Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with stalker

Please help me keep my girlfriend safe from a stalker

digividal — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:23:03 -0800

My girlfriend is being stalked by a fugitive, what can I do to try and keep her safe, and where can I turn for help. My girlfriend is being stalked by an ex-con. He want to jail for trying to kill her, and her family members. He got out about 3 months ago, after serving 3 years, and he is now stalking her again.

The police are looking for him, but this has been going on for 2 weeks now, and they have not found him.

He started out making threatening phone calls, saying he will kill her her family. He was seen outside their place of business, they called the cops of course, and he ran before they got here (just).

He has not been observed since then, and he has not made a call.
The police told us to do a *57 after he called. he has not called back, but from my own knowledge of phone systems, *57 might not work at all, depending on how he is placing the call.

We have tried to reach out to the media, to try and get his photo and details out to the people (Co), and harness the hivemind in that way, but DenverPost, 9news and other outlets I have tried contacting have not taken any interest. I guess the stalking is not a serious enough crime.

So my girlfriend and her family are at their witts end, after looking over their shoulder for a killer, who might be anywhere.

Any advice you all could offer would be great at this point.
I know the police are trying, but what can we do to try
and keep safe, and still try to keep sane.
She did not work at all for the first week, but she cannot
afford to not work for long.

How do I deal with an email stalker?

Ostara — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:32:14 -0800

For the past several years, someone with a sick fetish has been sending me sexually harassing emails. The emails come to my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. When I had a MySpace account, I'd get messages there as well. Up until recently, I've just deleted the messages and blocked his address. This person, however, always just gets a new throwaway email address and continues to send me messages. Right now they show up every 3 weeks or so.

I'm to the point now where I am absolutely tired of this. The emails detail what he would like to do to me, and I do feel threatened. What can I do?

I don't know who this person is, or why I'm the focus of this attention.

My friend has a persistent stalker who is not getting the message.

Optimus Chyme — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:11:30 -0800

My friend has a persistent stalker who is not getting the message. Help us get rid of him. My friend has an ex who will not stop calling, emailing, or texting her. On May 22, she told him not to contact her ever again, and that he would get no reponse to any attempted contact.

Since then, he has called 13 times, leaving at least 7 voice messages. He has emailed her 40 times. He has tried to relay messages to her through other friends. She has read The Gift of Fear. She has not responded in any way to his calls, texts, or emails. She even is using her phone company's "parental controls" to block all texts or calls coming from his phone. He is not getting the message, apparently.

How long can we expect this to go on? Another two months? A year? I don't think that this guy is dangerous - he's a huge loser, but he has never been violent. She just wants to be able to open her email and check her voicemail without having to deal with this pathetic little shell of a man.

I will answer any questions you might have in the thread or via email.

Did Jerry Lewis threaten to "blow the head off" of his stalker?

MrBCID — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:18:55 -0800

Trying to find a late 90's video/sound clip of Jerry Lewis threatening to kill his then-stalker... Back in the late 90's I remember either seeing or hearing a clip of Jerry Lewis (I believe it was in an interview about the stalker being released on parole) where he states that if his stalker shows up at his house he would "blow his head off with my 357-magnum" I don't know if that is the quote but that's what I remember...

Does anyone remember hearing this? I can't find anything online...

How do I stay safe online?

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:28:39 -0800

How do I stay safe online? I met this girl a while back. I'm a boy. She's older. We got it on. I had to leave.
I found her unusual and funny at the start. I rapidly found her a total flake and lost interest.

Now she's stalking me. She signed up on all the social networks I'm on and emailed my friends on it demanding personal information. She emails me twelve times a day with demands of marriage, accusing me of deserting her, and dubious propositions.

Its now reached a stage where she's seriously interfering with my professional life and this is totally not cool. She tracked down the phone numbers of where I work and called me six times a day until I had to disconnect my phone. She's threatened to knife me if I 'mess with her'.

I've told her clearly and in plain words that I am not interested in her and that she is stalking me and this is not appropriate. I learnt recently that she's stalking other men she met previously. Their advice to me has been to 'stay wary'. The common thread we agree on is that this girl tend to glaze demands for money+sex+companionship with a veneer of a cry for sympathy.

I've changed all my passwords thrice in the last two weeks and scrub my histories and any online traces I leave every two hours. We never used the same computer together, so I'm pretty certain she didn't get anything off a keylogger.

Please help.

Also: suggestions of 'try talking with her' are useless. Conversations with her are monologues and answers to any questions she asks are met with more irrational questions. 'Move away' or 'get another job' are useless too. And *please*: if you have an axe to grind about this question, please take it to MeTa.

I'm constantly looking over my back now. I'm paranoid about my privacy as it is. What do I do?

Is it possible that my stalker ex-girlfriend is joe-jobbing me?

TigerCrane — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:16:52 -0800

I have been the victim of a joe job. This means that spammers are putting my domains into the "reply to" of their spam messages, resulting in a barrage of auto-replies to my inbox. I am also being stalked by my ex-girlfriend. She has already vandalized my window, my car, and myspace page. She's pretty computer savvy, but I'm not aware of a method that would allow an individual (ie. not a professional spammer) to pass a domain onto a spammer. Is it possible that she is behind this?

tracking a blogger

grimley — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:39:33 -0800

my wife and I have an emerging business. We were asked by a blogger to provide a sample of our product for review. The blogger initially stipulated that the item would not be returned, and after explaining to the blogger that we were a small company and couldn't afford to give them a sample, we sent it off. well, guess what. in the immortal words of PWEI no deposit. no return. We have their address, and can badmouth their blog, but what recourse do we have? I've tried reverse lookup to get info on the blogger, to no avail. I don't want to come across as a stalker, but we are talking about a chunk of our rent here....

What do I do about my stalker?

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 18:15:45 -0800

I have a stalker. This young woman is 26 and we were friends at work, and became friends outside of work. I don't know what to do next... will the police help me? There is no threat of physical harm... just the mental stress from her not leaving me alone. She became overly clingy a couple of years ago and when I told her I wanted some space, she started calling me daily and e-mailing me several times a day. Even though I asked her to leave me alone, she kept on, and it grew and grew until I couldn't take it anymore and finally had to threaten to call the police. Then her husband e-mailed me, and said what the hell was wrong with me that I would threaten to put his wife in jail, and couldn't we just work it out and be friends. I explained to him in e-mail that I needed some space. Finally, it let up. I banned her from my web forum (that I own), and she re-registered with her husband's e-mail address and a new username. I finally banned her by IP. This was spring 2005.

In spring 2006, a year later, I moved my forums from Ikonboard over to phpBB, and didn't transfer the ban list. Shortly thereafter she registered with yet another username and I never noticed until I was informed about a week ago. She was dumb enough to e-mail a moderator to ask about a technical issue, who remembered her e-mail address from before. My moderator contacted me, and I banned the person by e-mail and IP. She e-mailed my moderator to ask why, and the mod told her that I said she wasn't welcome there. She replied to ask if she'd done something wrong.

I am really tired of her still wanting to hang around when I so clearly do not want to be her friend, so I just e-mailed her and laid it down, saying there is no chance of us ever being friends again, and that if I ever catch her on the boards again (these are boards I own on a domain I own and I pay for the hosting) or if she ever contacts me again, or sends me another Mary Kay catalog, I'm calling the police.

One problem is shortly before the whole spring 2005 mess, she moved away from my town. I now only have her maiden and married name, her husband's name, their kids' names, an e-mail address, and an IP. (I do know roughly what city she moved to - either the city itself or a nearby suburb.) Will the police get their address from the IP if I report her? Will the police even talk to her for me? My mom contends that since my boards are technically public, she may not be committing a crime by visiting them, even though I've made it clear that she's not welcome there and banned her several times. I also don't necessarily have the previous e-mails from 2005; my hard drive was dying and I got a new one. I can pop the old drive back in and see what Google Desktop (which was already installed on the old hard drive) can find, but no guarantees.

I feel sick about this whole thing, I hate being mean but this girl is just too dense... she just will not leave me alone. Will the police help me?

there's a stalker book?

kooop — Wed, 10 May 2006 11:19:47 -0800

what can i do to get this person to stop harassing me? there are a couple other harassment/stalker posts with good responses, but this situation is like no other:

MG SAGA
i was running around like a hussy with a married guy [mg] for about two weeks... it was very casual, he made claims that he was going to get divorced at the end of the month (as soon as his inlaws left town) so we met up two or three times and ran into each other on the running course. it wasn't about love and he wasn't leaving her for me, we were just enjoying each other's company.

then out of nowhere he got an anonymous email saying that we've been seen together around town and they want him to call it off, otherwise they're going to tell his wife. he decided he was going to lay low until after they've separated and it wasn't much of a big deal. i assume that since we said "fine" and no one really cared and went on with our lives, the anonymous emailer still wanted to dirty their hands and went ahead and told his wife anyway. shit hit the fan, etboringc.

from there, the person kept emailing me. they knew that [mg] came over one night to talk to me, they knew when he emailed me, they knew about phone calls and basically every last detail. it was truly bizarre. i thought they might be getting the information from my online journal (which is accessible to registered users only) - but the ip addresses were all for cities at least 100 miles from here. and i'd i emailed them a link (hoping they were foolish enough to click on it) and their ip address came back as this city. that seemed like proof enough that they were here physically following me/us, instead of getting the information from my journal.

further to that! they were making claims in the emails that if i don't stay away from him, there will be serious repercussions: i will lose my job, my name will be ruined in this town, and i'll probably lose my housing. then they offered a payout where if i'm a "good girl" they'll email me later in the year with an offer to help pay for my education.

initially i thought it was [mg]'s wife, but we've had many a telephone and email conversation trying to figure out who the anonymous emailer is and she even went to the extent of hiring a private detective who was worthless and only looked at the email headers to find the ip address, which we already had. so she's not a suspect.

all of that happened a month ago and i thought the drama had officially died down since i hadn't heard anything in some time, until.......

THE SCHOOL NARK

i went on a few dates with my art teacher, things went well, and he took up calling me his "girlfriend." i wrote the stories about it in my online journal and didn't see any harm coming for a million miles. we're both adults (i'm 22, he's older) and we weren't causing anyone any trouble, so i thought it was ok to tell what is going on. i'm not ashamed.

and then last week someone emailed the chair of the art dept saying that he has taken up dating "a younger student" and is discriminating against other students because of it. he got talked to and they basically just asked if we're kissing/touching on each other in the class, we weren't, and there was no further issue. at first i assumed it was someone in class who really felt that they were being neglected and felt badly....

until the very last straw - this week, there were excerpts taken from my journal, wrapped up in a different context and then emailed to the VICE PRESIDENT of my school. i don't know what they were trying to get out of it, but who goes around sending journal entries to school presidents? psycho!

anyway, yet again he was taken in, told what was in the email and that i need to watch what i'm saying in public places. everyone agrees that the person is acting maliciously or out of jealousy, and not just trying to get extra help in class as they originally claimed. he's not in any trouble and everyone is saying "whatever" since there is only one week of school left anyway.

however - now i'm just a little concerned that since every attempt to "destroy me" is foiled, they might step it up a notch and start trying harder. i don't know who it is, i don't know whether it's the same person (but the coincidence is just too uncanny), they aren't calling to "harass me" or any of the other definite signals to get police involved. and with it all being anonymous i don't know much they could do at this point anyway.

wtf are my options?! i'm going insane right now.

Help stop a phone stalker

jmd82 — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:54:38 -0800

My friend has a pervert calling her who will not stop. She's already tried the phone company and police to no avail. Looking for suggestions on how to get him to stop. A week ago, a friend gets a call from some guy asking perverted questions. He continued to repeatidly call her. She contacted her cell-phone carrier (Verizon) who said they can't block calls to cell phones and she should file a report with the police. She did as such, and the police responded by telling her they can't stop him because a) it's a restricted number (she has NO idea who it is) and b) they can't force the phone company to release who the caller is.
So far, she's tried having male friends answer, taking down her voicemail so it says, ""Your call has been forwarded to an autmated voice message system. The NUMBER is not available," And now just ignoring him. Yet today, he called another 4 times.
Any ideas on how she can get the pervert to stop calling or find out who it is, be it through the police, phone company, hired hitman, etc?

How to deal with a potential stalker

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 06:54:58 -0800

How to deal with a potential stalker? Long background, sorry. 8 months ago, a friend married a man she'd known and been with for 2 years. For unavoidable reasons, she was apart from her husband (in another country) for the first 6 months of their marriage - not seperated, just couldn't be in the same place.
She recently came to the US to be with him, only to find out a few things:
- He was planning to leave the country for an extended (2 month) business trip within the first 3 weeks of her return.
- He'd been having an affair while she was waiting to come join him
There wasn't much time to discuss the affair or what led to it before he left, and they agreed to discuss on his return.
She's now alone in an unfamiliar city, and the 'other woman' (let's call her woman B) has begun calling and leaving messages warning my friend that her marriage was over, she was hanging on to a man that didn't love her, he wanted to be with woman B and have babies with woman B, etc.
She is calling almost every half hour, and the calls and messages are freaking my friend out. Whether the marriage is in trouble or not, I feel that messages such as this are harrassment, and are not helping my friend's already fragile state of mind.

My question is - is this really harrassment in the sense that my friend could call the cops and make a complaint? Or does she have to wait until woman B does something really frightening like show up on her doorstep. She just wants to wait until her husband gets back and hash out the situation with him then, but these calls are really getting to her.

Anon because neither of them knows I'm asking, but I'm worried.

Stalker Persistent Despite Restraining Order - Advice?

yoga — Wed, 04 Feb 2004 11:36:14 -0800

How to squelch a stalker? More inside. A friend of mine (no, not me) has an ex bf stalking her. She's issued a restraining order and taken him to court. He still follows/watches. Short of hiring a hit man, what can she do to get this guy to knock it off?