She is the one who continued the relationship after the shooting, not him.

I think Heather needs to assess her relationship with Michael as it stands in present time – do they really have things in common? Does he behaved like a real person or a sycophant that will do/agree to anything to stay within her limelight? The fact that he was once an avid fan of hers, a woman who deliberately sought celebrity, doesn’t automatically invalidate their relationship now.

14

What raises it to cyber-stalking level to me is that he had accumulated the hundreds of pictures of her.

Heather is, in a sense, based on a real person. My stepdaughter is a professional photographer, one of her frequent models blogs about herself and her career in the way I describe Heather as doing. It would be trivial for someone to know what foreign city she will be in in a given week. It’s amassing a ton of pictures – presumably for fapping purposes – is a whole 'nother thing.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I’m wrong a lot. I never thought anybody would go see TRANSFORMERS II either.

15

“Who are you really, and what were you before? What did you do and what did you think, eh?”

“Rick, we said no questions.”

That’s the exchange between Rick and Ilsa during their time together in Paris. Later, of course, he discovers she was married to Victor but thought herself a widow, and he’s upset; she reminds him that he was the one that said, “No questions,” about their prior lives and loves.

So my answer sort of depends on whether Heather and Michael ever had a similar conversation.

Absent that, I think Michael’s failure to offer up his prior obssession about Heather counts as a betrayal. It’s the kind of thing that she’d have a right to know, and he should have told her.

BUT – if they had some sort of, “You’re wonderful, the past is the past, i don’t care what you did before we met,” type of Rick/Ilsa conversation, then Heather has no room to be upset.

16

He’s trying to start (or steal, I forget) a new tag line. :rolleyes:

It’s creepy.

Heather needs to decide whether the man she has lived with is the “real” person, and whether she can trust him. If she loves him and wants to salvage things, I think I’d insist on a counselor.

17

End the relationship and put a bullet in her head, and call it even.

18

Depends. Has he been doing anything with it?

Just having it sitting around is ordinary, normal human laziness. I have a bunch of flash drives around that I couldn’t tell you the contents of. They’re too useful to throw away, but ubiquitous enough that they seldom actually get used.

19

I don’t find it particularly unusual. People keep all kinds of old pictures and other keepsakes. If I had such a collection of a spouse (or even an ex maybe) I’d probably keep it by default. I’d need a reason to toss it. (Just for the record: Being seen as a creepy stalker might be enough of a reason to toss it.)

Beyond that, I’m not even sure I’d recognize a model if I met her in person. By the time they’re done with makeup, lighting and Photoshop, many photos of models are essentially fiction. I doubt that the Heather in his bed looks much like she does in a pin-up. (Especially after a couple of years of marriage. Even for a model, I’m sure the hair rollers and flannel nightie will come out eventually. :slight_smile: )

20

Heather should feel… eh, just like Heather feels. People will obviously have a variety of emotional responses to this situation.

If I were Heather, I suppose I would be mildly perturbed at first by the evidence of Michael’s cyberstalking, but I think I’d shake it off fairly quickly. Michael really admired me, and he saved my life, risking his own in doing so. We since seem to have found an even deeper connection, knowing each other for six months and now having decided to live together. The superficiality of him just having thought I was hawt, and the borderline creepiness of following me around, has by now, I’d like to think, been displaced by mutual love and respect.

I might extract some promise not to cyberstalk anyone else while we’re together, though. If I believed him, and if everything else was good, I’d stay with him.