An undercurrent, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right about Brian Ellington
Suddenly Brian was living with me, as he stayed over then came back the next night.and the next.and never left. Well, until I threw him out, but that comes later.
It’s easy to see all of this in hindsight.at the time it was really an undercurrent, a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right.but he had a legitimate job and he had money a week before.oh and did I mention the fabricated W2 he showed me claiming he made $225,000 in 2004??? To prove he could pay me back??? Again.Ha!
Three weeks went by. I was pressuring Brian more adamantly to get my money back. The total initially was about $2,600 in withdrawals of $300 or $400 at a time. Which he used to party. Like he did with the $8,000 from his corporate Amex. Now, if *I* were homeless and had access to that kind of money, I would buy myself RENT and FOOD. I would not spend it on taking my friend to a strip club on Halloween.
The next thing Brian said to me was, “Oh, if only I could get to North Carolina for Thanksgiving I could get my birth certificate, then everything will be okay.” I bought him a Greyhound bus ticket, one way.
That is another point where I regret not changing the locks and saying, “Do not come near me without my money and your wallet back under control.” But, I didn’t say that. I spent Thanksgiving 2005 weekend thinking, “I should tell him to stay away.” The thing was, I was worried I wouldn’t get paid back if he did stay away, and I really hoped things would work out for the better.
Despite his childishness and bad manners (blowing his nose into the air into the shower, sink and toilet, walking in front of traffic, standing at the very edge of the train platform as the train is coming, a horrible swearing habit, chewing tobacco and spitting constantly, sticking his hands down the front of his pants in public and at restaurants).despite those things, we were really close. Well, I was close, I don’t know WHAT he really is inside, most of the truth I now know is from tracking and researching him.
75 pages of arrest records
I did a background check on him using www.intelius.com. This revealed 75-yes, 75-pages of arrest records for multiple counts of public urination, marijuana possession and selling in college, drunk driving, driving with license revoked, credit card theft, credit card fraud and multiple counts of larceny.
That check didn’t yet include his most recent conviction—I found that later on the North Carolina Department of Corrections website. He was convicted of charging to someone else’s credit card and ordered to pay approximately $9,500 in fines and restitution.
According to a letter his father wrote to him in February, 2006, Brian did not personally pay for ANY of the crimes he was convicted of; his parents did (his parents are divorced and both remarried). And they paid his restitution. I will get more into that later. They are good people with good hearts but have enabled his behavior; enabled him to continue unpunished and enabled him to stay loose to repeat the same criminal behavior. At least I was able to find his parents and communicate what he was really doing and what was happening with me, so that possibly in the future they may not be so willing to enable him-he was lying to them too, of course.
No money at all
He arrived back from Thanksgiving and finally, after about another week with me getting angry on a daily basis-admitted that he has NO MONEY AT ALL. By this time, I am realizing he is unemployed also. He said that the company was going out of business and couldn’t pay him and they “really screwed him over” and he was having “tough times” as a result.
A lot of people will say, “Why didn’t you kick him out then?” I was initially very angry. I wanted to hold him still so I could get information on where to find him and evidence of what he was doing. I wanted to have control over SOMETHING—like he leaves either by arrest or after paying me.
I let him stay and I started looking for other women. He would disappear overnight more and more frequently, claiming to have slept on his friend’s couch. He had constant “phone problems”-not being able to answer when I called. He insisted his battery was always dead, and although I bought him three new phone batteries to resolve this, he still would at times not answer for hours.
Naked breasts
There were other suspicious happenings. He borrowed $200 from me, insisting he had to go on an overnight trip to Connecticut for a job interview for a company that didn’t have a Connecticut office. He claimed to have a job offer from the company (which I never saw), then had no idea what the company even sold, forgot the name of the company, and never started the alleged job. Also, his job interviews were frequently at or after 6 p.m. and included dinner. Things like that.
He kept his phone off when with me and the phone had a lock code. I guessed the code once. His phone was full of women I didn’t know and he identified them with their caller IDs by photos he had taken of their naked breasts.
I caught him making plans to meet with at least one woman. She said they were just friends, although she, too, was identified by a set of naked breasts in his phone. Brian refused to admit they had plans or that he knew her. Then later Brian said he knew her and she was an attorney who could help him cause legal trouble for me for questioning his lies.
I caught him having a sexually suggestive conversation with a woman he picked up while in North Carolina at Thanksgiving. Brian had been talking to the woman a lot since returning but never when I was there and refused to admit she had visited New York (on a business trip) and that he had gone out with her.
I didn’t find anyone he was actually physically having intimacy with, but I also was never allowed to look through his phone contacts except for when I guessed it once. I should have been smarter and not let him know I had guessed it. (I should have been smarter and followed through with that attempt to kick him out).
Stonewalling and sweet words
Brian always responded to my anger with stonewalling and sweet words. He has a way of getting you to ignore his lies or distracting the conversation by talking about what was wrong with ME.
No matter how I raged at him or how many times I tossed him and his things out-I went through three sets of locks-he dug in and hung on and just bombarded me relentlessly, wanting to stay. Brian would say, “I’ll get a job and pay you back, if only I can stay until then.” I got the “I love you baby” routine. Honestly, I made many attempts to get rid of him. He would just flat out wear me down.
Brian would harass me at work with excessively frequent phone calls and accusations that I was cheating or not really at work (even when I was talking to him from my office line). He hardly slept, would stay up until three or four in the morning—I live in a one room studio apartment and this made it impossible for me to get enough sleep. Or he would stay out until 3 or 4 a.m. and then come in like a freight train, loud, lights on, talking until I was wide awake.
I started to miss work from fatigue and exhaustion. My 14-year-old cat had a terminal illness and had little control of her bladder anymore, so I had to give her a bath once or twice a day. This was on top of working 40 to 50 hours a week with no sleep, commuting, and doing ALL the housework as he did NOTHING except live off me and try to get jobs with his fake resume and fake credentials.
He lived off of me like a parasite. He was unemployed from approximately mid October 2005 until late January or February 2006. I paid 100 percent of everything during that time—so not only had I lent him money, now I was paying ALL expenses—trains, money to go on job interviews, toiletries, food, cable, etc., etc., etc., etc. This too was to be paid back when he got a job.
Refused to go
Well, the first job he got, as a sales executive in Manhattan , lasted less than two weeks before he was fired. To my knowledge he did not receive a paycheck. He pretended to still be going to work for several days after losing his job. I saw from the Internet activity time stamps that he was on my home computer all day. I called Brian’s office asking for him and that’s how I found out he was fired. He claimed that he resigned because they wanted him to move to California —of course, another lie.
I wanted him to leave. Brian always had some excuse, “It’s cold out; I’ll die in the street; I have no money; I have nowhere to go; I’m homeless.I have a job offer! My mom is sending me money. I’ll borrow from a friend. I’ll cash in some investments. The check’s in the mail! Any minute now.” Brian said all of those things to me. He refused to go.
I was afraid to call the police. I felt that since he was not physically violent, they would not really do anything to him. They could not just lock him up for the next several years, therefore they had to release him immediately. I lived in my own perceived fear of having this angry, hungry, homeless person lurking out there and stalking me. And, Brian KNEW that and of course played on it.
The supply
And I was right. The police don’t care. They sometimes took a report; but only about 50 percent of the time I got to talk to them. So, there I was-not wanting to pay for him any longer, afraid to get rid of him, wrapped up in confusion and mixed emotions. On one level, he was my boyfriend and the person I spent most of my free time with. On the other level, he was parasitically and systematically sucking me and every resource I had dry.
I was, as you say, “the supply.” Anything you can think of to get, he took and he took and he took and he took. It is my opinion that he was not going to stop until there was nothing left of me. He grew wrapped around me and in me like a tumor feeding on the blood directly from my veins—so you see, it is not as easy as you think to surgically remove someone that lives and breathes like a part of you.
Then he got another job a sales executive in Manhattan. That job lasted four days before he got fired. He received his first paycheck in approximately six months. It was approximately $885. Brian signed the check over to me. I kept $585 and he got $300.
His first purchase was a fake Rolex in Battery Park. He then decided to ride the subway alone, dressed in a sports coat and wearing the fake Rolex, at 3 a.m. Brian got attacked by three men and said he fought them off, but the fake Rolex got broken.
The $300 lasted him less than a week and he was back to wanting me to pay for things. Now, the $585 was a water drop in the ocean-the original debt has not been touched.