The Inbox: Part 3, Vivian

[Email: After two years of hell, two years of anger, I finally broke down and cried reading your words.]

[Email: I was brought to tears reading about your family's experience.]

[Email: I sat on my hands and worried, and occasionally blamed my spouse for putting us in the thick of this legal entanglement that felt like it would never end.]

[Email: This slow and grueling process has placed a dark cloud of uncertainty and fear over our lives.]

[Email: Once we've been through this ringer, it's very difficult to carry on as before.]

Sarah Viren: When I started digging into my inbox last year, I thought I'd find, well, stories. Maybe some with documentation, a few screenshots, a police report or news link. What I hadn't considered was that I might find other inboxes, people with hundreds of emails, all connected to a story of their own. This episode is about one of those, an inbox within my inbox—one that has been filling up for the past decade with some of the most violent and upsetting material I've seen.

Sarah: It starts in 2011, at the end of a bad relationship between a woman named Vivian and someone I'm just gonna call S. But it would grow over the subsequent years to involve at least 20 other people, some of whom were close to Vivian, and some she didn't even know, but is connected to now through a kind of shared nightmare. Here's what Vivian messaged me on Twitter in March of 2020.

Vivian: Hi, Sarah. I wanted to reach out, but not publicly for reasons that should be immediately clear, because a number of my colleagues and I have been dealing with a similar situation for the past decade, so I wanted to let you know that you are not alone.

Sarah: When I read that email, I assumed Vivian also had a false accusation story, like so many others in my inbox. But then I talked with her and began to see how much more complicated and far-reaching her story was.

Sarah: We met over Zoom last fall. Her two vocal cats every so often sauntered before the screen like lost extras in a movie. And a number of times when I asked about a specific date or detail, Vivian would disappear, leaving me and the cats alone while she dug into an archive of documents in another computer.

Sarah: I know you've told me at one point you've just been, like, accumulating evidence.

Vivian: Oh my gosh, yes. Oh, I know that I have, like, a whole PDF of, like, 500 pages of emails. So let me just look for that.

Sarah: Okay.

Vivian: And I think yes, like, this documentation thing, like, there's this fear that if I don't document on any given occasion, at some point I'll regret not having documented, and I will feel like I made a mistake by not documenting.

Sarah: I felt that as well, when this was happening to us. Like, I felt like I have to record everything. You know, screenshot every—you know, it just felt like—I think for me, it felt like one way to control it.

Vivian: Yeah.

Sarah: Vivian met S in 2007 on OkCupid. S had a cute profile photo and seemed smart, so Vivian agreed to meet up. They started dating. Then S moved in with Vivian. And when got into graduate school in another city a couple years later, S moved with her. But the relationship felt increasingly unhealthy to Vivian, and it became even more so after she tried to break things off. S became sexually coercive, Vivian said, and aggressive. And in early 2011, Vivian decided to move out. And that's when the false accusations started. S emailed Vivian multiple times late at night, at one point threatening to tell others she'd plagiarized her entrance essay for grad school if she didn't respond.

Sarah: Things got bad enough that Vivian cut off contact completely. But S showed up in person at Vivian's campus. Vivian called the police, and S was arrested at least once for criminal trespass. Eventually S moved away, but the harassment and allegations continued online—emails filling Vivian's inbox, social media posts about Vivian and her friends. And then one day in 2013, almost two years after the break up, Vivian woke up to dozens of messages.

Vivian: I don't remember what time I woke up. I'm not an early bird, but I just remember waking up, and I had text messages and some people were like, "Oh my God. Are you okay?" And they were all kind of vague, and I just remember I asked one of my friends, "Hey, do you know what's going on? I keep getting all these text messages and, like—" and then she forwarded me the email that had been sent to everyone in my department—or at least everyone except for me.

Sarah: There were more than 100 people in Vivian's department, and they all received the same email from S.

Vivian: This email was 2:53 a.m. So it's like a Trump tweet. And so it says, "I have nothing left to lose in life, so I'm going to speak the truth."

Sarah: Unlike a Trump tweet, the email from S was long. In it, S claimed that in 2011, when the relationship was coming to an end, Vivian sexually assaulted S. Vivian says that never happened, and in the timeline of the documents I reviewed, it seems like S only made that claim after Vivian started telling friends that S had been aggressive and manipulative during their relationship.

Sarah: Can you remember what went through your head when you—somebody finally forwarded you that email?

Vivian: I was really worried. I felt very embarrassed. I was very concerned about my career and kind of my professional reputation. I kind of have this—or, like, remember this feeling of just kind of being struck by how the situation that had been affecting me and affecting the people who I was friends with my first year, right? Going from a situation in which I could sort of predict who the targets were gonna be to then just ballooning.

Sarah: That ballooning took a number of different forms, but much of it seemed aimed at S getting what abusive partners or abusive exes often want: control. In the beginning, S only harassed Vivian and her friends, those who had supported her during the break-up. But soon, S began reaching out to others: colleagues and guest speakers to the department, and those Vivian interacted with online, telling those people that Vivian was a rapist. It seemed like most people didn't believe what S was saying, but it was impossible for Vivian to be sure.

Sarah: As the years passed, S began threatening new people in Vivian's life, including the friend she met after the break-up, Shantel, who also went to grad school with Vivian.

Shantel: The little sound. Should I mute that?

Sarah: I spoke to Shantel with Vivian's permission in February of this year. She told me that she and Vivian first bonded over Vivian's attempts to "class up" the snack table at departmental events.

Shantel : She was always really big on the cheese selection for our—for the snacks. [laughs]

Sarah: What did she want as far as cheese?

Shantel: Just, like, wanting to, like, make sure there were good cheese options. So, you know, not like …

Sarah: Just cheddar.

Shantel: Yeah, not something basic like cheddar, right?

Sarah: Vivian and Shantel also gravitated towards each other because they were two of only a handful of people of color in their graduate program. Vivian is Asian American and Shantel's Black. They went out for margaritas sometimes and just talked, so Shantel knew about S and what S had been doing, but it never occurred to her that she might become a target. But then one day she was interacting with a stranger on Twitter.

Shantel: And I got a DM from someone that I knew from grad school, and he was like, "You know who that is that you're talking to, right?" And I was like, "No, who is it?" And he was like, "Oh, that's S." So my immediate reaction was, like, "Oh! Well, shit. Gotta block them." That was it. S turned on me immediately.

Sarah: Shantel remembers that S got really angry, accusing her of being a fake feminist and supporting sexual assault. Later, a dummy Twitter account was created in Shantel's name, and posts there repeated similar accusations. In one, there was a picture of Shantel, her face scrunched up into a huge grin, but over her photo were the words, "It's not sexual violence when a woman of color does it."

Sarah: Shantel reported the fake account to Twitter, and eventually it was taken down. She also let friends and followers online know what was up. She posted a screenshot of S's handle. "Don't trust this person," she said. "They're cyberstalking me."

Sarah: But the harassment didn't stop.

Shantel: Things really started to ramp up once I announced my job.

Sarah: In 2017, Shantel announced online that she'd received her doctorate and gotten an academic job, a really good one that she was excited about.

Shantel: I used to have on my website a, you know, widget where you could send me an email. S would go on there and fill out the widget with, like, multiple messages. So I'd get, like, five to ten emails in a day multiple days in a row for like a week or two at a time. And, you know, they started calling me names. So they—"Rape hog." They would call me a fascist. They were threatening to chop off my hands, throw acid on my face.

Sarah: God!

Shantel: It was all really, really traumatizing.

Sarah: Yeah. That's so scary. I had no idea that it was that level of violence.

Sarah: Vivian had avoided specifics in our early conversations, in part because there were so many of them, but also because they were upsetting to talk about, and it would be months before I saw some of those 500 pages from her inbox that she'd archived. So when Shantel and I talked last February, I suddenly saw that S hadn't just been harassing Vivian and others for years, or even cyberstalking as Shantel said, S had been terrorizing them.

Sarah: That terror has remained steady for Shantel ever since she accepted that job four years ago. At first, the threats mostly stemmed from Shantel's support for Vivian, but around 2017, S began to identify as trans and after that, S also started to call Shantel and others "transphobic." S threatened to send activists after Shantel for supposedly inciting violence against trans women. Shantel tried not to let the threats upset her, but then she received a new email—a really disturbing one.

Sarah: In it, S called her a racial slur and threatened to mutilate her.

Shantel: I remember the next day, I was going to go on a date and, like, literally just had a panic attack in the closet trying to figure out what to wear. 'Cause it was just—I think just like the stress of it just, like, finally released and I just freaked out and was, like, crying in the closet for, like, 30 minutes. And so I was late to the date. And so then I'm, like, having to explain, like, why I just freaked out and why I'm late. And it's like, that's a lot to put on a person who you're just meeting, you know, for an online date. So surprise, surprise that didn't go anywhere.

Sarah: After a break: can anything be done to make this stop?

***

Sarah: This is "The Inbox." Welcome back. When we left off, I'd asked how we might make this stop. Vivian and Shantel and others have tried. They've contacted the police in every town they've lived in since all this started, but with little success, in part because Vivian was often told at first that she needed to provide a physical address for S, which she didn't have. S has been hard to track down. But also because state laws differ on when an online threat is, well, a threat.

Shantel: A lot of our experience with kind of like law enforcement's part in this is not taking it seriously because they've never delivered on their threat. So it's like the emotional terrorism of it all, like, apparently just isn't sufficient for, like, people to care. And I'm like, yeah, let someone call you racial slurs for years and tell you how they're gonna maim you for years.

Sarah: Recently, Vivian and Shantel learned that warrants for S's arrest have been issued in at least four states, but as far as anyone knows, S now lives overseas, most likely in The Netherlands. So even with those warrants in place, there's nothing to stop S from sending violent emails, posting defamatory tweets or threatening people online.

Sarah: At one point, a friend of Shantel's who was also being cyberstalked by S tried to get the Dutch police involved, but they declined as well. They said that local police in the United States had jurisdiction.

Shantel: I don't know. It's really frustrating, because there's not a lot I think that the law can do about psychological terrorism, to be honest.

Sarah: Yeah, I think it's lawsuits that are what handle them. But those require money.

Shantel: Yeah. Yeah. The advice that was given to me was, you know, file a civil case. And I'm like, who has—I don't have money for that, you know?

Sarah: Cyberstalking, like real-life stalking happens more often to women and people of color. And lawyers and activists have started to argue that online harassment is a civil rights issue because being present online, whether it's to promote yourself or socialize, is less and less a choice these days. It's how we live, work, make friends, and in some cases, fall in love. And if you're too scared to participate in that world, if you're constrained by threats, then you can't live and thrive the same way as others.

Sarah: And I see that—especially in Vivian. She told me that she's become much more cautious about promoting herself and her research online over the years, because almost every time she has in the past, S has been there in the comments section or subtweets or in her inbox writing about what a horrible person she is. She worries about making new friends or colleagues, because what if S goes after those people too?

Vivian: I think one of my—a source of pain is thinking about will people regret getting to know me? Will people regret becoming my friend because now they're a target? I do worry that people are gonna be like, "Well, I wish that Vivian were not in my life, and then I wouldn't have to deal with, like, this."

Sarah: At this point, close to 20 people in several different states have been targeted by S at one time or another. They're almost all women, people of color or queer. And in fact, one of Vivian's former professors, a white man, told me that he's never been targeted, even though he's defended Vivian a lot over the years. And he thinks that S goes after more marginalized people on purpose.

Sarah: For Vivian and Shantel, that harassment is not only terrifying, it's also time consuming, because each time a new threat comes in, they try to log it and then send it out to the police and university staff, but also others who've been attacked in the past so that they're aware that S is at it again.

Vivian: When I think about, like, what triggered me, something that actually triggered me a lot was administrative work related to this situation. The sort of like additional creation of labor, that is actually one of the more frustrating aspects of this is how it robs me of my time.

Sarah: I listened recently to a recording Vivian made of a 2016 meeting she had with the Assistant District Attorney in the county where she went to graduate school. The ADA, a woman, said she had seen personally how hard it was for victims of stalking to get help.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Assistant District Attorney: In handling stalking cases, which I handle quite a bit, one of the biggest challenges for people that are trying to get charges filed or trying to get a protective order is lack of organization.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Vivian: Mm-hmm.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Assistant District Attorney: My number one recommendation for building a case is be organized. The more organized you are and the more you can put stuff in a timeline fashion, the more likely it is that law enforcement and/or prosecutors are gonna do something about it.]

Sarah: Listening to that tape, I imagine Vivian there, her phone on the table recording the conversation, as she was told that the onus was on her to document everything, organize it, present her case. I thought about those hundreds of pages of emails and other documentation she's now gathered. At the beginning of our conversation, I compared that act of documenting to a form of control. But S still controls so much of her life, and the lives of so many others.

Sarah: At one point, Vivian talked about the kids she might one day have, what she would need to do to protect them too. And I tried to imagine facing an endless future threat like that, one that you realize might not ever change.

Sarah: The Assistant DA seemed friendly and supportive, but also realistic. She explained that stalkers can be hard to stop, in part because they can become obsessive. But another issue is that jail time for cyberstalking just isn't that long—at least at the state level. And the fear is that a person like S will go to jail for a few months and come out even angrier.

Sarah: One thing you could do, the Assistant DA told Vivian, is get the FBI involved. But most likely that would only happen if Vivian could make a compelling case.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Assistant District Attorney: Even though it seems like a tremendous pain in the ass, I think that is your best shot in getting something done is to be organized and clear, because they don't want to be the ones to put all the pieces together. Because when somebody can see the big picture, they're like, "Oh my God, this is a horrible, horrible thing!" But if you have everything in separate reports and they can go through and then, you know, connect all the dots themselves, it's just less likely that they're gonna do anything.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Vivian: Yeah.]

Sarah: A number of S's victims have tried to get the FBI involved. In addition to Vivian, there was a woman in Colorado who pressured them to open a case. A friend of Shantel's contacted a police officer who was in touch with the FBI too. But the person who finally got their attention, at least as far as I could tell, was a woman named Letisha.

Sarah: She was a friend of Vivian and Shantel's from grad school, and starting in 2020, S began to target her directly, calling her transphobic, in part, it seems because Letisha once accidentally referred to S as "he" on Twitter, not knowing that S now identified as trans. S emailed doctored photos of Letisha—who is Black—with a Klan hood on her head. And eventually, S began threatening Letisha's department as well.

Letisha: The one that, like, really scared me was like, "If Letisha isn't fired by this date, there will be incendiary devices, like, placed in your department." And so I really thought, like, at that point it was gonna get taken seriously.

Sarah: There had been a deadly school shooting at Letisha's university more than a decade before, and perhaps because of that history, her administrators reached out to the FBI, and the FBI responded. Letisha was put in contact with an agent, and for a little while things felt hopeful. But then a year passed.

Sarah: What have you heard specifically from the police or FBI? What sort of hope do you have? What are you thinking about whether or not this'll end?

Letisha: "We're working on it." That's the company line, and I'm like, I feel like y'all say that every single time, and yet I don't see anything being done. I'm like, "What is there left to investigate?" You know who the person is, you say that you're aware of where they are, you've read the emails, the tweets, you've spoken with all of us. What is left to investigate? The only thing I can think of is that they need one of us to die for this to become a situation. And I don't want that to happen. It should not have to go that far. It's gone far enough. It's gone on long enough.

Sarah: Letisha got one of those emails from the FBI recently, so they know the case is still open, that they're still working on it. But Vivian got a separate email not long ago letting her know that agents in another region had looked into what S had been doing and they could not, and I quote, "Develop a federal charge." In other words, who knows what's going on, or if this will ever end? The FBI, for their part, refused to answer questions about what they are or are not doing about S.

Sarah: I think about all these email updates and our inboxes, and how much different they are from mine. Vivian, with her archive of hate; Shantel, and her collection of racist messages; and Letisha, with these updates from the FBI always saying the same thing. And then, every once in a while, a new message from S reaches one of them, and it all begins again.

Sarah: Vivian told me she wanted to tell her story here because she has no idea what else to do. But she doesn't have a lot of hope that it will help. Shantel said the same. In fact, she thinks it might make things worse, that S might hear this and get even angrier. But Shantel said she'd talk to me to support her friend. Letisha decided to tell her story in part because she shares a birthday with Zora Neale Hurston, who once said, "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."

Sarah: But none of them want S to go to jail, or even be punished. Vivian used to be in love with S, and Shantel told me that she knows S is a hurt person, that hurt people hurt people. But at this point, they just want to be left alone.

Sarah: Near the end of my conversation with Vivian, I ask her a question that I thought about a lot during my and Marta's ordeal. It's one of those questions we ask ourselves when we feel trapped—by circumstance or someone else.

Sarah: Do you ever think about, like, how your life might've been different if you hadn't known this person?

Vivian: I think that at this point, I'm just kind of like, I just reject this idea that people have harm-free lives. And it's unfortunate that I have had a life of harm, but so many other people do. And I think that maybe kind of reworking that would be accepting that people have lives with harm and starting from that assumption. All of the women of color I know from my program have had some kind of devastating thing happen to them. And so I think that what helps me not focus on what was lost is just kind of rejecting that paradigm in the first place.

Sarah: There was something so smart but also heartbreaking in what Vivian was saying—that one of the ways she's learned to cope is to focus on the reality that no one's life is free of harm, so hers never would have been, even without S.

Sarah: But there is something jarring about that too. I realized how committed I'd been to the possibility of finding a solution to S, some alternative future for the people S has harmed. Marta and I found a way to handle our version of S, someone I referred to as J in my story. And hearing from people like Vivian in my inbox, I often feel guilty for the peace we've been able to find. But I also feel so keenly that none of this should be happening to any of them. And I want to change reality. I want solutions. But I still don't know what they are.

Sarah: Up next, I speak to a couple who did manage to find resolution. In the final episode of "The Inbox," the story of Ken and Mark.

Kristen Torres: "The Inbox" is a project of The 11th, from Pineapple Street Studios. It's written by Sarah Viren and produced by Sarah Viren, Jenelle Pifer and Maria Robins-Somerville, with editing by Joel Lovell. The 11th team is Leila Day, Joel Lovell, Eric Mennel, Jenelle Pifer, Chloe Prasinos and me, Kristen Torres. Our executive producers are Max Linsky and Jenna Weiss-Berman. Our engineers are Raj Makijah, Hannis Brown and Devy Sumner. Fact-checking by Sara Ivry. Music by Raj Makijah, BlankForms and Blue Dot Sessions. Sales and marketing by Cadence13. Artwork by Jonathan Conda. Thanks for listening.