This January is the 19^th year acknowledging January as National Stalking Month. Stalking is an issue that doesn’t get the attention it deserves and is often trivialized. It’s also a crime that is underreported, underacknowledged, and under-resourced. It’s hard to get protection or really feel safe when it comes to stalking. Stalking creeps in and invades every aspect of your life in a way few other things do. I know because I am a survivor of stalking.

I know some don’t care for stats, but I like them. And I think it helps anchor the conversation. But if stats aren’t for you, skip this italicized paragraph.

At least 3-4 million people are stalked each year; some say it’s closer to 7 million. Approximately 1 in 6 women and 1 in 17 men will experience stalking at some point in their lifetime. Most experience stalking as adults, but 24% of female victims and 19% of male victims report being stalked as a minor, and 58% of female victims and 49% of male victims experience stalking before the age of 25. (All information here from CDC).

I was 21 and 22 when I was stalked. I’m sharing my experience in the hopes it may help some of you put a face to stalking and also to demonstrate what it can look like. I know it wasn’t my fault. I was naïve and overly trusting and inexperienced, just like so many victims are, but I do know it wasn’t my fault.

I don’t know how to make this a shorter post because a lot happened over the course of that year. I also didn’t realize I had been stalked for most of that year. While I have tried to condense the story, I think some of it is important to lay out in the fullness of what happened. So I have, and so this is long.

I’ll call the stalker Amir. No, that’s not his real name. I met him toward the end of my mission in Italy. He seemed perfectly polite in my few interactions with him. The male missionaries were teaching him, not me, so my interactions were limited to when he sat nearby us in church and when I saw him get baptized. I had maybe a handful of conversations with him, never for very long and never alone. I didn’t interact with him much online either after my mission, so I still have no idea why he picked me out of everybody else.

It started with a simple friend request on Facebook, and it ended with him saying we were married in God’s eyes and him sending me death threats for being unfaithful to him.

While the stalking happened for a year or so, I didn’t realize I’d been being stalked for a long time. When I spell out everything chronologically like I do below, it appears so neat and tidy, so crystal clear what was happening. But it wasn’t that way at the time. It was confusing and disorienting until the very end.

Only in the last few weeks, when things really spiraled out of control, did I realize what had happened. Only when I was presented with the full picture could I see the individual puzzle pieces he had laid down before me. Pieces I had missed.

Here’s what happened:

• Amir friends me on Facebook when I am 20, and we have limited interactions. I don’t think much of him.
• Many months pass, and I notice he shows up on my Facebook timeline frequently. Innocuous comments or liking my posts. It doesn’t seem more excessive than many other people I met in Italy, and it feels very similar to other people. Mostly it’s just liking my statuses. I don’t respond to any of them.
• I notice every time I post, he comments or likes it, but it doesn’t seem harmful. No more than many other people.
• Then I realize that a few times when I made a status update, he would write his own status in direct response to my posts and me. But again, I dismiss it as something others I met on my mission have done and as harmless. I respond only once, acknowledging his status in response to mine because it seemed he felt bad about something I said, and I didn’t want to cause harm. I don’t recall any other time where I interacted on his page or commented or liked anything he did.
• He then begins to like every single post and comment on all of them. Nothing that’s not innocuous other than frequency.
• I then realize I am getting over 20 or 30 notifications every single day on Facebook, which seems like a lot. This greatly confuses me, as I only posted once a day at most and most often once every few days during this time. (Note: I post a lot more now than I did then.) The notification says something like “Amir and FRIENDS like post/photo”, etc., so at first, I don’t realize he is the reason I’m getting all the notifications. These notifications are on older posts of mine from months and years ago, so it’s clear somebody is going through my old posts, but at first, it’s unclear who it is at first. Pretty quickly, I realize it’s Amir.

• I then start getting 70-80 notifications a day on Facebook from him liking old posts or photos. I know friends are getting the notifications because he likes things with friends tagged in them. Nobody mentions it to me, though.
• After several days of getting 70-80 notifications a day, I start getting hundreds of notifications a day from him.
• At some point, I realize that even if Amir were going back and liking all my photos and posts, I shouldn’t be receiving that many notifications every day. I then realized he is intentionally un-liking photos and posts and then re-liking them to constantly remain in my notifications. He wanted to be constantly in front of me, and he was.

And at this point, I realize I have a major problem on my hand that I need to do something about. When I realized he was beginning to like old posts, it was weird, but something others had done. When I realized he was liking all of my old posts/photos, it was disconcerting. But when I realized he was liking and un-liking and re-liking, I knew I had to act. So I talked to other people, not my parents at first but my peers. I wasn’t sure what really to do.

Nobody talked to me about this until I approached them. Then they told me they had been getting a lot of notifications because they were also tagged in some of my photos, so every time he unliked and re-liked, they were also notified. Some said they had realized what he was doing long before I had. When I asked a few people who knew both of us, they said things like, “Yeah, he messaged me to ask about you or talk to me about you.” But everybody seemed confused by it and unsure what to do or how big of a problem it really was. I don’t blame any of them.

Up to this point, he’d only been paying me excessive attention. Nothing was “harmful” or frightening aside from that. That changed pretty soon after.

Somewhere between realizing there was a problem and when this absolutely spiraled out of control, I looped in my parents. The timeline of exactly when everything happened next is fuzzier. But certain details, like his stalker wall of photos of me and which of the photos he featured most prominently, remain seared in my memory. (More details on this below.)

• He then started sending me dozens of personal messages via social media daily, which I ignored.
• He then started calling me over Facebook multiple times a day, which I ignored. I think the maximum was 20 or so in one day at this point.

And then came the first moment that truly terrified me. You know how in all the movies how the stalker has a wall with dozens, if not hundreds, of photos of the victim? He had that of me in his bedroom. And he sent photos of that wall to me via Facebook messenger. When he sent me these images, I immediately recognized it for what it was because I’d seen it in movies. It was the creepy stalker wall of every film ever.

He had dozens and dozens of pictures of me that he had made into a collage and hung up all over his bedroom wall. Some of these pictures I had not seen before or couldn’t find anywhere. They weren’t on Facebook. Later, when I tried to find some of these photos, I could only find them on Google search after searching back dozens of result pages of my name. It was then that I realized how much time he was spending focusing on me.

He also had two pictures of me from when I was a young teenager on his bedroom pillows. I still remember precisely what photos he chose. He also had pictures he had poorly photoshopped to have him with me, where he would write words to indicate he was kissing me or touching me or how he felt about me. I still can’t look at some of my favorite photos without remembering how he used them.

The terror I felt at that moment is indescribable. I felt violated. I felt truly naïve and stupid. I felt dirty.

When I returned to social media next, I had dozens of Facebook calls from him, and I immediately unfriended him. (Note: I meant to block him, but I did it wrong, so I only unfriended him.) I still don’t know how what happened next did, but when I logged back in later, he was there back in my friend list. I presume he must have somehow hacked into my account.

I felt utter panic again. I unfriended him again and then changed my Facebook password and username (my only social media account), all my email passwords, and the password and often username on any other online account I had. I re-checked all my privacy settings and researched Facebook privacy as much as I could to make it as locked as possible.

But again, I’d inadvertently only unfriended him, not blocked him. So maybe a week or two or so later, I realized I had received nearly a hundred message requests from him. He clearly knew I’d unfriended him, which sent him into a tailspin.

After ensuring he wouldn’t know if I looked at the message requests because I didn’t accept them, I viewed the message requests.

• In one, he proposed marriage to me and told me he knew that we were meant to be and that God had told him so in a dream.
• In another, he told me he had a dream that we were married in God’s eyes and that God had accepted the marriage, but we needed to consummate the marriage for it to be valid. He told me he was coming to find me so we could consummate the marriage. I was terrified that he would actually come, but I also knew he was far away and poor. But that terror was there.
• In another, he told me God had told him that in God’s eyes, the marriage had been consummated, and our marriage was then binding and everlasting.
• He then told me that talking to other men was infidelity and would give him the right to kill me and told me he knew where I was. And that I needed to come to be with him. (You can imagine the terror that this brought.)

At this point, I finally fully blocked him on Facebook.

I was so terrified that I reached out to everybody who knew both him and me and told them not to tell him anything about me or talk to him about me.

I archived and deleted that Facebook account and created a new one so he wouldn’t be able to find me as easily and kept it extremely locked down. He was an ocean away and poor, so I thought that if he couldn’t contact me, maybe the obsession would end. I became an expert on Facebook security and privacy too.

He then found my book review blog I had for freelance work and associated freelance work email—not an easy feat since it was under a different name. He began emailing me dozens of times a day. Later, when I tried to replicate how he could have found this connection, it took me about 20 pages back of google results to make the connection.

Then the fun cycle began where I would block his email, and he would create a new one to contact me. This was also when I discovered that even though I didn’t have Pinterest, he could email me things via Pinterest. He created a board with our names attached to it, a whole wall dedicated to us. He sent me more photos and videos. He even sent me a photo album he had made of our supposed wedding. And in many of them, he had again found photos I don’t know how he did.

In those latter emails, he would send me fake flight confirmation emails informing me he was coming to be with me. I was terrified because they looked real. In some, he told me he was coming to kill me because I’d been unfaithful to him and our marriage.

At that point, I deleted my book review blog, a decision I still hate that I made. It was years of lost work. I changed all my emails, I changed every online log-in, and I scoured google results to try to limit information about me. I got rid of everything I could and changed everything else.

I’m fortunate. Because when I told people about all this, people believed me. The evidence and communication supporting my claim were immense and very clear—which helped my cause. Something many don’t have. I had a clear online record and clear knowledge of who the stalker was. Something many do not have. It was also difficult to stop because it was all online.

When I told some people, they did ask me if I’d made it clear to him that the communication was unwelcome and that I wanted it to stop. Even knowing about the death threats, some wondered if I had done a good enough job communicating his attention was unwanted and that I didn’t think we were married.

Many more told me I’d been stupid, that it was my fault it escalated so far, that I could and should have stopped it sooner, that I’d been foolish. But I was believed. And again, I got the help I needed, and he left me alone eventually. Maybe because I successfully locked down everything so well, or maybe because he really didn’t have the means to come here. Or maybe he found somebody new. I’m not really sure. But for a long time after, I told people close to me that if I ended up dead, they would know who had killed me.

I’m no longer afraid of him, but this episode left long-lasting marks and some permanent ones.

• I still google and “duck duck go” search my name way too frequently to see what pops up. I know what pops up if you search my name better than anybody ever should. Also, I’m aware of the many sites that list every family member, every address, and every old phone number you’ve had. The amount of information people can glean for free or $10 is staggering!
• It left me terrified to give anybody my contact information for years. When my husband first wanted to send out Christmas cards and receive them, my first thought was, “do I want this many people knowing where I live?” A thought I had to work through again.
• It made me terrified to return to Italy or go to Europe. When I finally did visit, I didn’t visit the city he lived in (one of my favorites in Italy), and I was hesitant to tell anybody in Italy I was going so I largely didn’t. I didn’t let anybody know I was there until I was back home.

The fear he presented lasted years. It’s been nearly a decade since this happened. I’m doing alright. I’m okay. But I hope this helped illustrate what stalking can look like, how scary it can be, and also why it matters. Stalking is a real issue, and it’s not okay.

I know some will not believe me or will believe I exaggerated what happened. And I accept that. It is a pretty incredible sequence, but it all happened as I said it did. And somewhere, I still have all the records in my archived Facebook and in old email accounts to prove it. It would take time to pull out all the old records and sort through them, but they exist. And that’s why I was believed when it mattered when so many sadly aren’t. But without such extensive documentation and death threats, I’m not sure I would have been. And I’d hope we could act before it escalated so far and with less evidence.