I initially started this blog to tell a very specific story about the hell I went through because of one person. To tell it properly, it was becoming a very long story that required going back over thousands of texts to put the exact timeline of the situation back together, as it happened last year and I wanted to make sure the story was completely accurate. Otherwise, it was like trying to piece together fifteen years of the show Supernatural by memory alone. As I was doing that, I was finding more and more things that this person had done to me that I had blanked out, and the story started to spiral out of control and was affecting my mental health.
It was also taking all of my spare time to write, and I would really love to focus on finishing my novel and sharing my fictional stories with all of you - things that I actually love writing as opposed to something that is frustrating me terribly. I ultimately decided that I will tell you the cliff notes version of what happened in this post but, at least for now, I’m going to forego the seven weeks series. There’s a lot of reasons for it, which I’ll cite at the end, as well as why I’m using fake names.
Harassment, control, manipulation and inappropriate behavior don't always come in the form of someone directly and openly displaying these behaviors to where you immediately clock it. Sometimes it comes from someone you're supposed to trust, who slowly seeps into every part of your life and undermines you in a way where you don't see it until you see it. Just because someone does something nice for you doesn't mean they're nice to you, but we're conditioned to believe that they are. By the time you do see the truth, it's too late and you're struggling to find a way to get your feet back on the ground. It's the way a lot of cult leaders work, as I've since learned.
I've lived through this experience and I'm hoping that my story can help others see what I should have, and also know that, if it has happened to you, it's not your fault. The shame is not on you. I'm hoping to start a conversation, because it needs to be talked about more. It's important, whether you're a man or woman, to know that the warning signs aren't always blazing red flags, but often something far more subtle.
My best friend died. I will grieve her for the rest of my days. There are still days where I pick up my phone to text her, realize she’s gone and end up crying all over again. She’s been such a big part of my life for so long, but I’m going to have to live the rest of my life without her. Painfully, I realize that unless I die young, I will spend more years of my life without her than with her and I still haven’t figured out how to do that yet.
Katie was originally born and raised in my county and moved across the country to be with Patrick, her fiance. I didn’t really know him that well. I met her online by chance, only to find she was from here and that she and Patrick came to visit multiple times a year, and that’s how a friendship formed with Katie. I had never spent any time with Patrick without her around. I texted him a few times a year - a Happy Birthday here or to talk about Katie. She and I, however, became like sisters despite the distance.
After the funeral, he never went back home. Instead, he became my worst nightmare. It started with him lying to me the very first day he was here to rope me into doing something for him, and ended up with him being a manipulative, controlling, creepy, homophobic, transphobic, racist, borderline stalker. (I want to make something clear; I am an ally. If your parents don’t accept you, I will be your mom. I will never judge you based on your skin color. I am white as hell, but I will stand by your side. I very specifically only judge people on their attitudes.) The person he always came across as with Katie around or in public was very kind but self deprecating, always thinking he did something wrong when he didn’t and never wanting to do anything to offend anyone else. After spending some time alone with him to help plan the funeral and such, I found out that this was a Jekyll and Hyde act for the ages.
Before he came out for the funeral, I started to get the impression by things he was texting to me that something was going to go wrong. I made it very, very clear to him that I had a busy life and was very overwhelmed. It was the holidays. I was the sole proprietor of a small business. I was dealing with a neurological issue of unknown origin. I would help as as best as I could, but I couldn’t drop everything for him. He took that to mean he could over insert himself into my life instead and I would just let him.
I learned early on that I couldn’t answer questions he asked me like a normal person. If he asked me what I was doing that day, I couldn’t say, “I have to run to Target because I ran out of printer paper,” because I would get to Target and he’d be sitting there waiting for me. Ask me how I know this. He would often text me to let me know he was coming over when he had never been invited, and I had to tell him very bluntly not to come over. He would completely ignore me and tell me it “was fine.” He would “be over soon.” I had to threaten him with calling the police if he showed up at my house more than once.
I have never met anyone who genuinely believed that they could completely ignore every word you were saying and continue to shove what they wanted down your throat, and suddenly you would just forget that you were a walking, talking human being with feelings and a life and do whatever they wanted. I was made to feel demoralized and as if I only existed to pay attention to him.
Before Katie was even in the ground, he kept asking me how he was going to find another woman, because he didn’t want to live his life alone. He also kept saying to me, “You find me attractive, right? I’m a really attractive guy. I’m in really good shape.” I did not and, to me, he was not either of those things. He once backed me into telling him this, and because I knew better than to lie and let him use it as an excuse to glue himself to me more, I told the truth. He became angry and then slowly devolved into telling me that I clearly didn’t find older men attractive like I claimed and I had lied to him. Yes, he accused me of lying about finding older men attractive because I didn’t find him attractive. This was also something I had never told him. It was something Katie knew about me and she must have passed on to him.
He tried to challenge me. If I did find older men attractive, I would name one celebrity around his age that I found attractive, and it had to be someone he would know. I told him I found Paul Johansson (That’s Dan Scott from One Tree Hill for all of my fellow millennials.) attractive and his response was, “I can’t compete with that.” I…was gobsmacked. Paul is a person on TV that I do not know. Who was he competing with? Truly one of the most bizarre conversations I’ve ever had in my life, but it gives you an idea of what I was dealing with.
This behavior was totally different from that mousy, self deprecating man he came across as with Katie. None of this really sat right with me. She hadn’t even been gone a week and he was worried about finding someone new. Then, despite me being clear that I had zero interest in him, he started targeting me. His exact words to me were, “You could move back with me, get an apartment, and I could move in with you.” WHAT? Why would I want to move across the country with you? Why are you moving in with me? These questions ran through my mind. I had given him no indication that I wanted to leave my family and friends and go anywhere, far more with him.
When he was consistently and unwaveringly told no, he started trying to manipulate me. My mom and I made the mistake of inviting him over for a family dinner, where we also found out he was a thief, and no, we never got the items back that he stole. We had a hell of a time getting him out of the house to where my mom actually had to yell at him to get him to leave. I had asked him to leave over and over again, and he completely ignored me for almost two hours before my mom lost it on him. He would later have the nerve to say something nasty to me about my mom doing that, as if he was the victim. When I told him that I had asked him to leave for almost two hours and he ignored me, he said to me, “I don’t remember it that way.”
And that was a theme with him. Every time he did something wrong, he “didn’t remember it that way.” Alternatively, he constantly bragged about how much money he had and would try to throw money at me to get me to do what he wanted or “remember” things how he wanted. (This is one of the reasons why him wanting me to get an apartment so he could move in with me was so creepy; he has his own money. He can afford a place to live.) He tried to not only tell me that my mom said a bunch of things about wanting me to move away and go off on my own that I know for a fact she would never say - and I’ve confirmed this with her - but also tried to gaslight me into thinking things happened that didn’t. Thankfully, I was strong enough in mind to know better.
I hung out with him a few times after the funeral, but less than a week after he had first arrived, I stopped getting together with him because of his behavior. I tried to tell myself over and over again that it was just grief and he wasn’t insidious and creepy, but he was. I tried to tell myself to stay in contact with him for Katie, as a last act of love to her, but he was getting way out of hand. He was also so intricately interwoven in the fabric of Katie’s life that blocking him out of my life also felt, in a way, like losing her all over again. He was the string tying me to her, or at least that’s how I, in my own grief, felt at the time.
At one point, he threatened to kill himself if I went to bed and didn’t keep talking to him. I was extremely ill that night and he knew that. I had to sleep. It wasn’t negotiable and he didn’t care. At this time, his sisters were here for the funeral and they were staying in the same house as him, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have someone available to talk to if he needed help. He just targeted me specifically. He was totally fine the next morning, but had to make a few jabs about how he couldn’t believe I went to sleep on him anyway.
That’s something that has gone through my head so many times. Why me? The only explanation I could come up with is quite simple - he’s a predator. You see, my friend was much younger than him and disabled. She came from an abusive household and it was easy for him to convince her that he was a nice guy. She was his entire world and she would drop anything to be there for him, which he made pretty clear multiple times that he expected me to do as well.
I am also significantly younger than him - over twenty years - and disabled. If you’re curious, I am in my thirties and he is in his early sixties, so this also lends to the fact that I was not dealing with a young guy. I was dealing with someone who was old enough to not be acting like this. Thinking back on the way he’s treated me, I absolutely think he thought of me as a target. I am much older than Katie was when she first met him, and though I’ve been through a lot in life, I went to therapy, I learned how to control my demons, I put in the work, and though I still struggle with depression and anxiety and am not ashamed of it, I knew better. He didn’t catch me young and naive, but everything about the way he treated me told me he thought that of me. He took every chance he got to point out how “smart” he was and how “sneaky” he was.
I didn’t find him to be too smart if he thought I was buying what he was selling, which he constantly did despite me directly telling him I wasn’t. He never listened. Every no was a chance for him to try and start an argument with me about how I was wrong and I was the one who wasn’t seeing things correctly. (See; the fact that I didn’t find him attractive.) He was never wrong and never took responsibility for himself or his actions. It was always my fault. As for sneaky, he was as subtle as a fart in a church.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am not great with technology. I am also not big on texting a lot. And I was busy. He knew all of this because we had this conversation every single day. He would not stop texting me. The worst part was, most of his texts were him going, “Hello?” “Hello?” “Are you there?” “Why aren’t you answering me?” “Hello” “What did I do wrong?” “Don’t ignore me!” He would give me, on average, ten to fifteen minutes to answer a text he sent, and when I didn’t because I had a life and was busy, he would start this crap. And it was always about him. Never was it, “Are you busy?” “Are you okay?” It was always “I” and “me.” He even did this to me knowing that I was in the hospital. It’s really fun to be taken for painful medical tests and come back to these kinds of texts.
After the hospital debacle, I flat out told him that my world did not revolve around him and he was being extremely disrespectful and needed to stop, but he didn’t. I started mostly ignoring him thinking he’d get the hint, but he didn’t, and by the end of the seven weeks I had over seven thousand texts just from him. It averaged out to him sending me one hundred and fifty three text messages each day. That’s crazy in the first place, but when you consider that I was telling him NOT to do this and wasn’t answering most of them, it’s straight up stalkerish. It was also incredibly disrespectful, but as a whole, he was incredibly disrespectful to me. He just wanted what he wanted and that was that.
Those seven weeks were the worst seven weeks of my life without even factoring him in. I lost my best friend, I was in the hospital more than once, I had multiple medical appointments for worsening neurological issues, I caught Covid, I was running a business, and then we had two holidays and two birthdays in our family. I got to the point where I was giving him the least amount of attention possible to just keep him from coming to my house, as he threatened to do when I didn’t answer him, because I knew that was going to end in a police report. I probably should have let it happen, but I didn’t want to be the person to file a police report on my dead best friend’s grieving fiance.
Now that those seven weeks were over and I could breathe again, it really hit me just how inappropriate and awful this whole situation had been, and now I had time to deal with it head on. I told him to leave me alone; very directly and flatly, I told him not to contact me again. This was a man who told me that he supported Manson because Manson didn’t do anything wrong and never deserved to be in jail. According to him, nothing that happened was Manson’s fault and his exact words were, “If I told you to do something and you did it, I shouldn’t be in trouble for that. It’s on you.” All of those people would still be alive if it wasn’t for Manson, but here he was supporting the guy. He felt similarly about Jim Jones because, “They didn’t have to drink the kool-aid.” There was a certain amount of fear I had towards cutting him off when he knew where I lived, but I knew it had to be done.
Just a side note, if you’re wondering why I invited him to my house with him acting like this, he knew where I lived anyway. Katie and I often sent cards back and forth and he had told me before that they had driven past my house to see where I lived, so it wouldn’t have mattered. He had my address. He could have showed up if he wanted to.
He just kept texting me. It went on for weeks. I ignored most of his texts, but in the end I told him a total of four times to leave me alone and, figuring that I had enough to file a police report against him if it became necessary, I finally blocked him. Then he started texting me on Katie’s number, so I ended up having to block her number, too. The very last conversation I had with him was me saying to him, “Do not keep texting me.” His response was, “I’m only doing it because I genuinely care about you. You understand that, right?”
He wasted no time hitting me with the manipulative and passive aggressive one-two punch, and I was beyond disgusted. You don’t do something someone is repeatedly and clearly telling you not to do because you care about them. You do it because you don’t care about anyone but yourself and what you want. I already didn’t care for him and he had crossed every boundary I ever set prior to this, but this alone showed me who he really was. I had been leery of him for quite awhile, but this is when I really saw it. Yes, I was slow on the uptake.
Katie had introduced me to her motley crew of friends, and several of them became my friends, too. What is so interesting to me about this is that Patrick refused to hang out with her friends, told me that I was the only one of her friends that he liked, and constantly shit talked her friends under the table. But he had their phone numbers, so I’m sure he was also shit talking me. Somehow, he was able to wrangle all of them to reach out to me about contacting him.
What got me is that none of them ever asked me why I wasn’t talking to him. These were people I had built friendships with over the years and they would simply text me and tell me that Patrick had to talk to me and I needed to text him. I would tell them that I had no contact with him because he was consistently disrespectful to me and leave at that, but they didn’t stop. What I was able to establish was that none of them spent any time alone with him. They had all texted him since Katie’s death, but not one of them had gotten together with him and they all still thought he was a great guy, and somehow he managed to make them think I was the problem. He was a fan of cult leaders, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
However, I saw this coming. I knew even when it was happening that he was isolating me, and that he hadn’t been spending any time with her other friends because I was in contact with them through it all. I knew if I blocked him or if this went down, it was going to come down on me, and I was fine with being the bad guy if it meant getting him out of my life. I didn’t expect to be hassled about texting him, though. This went on for six months. Nobody seemed to be able to respect me simply saying that I did not want to talk to him, and not wanting to start anything, I never told them what happened, but I shouldn’t have had to. Saying that I didn’t want contact with him because he was disrespectful should have been enough to get people to stop, but it wasn’t.
What really changed the situation was when Katie’s cousin, who I met and talked to exactly once almost ten years ago and was absent from the funeral, sent me a message on social media absolutely flipping out at me. She ran the gamut of calling me every name in the book to telling me that Katie would be ashamed of me for the way I treated Patrick. It was a multi-paragraph, grammatically poor rant that I struggled to make sense of, but what I got out of it was that what Patrick was telling people had happened between us had absolutely nothing to do with what did actually happen. This is when the whole picture really came together and I hit the block button for her right quick without a response. She was looking for a fight and I didn’t need to defend myself. I just had to protect myself.
I knew I would be the bad guy for cutting him out of my life, but I didn’t expect him to make up fantastical lies about me and what happened. I thought he’d just tell everyone I was a piece of shit like a normal human would do and move on. What was even more curious is, if I was as bad of a person as Katie’s cousin was telling me he had made me out to be, then why was he constantly having other people ask me to contact him? Katie’s cousin, at the end of her ignorant and uncalled for message, even told me that I would be a much better person if I would just stop treating him poorly and reach out to him. But ma’am, if I am so awful that you had to go out of you way to call me names and tell me Katie would be ashamed of me, then why would you ever want me to contact him? If I’m this awful, wouldn’t you want me as far away from the person who you just told me was “absolutely wonderful?” None of it made sense, but it was creepy and it was more than I was willing to put up with.
That night, I went through and blocked every single person who had any kind of contact with Patrick. I did it to protect myself. I have no regrets. I wanted to make sure that he couldn’t find out anything about me or my life through other people, or in any way have access to me. There are still days that I worry he will just show up at my house, because the last I knew, he got a place here and hasn’t gone home.
This kind of creepy, ongoing behavior is what made me ultimately decide not to post the seven weeks series, at least not now. It is finally quiet. Nobody is bothering me about him, I haven’t had to talk about him in almost a month, and things have been peaceful. I just want him out of my life and for this to be over with. I changed the names in the story for this reason. Although nobody bothered to hear my side and his story is just that, a story, so I doubt anyone would recognize my side of things if they read it, I’m not taking the chance. Especially after what I’ve been through and the way Katie’s cousin flipped out at me.
The really sad thing is, people should be able to tell their stories when they go through something like this. But if I’ve learned anything from Rose McGowan, it’s that sometimes telling the truth torches your whole life. I’m not Rose and not in the public eye, but I am still afraid of this guy. I still carry the worry that he could show up here or that I could run into him, and I don’t want to perpetuate that by spending months posting a story about him. For now, I just need to leave it alone for my own safety.
