UPDATED FOR 2024. Editor’s note: Lovefraud received the following from a reader who we’ll refer to as “Tanya” about her experience of trying to expose the sociopath.
I was 35 when I met my sociopath — we’ll call him Dave. I was in a top twenty graduate business program — a magnet for narcissists and sociopaths, by the way! A culture that so prizes appearances, financial accumulation, and power must seem irresistible to people with those disorders.
Dave seemed so great at first — attentive, interesting, intelligent, open, honest, fun. My friends warned that he was too flirty — but I only took that as a sign that he was desirable and, hey, I won him over when others had failed.
We were off and on for a few months — the usual drama of dating a pure sociopath took its toll right away. He did very scary things early on, like drink and drive, show up at my door in the middle of the night, call a dozen times a night, etc. etc. In the alcoholic daze that is your typical business school culture, his behavior didn’t stand out as much as it might in real life — but it really should have at the time.
He’s engaged
Finally we broke it off completely. Then one night I got a call from him — he was in Brazil on holiday (he lived there for a few years before coming to Business School) and he was calling to tell me that he was engaged to a girl he’d met there. He put her on the phone so that she could be reassured that he was no longer involved with me. I thought it was crazy, but in my own attempts to CONTROL the crazy (always the first mistake), I took it upon myself to tell his friends at school about the call. I framed it like “Congratulate Dave! He tells me he’s engaged!” He was furious with me when he came back and his friends no doubt thought I was insane.
Later, his “fiance” called me a few times trying to find him. I “googled” her name on my computer — again in an attempt to control the crazy— and found that he had been emailing her from my computer during the time we were dating. Then I found emails he had sent to a sex tourism site called Club Hombre. Over the previous two or three years, he had posted HUNDREDS of emails to this site, explaining his sexual exploits with prostitutes all over the world. His “fiance” was a prostitute. On the boards, he talked a lot about having unprotected sex with prostitutes in Rio and Turkey (both high HIV areas).
I reported what happened
I was so petrified. I went to the school clinic and explained my situation. The nurse told me that I had a one in thirty two chance of having HIV and I had to wait a week for test results to come back (thankfully, negative). During that week I went to my school counselor (a 27 year old kid new on the job) and tried to explain my situation. I brought in print-outs of the postings Dave had made to the sex site, and a note from the clinic explaining the risks he had exposed me to. I wanted to somehow get this guy on record before he put other women in our school at risk, even if it meant humiliating myself. The counselor was skeptical. He asked me if I wanted to file a restraining order and I said “no.” I thought that would only make things worse.
As per procedure, he had to bring Dave in as well. When he asked Dave if HE wanted to file a restraining order, Dave said “yes!” So, as a reward for my efforts to work within the system, I got a restraining order filed against ME for harassing DAVE. One of the worst days of my life.
Can’t control the crazy
That was three years ago, and I still definitely bear the scars of the experience. I try to put the details out of my mind and, even as I read this, I can’t believe it happened.
I do my best to not fault myself for getting involved in the first place. As so many others on your site have said, I was behaving normally in an abnormal situation. What I DO fault myself for is trying to CONTROL the crazy. Every time I tried to control it and expose the sociopath, I only made things worse for myself. The true trauma wasn’t the stuff that happened between me and him, but the stuff that happened when I tried to expose him to others. It was so awful to see how easily sociopaths can bend the system to their will. Before then, I believed I lived in a just, fair world and that I could trust the system to protect me when I needed it. After Dave, I know now that I have to protect MYSELF.
When I’m philosophical about it, I just think that it’s only human to want to believe that we live in an ordered, just world. We want to believe it so much that we ignore the disorder and unfairness RIGHT IN FRONT OF US, and this blind spot is where the sociopath functions. I’m so thankful that I emerged with much less damage than some others. I only wish that there was a way to constructively deal with this — to raise awareness about sociopathy in the same way that people raise awareness about cancer or drug abuse.
Thank you again for your site — it was cathartic to share my story.
Learn more: How to report your abuser’s crimes so the police take you seriously
Lovefraud originally posted this story on Dec. 16, 2009.
How the messages we hear all our lives keep us vulnerable to sociopaths
Dear AKA Bob,
Having “contact” even by sending someone else to interact with them, doesn’t seem to workk at all and this is why as much NC as possible seems to be the best way.
There is NO WAY they will be (1) fair (2) truthful (3) honest and their “dupes” will not listen to reason and all we accomplsih when we deal lwith them on a logical, truthful or reasonable way is to STIR CHIT and in the process we get it all over us. I wish I could say there was any way to deal with them and not get chhit on us.
I am in the process of hiring an attorney to go to my P son’s next parole hearing to otry to KEEP HIM IN PRISON, and to tell the PAROLE BOARD that he is a danger to others, including me. My “story” sounds like a “BAD MOVIE PLOT” and I know it. Even though the attorney I talked to yesterday is an HONEST ONE, and a CARING one (not just faking that, he really is an honest attorney and a caring one) just telling the story knocked ME INTO THE PITS OF EMOTIONS AND CRYING AND SHAKING. I went into a tail spin. I can only imagine what would have happened if this man I was talking to had been nasty to me, or uncaring etc.
Fortunately, this attorney KNOWS WHAT A PSYCHOPATH IS AND CARES. Yet, just the telling of the tale to someone I was trying to convince (he got it quickly) still threw me into a deep abyss of despair and emotional pain.
As much as we would like to defend our reputations and so on, I think usually the best deal is to just LET IT SLIDE.
I feel that in order to protect my own life (LITERALLY) I must keep my son in prison and the ONLY way to do that is to hire an attorney to present my side of the issue to the parole board and hope that they will listen.
I did learn something though, and that is that I am SO emotionally involved in it that I cannot PERSONALLY speak to them because I would sound like a raviing lunatic, I cannot control my emotions enough to be an EFFECTIVE speaker before them. So I have to have someone else deliver my message for me. So at least my descent into the abyss last night did teach me that much and I will let someone else do the speaking. So as painful as yesterday was, it did teach me something about strategy and that is that I am not capable of doing the speaking. How much better than if I had tried to do the talking myself and FAILED and he had gotten out because of my poor strategy.
It is almost a year before his parole hearing comes up and I am starting “early” so I can have this behind me getting all the ducks in a row, but I am now prepared for this to be a very painful process. One I will do, but painful none the less.
“I did learn something though, and that is that I am SO emotionally involved in it that I cannot PERSONALLY speak to them because I would sound like a raviing lunatic, I cannot control my emotions enough to be an EFFECTIVE speaker before them.”
When I first saw my attorney seeking a divorce, she was adamant that I see a therapist. It was a good idea for the very reason described above.
I like to think that I am past the emotions of all of what has and continues to occur, it has been going on for years. However, my wife begs to differ with me. She sees and points out my anxiety in awaiting the next email from the ex-P responding to something I write concerning our children, our finances or some other reason that I must communicate with the ex-P.
This past weekend my wife and I met some friends out at a bar where our favorite band was playing. My wife was pre-occupied with one of our friends as another woman who anxiously looked like she was looking for her partner walked by (actually was trying to flee someone). I somehow casually struck up conversation with her (into a few beers at that point) for a few minutes, I guess she felt safe from this man in talking with me. When finished, my wife read me the riot act. Not because I was speaking with another woman, but because I told her “my life story” (her words). My wife angers that I on occasion read LoveFraud and post to the blog. She says we have confirmed what she is, why keep going back for more affirmation. Can someone speak to that point, because I don’t have the answer.
You think you are over it all, and you jump right in with the opportunity to tell your story to a complete stranger, sometimes not even aware you have gone back to the dark side. I guess no one wants to hear it unless they are reading these blogs, and my wife would like to feel I am over it all and have moved past that part of my past, even knowing that we have to interact with the ex-P on any given day. After re-evaluating the situation, she was right and when conversing with others I need to speak about the present day and future and not dredge up the misery my ex-P continues to inflict on our lives in the past or present. It is a boring story to those who don’t have a P in their lives.
I find when I do reconnect with old friends, especially those who knew my ex-P but are unaware of our story, I sound like a raving lunatic as well with that opportunity to tell them what psycho and pathological liar she is. We need to learn to bite our tongues, but we all know what these P’s do to us sometimes can bring out that dark side in us. We possibly subconsciously do it to obtain further affirmation from another party. I think we all get the affirmation we need at this site, but sometimes we just can’t help ourselves.
Dear AKA Bob,
Your post is so thoughtful and thought provoking too.
99.9% of the time I am OK, and my life is good, and I do well, and posting here on this blog doesn’t get my anxiety up, but you are right, if I do tell my ‘story” to someone, even someone I know, I realize now I SOUND LIKE A RAVING LUNATIC!
A few months ago I ran into a minister friend of my egg donors and I immediately launced inito my “story” right there in the grocery store (I hadn’t seen him in 5 years) and told him what all was happening, and had happened with my egg donor sending money to my P son and how she had devalued and discarded me in favor of the Trojan Horse psychopath (until he had gone to prison) and my now X DIL (this whole thing sounds like the unbelieveable plot of a B movie) and he stood gaping, as he had known our family for nearly 40 years and didn’t even know my P son was in prison.
He then said “why didn’t you call me, I would have talked to your mother?” Then he wanted PROOF of all this, which I had, and xeroxed copies of the documents and the letters proving all this “plot” and then went to his house with WITNESSES from my egg donor’s church and told him the story again, and HE DIDN’T BELIEVE A WORD I SAID, even with the DOCUMENTS and the PROOF. He did NOTHING to help. then got huffy and accused me of being “bitter” and so on. Well, I realize NOW (thanks to the attorney I talked to yesterday) that I SOUND LIKE A RAVING NUT CAKE and by sounding that way, I make the story unbelieveable and myself appear NUTS.
Of course your wife does NOT udnerstand because she was NOT as emotionally bonded to this woman P as you were, and sshe IS ABLE TO MOVE ON, but because of the TRAUMA WE hve suffered, the changes to the chemistry of our brains, it is almost imposssible for us to be 100% desensitized from these things.
I had EMDR (“rapid eye movement and desensitation therapy) and it HELPED BIG TIME, but it did not “fix” me “good or better as new” I still have residual triggers and also a need for validation of my story. Validation of my trauma.
I get that at LF. I get it from my sons, but I do NOT get it from those that cannot truly relate to what I went through by having similar experiences.
It is why AA works for many because another booze addict truly understands the need for the drinking. NO one else can truly understand and truly empathize.
I know your wife means well, but so do our friends who love us, but THEY DO NOT TOTALLY “GET IT”—I was amazed at this attorney saying “your son sounds like a psychopath” before I had said the word. HE GETS IT, and though he did not share it with me, i will be willing to bet the farm that he has had a personal run in with one or more in his life. He truly GETS it.
He is also gutsy enough to tell me the TRUTH about how I came off even talking to him, and putting that together with my experience with the un-sympathetic minister, I KNOW NOW that I must NOT blow my chance, my one chance at th eparole board by trying to tell my story myself. I realize my INABILITY to do it and sound rational, even though I am TRYING as hard as I can.
I am actually a gifted public speaker, and have done a great deal of it in my life, but NOT ABOUT THIS. I am too emotionally raw when I start to tell that story verbally. Some how writing it doesn’t rev up my blood pressure the way telling it does, and THIS PRESENTATION TO THE PAROLE BOARD IS VERY IMPORTANT, and that will rev me up even more.
I’ve wondered why I have stayed here on LF for 2+ years, actually I think the summer of 07 was when I came here, and maybe those people who have left here and “moved on” are in better shape than I am, maybe LF has become my “emotional pacifier” that I use to keep my emotions in check, I’m not sure what it is, but I know that as long as I am HERE I am safe, I can think about ME (even more than about them) and say on the road toward healing and sanity and the good life. My real live off this blog is good, and I don’t have my emotions up and down like a yo yo like I used to have, but I am like you, Bob, there is still some part of me that can be TRIGGERED, a need for validation, or something….and it turns me into a ‘raving lunatic”—maybe someday this story won’t be so “dramatic” to me, or “traumatic” either, but in the meantime, I will do my best to keep my emotions on an even keel, and heal at my OWN RATE, and not let someone else’s idea of how or when I should heal make me feel bad about not healign faster or better. I know my judgment is better, my life is better than before all this even started. I’ve made what I think is remarkable progress in my life.
So I am going to continue to work on ME, and that includes accepting that somethings about me are still just “scabbed” over, and I still have more work to do.
I imagine that having to deal with your X because of your children must be a trauma too, Bob. But hang in there, you ARE on the way to healing, and I think recognizing these things about ourselves that are easily triggered, allows us to work on those things as well. Happy holidays! And thanks for the insight.
We both go to the same mental health centre. It horrifies me to think of how vulnerable the other women there are to him. But if I try to explain to people, I become the harridan, the screaming rejected vengeful women. And he is so very charming, polite, kind and thoughtful. He has a very posh accent, too, which shouldn’t matter in this day and age, but does (mine is working class and northern English – which I’m proud of, by the way!) After the last stupid confrontation I engineered, I told him off for flirting so much when he is supposed to be gay (not out – really he’s bi). He said: “Flirting is fun and no one gets hurt.” “What about me?” I shouted. Because it started there – all that flirting, which to him is simply “fun” (his favourite word) but which to vulnerable women seems like an honest expression of desire and affection. When he said no one gets hurt, he meant HE didn’t get hurt. So it won’t stop and he’ll do it all over again because he doesn’t care about the pain he causes with his “fun”.
It makes me so weary. But we are Cassandras, with these people – no one believes our prophesies. And I’m sure every time Cassandra went around screaming, “Beware! Beware!” people just said, “Oh, shut that mad old bat up.”
Wish I could snap my fingers and send him to Australia. People seem tougher there. Also, the accent wouldn’t impress them at all. And I’d be free.
Funny my S also puts on a posh accent. If you don’t appear emotional I’m sure you can convince, though. Better if you have some evidence, as always. If it doesn’t seem to work, well, at least you’ve planted the seed of doubt and that’s one thing. If I had been given a warning of that type I would have taken it seriously.
re accents –
the spath HAS A WHOOOOLE bunch of them…wild to be able to pull that off hour after hour, day after day.
quite a talent actually.
I know, cause she talked to me in two AND she’s on youtube. snort! (as herself (???) after she was outed by the friends of one of her dupes. they filmed her ‘eviction’ from their friends house)
My ex-P is originally from the deep South. She has been gone from the south for 20+ years, lived on both East and West coasts since and normally and in business you might faintly hear an accent, if any. But when it is time to charm, social hour, cocktail party, a couple drinks, she puts it on real thick.
Dear Bob,
I grew up with a thick Arkansas accent (there are two different ones in this state, I got the “hill billy” one) and lived on both coasts long enough that when I would call home my egg donor would have an “accent” to me. So I am bi-linguial as well. I speak both hill billy and English. LOL
And which one depends on who I am talking to. I don’t do this on purpose, but did it almost automatically, and friends and family pointed this out to me, but it is just “natural” to lapse into the hill billy accent and phrases when I am with the locals here and to speak more “correct” less-accented English when I sm speaking to someone who is not local.
My accent, however, is not the slow, peach syrup southern drawl but more of a Texas Whang, as the people who settled Texas were generally of the same Scots-Irish stock from which I sprang—in fact, studies in the Ozark hills on language show that until the 1940s it was almost a pure Elizabethean English with specific words from that era, including “hit” (with an H) for it, and very few foreign words in the vocabularly, one being Kraut and the other one “doney girl” meaning sweet heart which was probably from Spanish “Donna.”
Television and radio have of course changed some of the local accent and added new words and phrases, but some of the old times still speak in a very thick dialect which I do understand and speak as well when I am communicating with them. Having hung around with a lot of very elderly friends of my grandparents as a child, I grew up hearing it from people born not long after the civil war who had not been exposed to many people from “the city” or wider culture.
It is funny though how some Ps use or try to use, their accents as part of this fake personna they want to project.
“
Amber, I did out my S-ex. He would also drink and drive and smoked marijuana regularly. He was a middle school PE teacher and coached 7th grade girls basketball. He smoked marijuana all the time. When I asked him how he could do that and drive a school bus filled with children, he just laughed. I called the central office in Concord, NC until they listened to me. At first, he told them I was crazy, harrassing him and that I stalked him. When he bragged about this to me, I really got pissed. I called again and told the personel director of his inappropriate use of the school computer and when they found out what he was really up to, they let him finish out the year and forced him to retire. I have the two page letter they wrote to him calling him a liar, cheating the system, etc. It was priceless. They also found out about his arrest for DWI. That letter is priceless to me. I read it often especially when I feel the need to “out” him some more. I’m glad I forced others to see him for what he was. I even send copies of e-mails from him begging me to come back to his x-wife and children who all thought I was the crazy one. Now they know better. His daughter called my home and admitted he was a user and a liar. It felt good to out him. It would feel better if he were dead, would just go away forever. He is the lowest scum of the earth and I loved this evil bastard. No more. It’s taking me a while to come out of a deep, dark depression and to function again but I am at least living now and interacting witih normal people, good people who aren’t constantly trying to manipulate me. I say, if you can “out” him safely and in a way it will not be harmful to you, do it!!!!!!! It feels great, I have to admit. Then again, is he worth the energy it takes to do it. It was for me but I don’t dwell on it anymore. I exposed him. He deserved it.
Dear X-victim,
I cannot believe the school gave him an “out” to “retire” when they knew he was doing things to endanger the children. Sheesh! Protect the bad guy just so we can not have to expose him even when there is evidence. That makes my blood boil!
I am glad that you did expose him though! And that you were at least able to get him away from the kids. I hope his x wife and family see him for what he is too.
I hope he didn’t molest any of those students either. There is no depth to which they will not sink.
I am glad that you are going on to a new life and without him. Don’t be so hard on yourself for being conned though, they are good at what they do most of the time. There are some pretty bright people here who have been conned, so we are in “good company.” (((hugs))) and Happy holidays Oxy