As any chump can tell you, the pain of betrayal is a motherfucker. That stomach lurching, heart stopping moment when you realize your partner was not who you thought they were. Their mask slips, the truth is revealed, and you’re devastated.
If you read this blog, you’ve been there. Cheating is so common, so insidious that if it hasn’t happened to you, it tends to be a big shrug. Oh so that’s why the Throgmortons are divorcing. Being chumped doesn’t engender much horror outside the small circle of those collaterally damaged.
We throw our invective at cheaters — they’re assholes, freaks, narcissists, pompous, ridiculous, pathetic players with their contrived dating profiles and banal workplace affairs.
But quite a few of you have much darker tales — you tangled with sociopaths.
I hesitated to write this column because of the Esther Perel-esque critique — “Your situation Goes Beyond Infidelity.” Oh Tracy, don’t conflate cheaters with personality disorders. Don’t mention retirement accounts blown on hookers, or Thai sex workers, or criminal fraud. God forbid, don’t mention the domestic violence that often goes with cheating — the pregnant woman whose head gets slammed on the concrete basement floor when she confronts him. Don’t talk about the protection from abuse orders. Or the guns. Or the verbal threats. I’ll burn your house down. I’ll piss on that baby’s grave. I’ll kill you if you tell anyone.
Infidelity is abuse. And some of it, yes Esther, goes “way beyond” — it’s actually criminal.
Over the Christmas holidays, a dear chump I know made a horrifying discovery, when she came home and found police detectives in her apartment. Turns out they were there to confiscate her boyfriend’s computer. He had been online cruising for under-age girls. They’d been together for several years and were living together. He was a sexual predator.
And no, she had no idea.
And yes, she thought he really loved her.
So in addition to the devastation and skein untangling that your average chump goes through, she also had to contend with the darkest knowledge you can have about another person — that they prefer to fuck children. That you were a front of normalcy to their perversion. That they saw you as the weakest antelope in the herd, and that’s why they went with you. Surely, a healthier person would’ve pegged them? Why ME? How did I not know THIS?
And lest you think my friend is an outlier, freak of the week, I get letters with situations like hers every month. Often, every week. Just the other day, a woman sent me a online review of Romanian escorts from some “FKK Saunaclubs in Germany” that she found her husband on. Sexual trafficking of poor, Eastern European women. It’s a real chucklefest of a read, until you consider — they are BUYING AND SELLING PEOPLE. And then reviewing them like it was Amazon.
It’s a thing. A modern slavery THING.
And I know that by writing about it — exploring the Venn diagram of where serial cheater and John and sexual predator overlap — will get me the criticism of hysteria. Much better if we keep all these discussions in nice, tidy boxes. Cheating is just that thing that happens when you Aren’t Meeting Their Needs! (For adolescent girls….)
In the coming months — be warned folks — I’m going to start a conversation about this, beginning with examining the work of Rachel Moran, author of Paid For. Moran was once a 15-year-old prostitute on the streets of Dublin. She’s been taking on the sex trade and the myth of the “happy hooker.”
You know that bullshit — that sex workers are just self actualized, liberated sex-positive creatures, trying to make a wage! Moran instead points to the exploitation, the coercion, and the obvious suffering of women forced to fuck multiple strange men a day.
She wants to have a moral discussion about that suffering.
“I think that the reason people want prostitution stripped of morality is because if we viewed it through a moral prism it would collapse, and they know it,” she said.
Malignant entitlement comes in many forms. What keeps entitlement alive (and predators hidden) is not calling it out. Let’s help this shit collapse — let’s talk about it.
Yes, this is an important topic. Some of these cheaters are sociopaths and psychopaths. They are malevolent. They are masters of disguise. They know exactly how to appear normal while hiding some very evil stuff.
If you have dealt with one, no you are not at fault for not knowing. That is what they do. There was no way for you to know. Don’t beat yourself up.
I’ve tangled with two. Both were exceptional at getting past my highly tuned bullshit detector. That is the scary part. They are capable of hiding anything from anyone…at least for a period of time.
Watch Investigation Discovery for a week (or a month or all the time like I do lol) and you will see that this is not uncommon. In fact, it is far more common than you could imagine.There are far more people out there who exist to use other people that you can imagine.
People like this need to have a veneer of normalcy. That is part of the game. They need to appear so normal that if a rumor starts no one would even consider the rumor true. “Him? He is such a great guy! He would never do something like that!” is the reaction they want if they come under suspicion.
If you are a good person, if you are an honest person, your set point is to consider other people are nice and honest too. You have no frame of reference that includes “wow, I’m dating/living with/married to a sociopath.” Your instinct is to think they have had a rough life, don’t have good coping skills, feel wounded, need therapy and lots of love and acceptance from you and they will eventually settle in to a good life with you.
That is what people like this count on.
Repeating: That is what people like this count on.
Trust your gut, be observant, don’t be so quick to give someone the benefit of the doubt, expect to be treated with respect. The minute you feel manipulated is the minute you need to completely reevaluate the relationship and go into self-protection mode.
Chumplady is not over-stating or being alarmist. The IRC completely avoids and actively ignores the facts. Some people really are just mean/mentally ill/evil and there is no way anyone should try to stay in a relationship with them. Some people can’t be fixed. Personality disorders are managed not cured and that takes a huge effort by the person with the personality disorder. Many people are simply not capable of that level of self-reflection or can sustain that type of self-control to manage their personality disorder.
You can’t fix them. Love can’t fix them. There isn’t enough acceptance or support or therapy or medication in the world to fix them.
Excellent post sam. I completely agree that “They know exactly how to appear normal while hiding some very evil stuff.”
Cheater ex is a sociopath – not officially though because he quit going while they were working on that diagnosis. I come to realize that now that my head is clearer than it was before I knew about his cheating. Had I not discovered it, I’d still be there believing that he is a good person whose priorities are skewed but he’ll figure it and all will be well again. Makes me sick to my stomach to think that was my life for so long.
This is so good I just had to copy and repost:
“If you are a good person, if you are an honest person, your set point is to consider other people are nice and honest too. You have no frame of reference that includes “wow, I’m dating/living with/married to a sociopath.” Your instinct is to think they have had a rough life, don’t have good coping skills, feel wounded, need therapy and lots of love and acceptance from you and they will eventually settle in to a good life with you.
That is what people like this count on.
Repeating: That is what people like this count on.”
It all starts with thinking of/treating people like things as the great Terry Pratchett said.
“They need to appear so normal that if a rumor starts no one would even consider the rumor true.”
In addition Sam they are able to put doubt in others minds about the faithful spouse. Subtle and not so subtle undermining goes on for years. Not only do they want to look like the good guy/victim they make us into the scapegoat for all their woes. Poor, poor, Mr. Dark he so mistreated.
sam……this is exactly what I’ve been saying/thinking. Positively chameleons. You described the X- Lucifer!
He’s a con-artist and I was positively used as a good front man while he hid behind me, like the rat he is, to entertain his sick pleasures.
I have no proof, only gut instinct due to who he is, what he likes, and what he has said, that he is a predator too. (Guess thats a little more than my gut growling!).
The HATE I continue to have for him is beyond unexplainable. No, I don’t let it consume me 24-7 but the times the fuckhead pops in my brain, that’s when the overwhelming feelings of disdain come in.
So excellent Sam.
“expect to be treated with respect’. This alone should be the benchmark. Simple.
I also read somewhere to ask – Do you have empathy for your partner? Does your partner have empathy for you? — In most cases, they don’t have empathy for you. And in other situations, they don’t have the ability to have empathy.
Sam, you absolutely nailed it. Your insight is exactly what’s omitted in the sex addiction recovery models albeit intentionally. When I once described the CSAT model to a friend, she replied, “sounds like it was developed by a sex addict”. In fact, IT WAS.
Yeah, they lied to you for years, maybe even decades? That’s normal and part of the addiction. They get angry, moody, defensive and blame you? That’s normal too. And they don’t feel empathy and remorse? Of course, so textbook but please don’t make any big decisions (like leaving) in the first year. It takes time to feel feelings and Carnes’ Gentle Path through the 12 Steps literally must be approached gently because clearly only a wounded soul would rate and LOL about fucking 18 year olds, complimentary rim jobs and surreptitiously inserting fingers in “the back door” of escorts they had “pounded” on various review boards.
I work with a renowned forensic psychiatrist and after 2.5 years I finally disclosed as I was considering reconciliation but struggled with my ex’s lack of empathy. And yes, my ex totally had that “veneer of normalcy”. I expected the psychiatrist to be sympathetic to my partner, but instead he said, “these guys are having their cake and eating it”. He even offered to look at a psychopathy assessment tool with me. Coincidentally, I came across CL around the same time.
My ex cheated on me for the first 11 years of our relationship and then I spent 2 years in so-called “recovery” with him. Thank you soooo much CL for calling this behaviour for what it is – predatory and sociopathic.
People don’t know. I was just at my dance class tonight. A guy goes, was close to the husband of the lady who runs it, turns out he had been bad mouthing people and if confronted about it blamed other people, but it all came out recently. I asked another lady there whose husband he had been close to if she had any issues with him, “oh yes”, she says, “and he’s a convicted paedophile on the sex offender list, went to jail for a year a decade ago for grooming his granddaughter, luckily she told and nothing happened, but he was planning it”. WTF! Would never have picked it.
Scream it from the rooftops and bravo to you for doing so. My estranged husband is planning to fly to Odessa in June to catch up with one of the many women he is corresponding with. I feel sick that he is cheating on other women & exploiting them as they are often not allowed to leave these dating websites once they get on them. Good luck to you and best wishes to your friend.
“Let’s talk about it.”
I’m in!!
Me, too.
I’m in too. I’m shocked that no one who’s learned about his “preferences” is concerned about our young daughters. I feel so alone in my fears. They don’t understand how much he’s hiding and how good he is at it.
I haven’t had any direct personal experience that I’m aware of (although I wouldn’t be surprised if X participated while we were married). I do know X paid for underage girls in the Philippines before we met.
I lived in the Philippines while I was in high school. Young underage girls were being exploited by men of all ages, doing unimaginable acts. It’s disturbing to see very young girls some appear to be children married to men who are clearly senior citizens.
There have been investigative programs on television profiling child prostitution and the men who pay for sex with children overseas. Why aren’t these men arrested and put away for child sexual abuse?
It’s clear to me it’s because most government officials and perpetrators have money or are making a profit from the exploitation.
There is a name for it unfortunately: “sex tourism”
Traveling to other countries to get away with horrific things done to people who have no options, support or any protection from law enforcement.
Thailand is the biggest one that comes to mind. When guys brags about how great a time they had on their solo trip to Thailand? I definitely read between the lines on that. Gross
“You know that bullshit — that sex workers are just self actualized, liberated sex-positive creatures, trying to make a wage!”
This is exactly the argument…..and total bs.
Yes, or the opposite, that they’re amoral degenerates who chose that life. Life is black and white for some people.
I have never once met a little girl who wanted to grow up and have sex with strangers for money. Or live with a sexually transmitted disease. Or do drugs. Or screw old men.
I have read that in the US quite often, when women (for example) are trafficked, are able to escape and go to the police, the police then arrest them. Does anyone understand the rationale here.
It’s now thought that the sex tourism business is more lucrative than the drug trade. It accounts for 10$ of the GNP in Thailand, 2-21% in other nations in SE Asia.
Unfortunately, sex slavery is not just a problem in other countries. It is here, in America, as well.
I’m really glad Chump Lady is focusing on this, cause it’s an “issue” of mine I’ve been following. I live in a good size city known for tourism and Conventions. They had an article in the paper about all the prostitution connected to the conventions. The girls are actually packed up and travel around from city to city for this. By the pimps. A lot of the time, they don’t even know where they are. They are kept prisoner, food brought in, don’t leave the room, drugged. It’s not a good life.
Many of these girls, and boys, are actually kidnapped from school, parks, etc. The preferred age? Preteens. If your ex is having sex with children, you can be pretty sure the child is disgusted by having to do that with a nasty middle aged or older man. I don’t know any teenagers who “want” sex with these guys. It’s truly horrible.
I think we may live in the same city, and you are so right. I work at the airport for a major US airline that has given us a good amount of training on human trafficking and what to look for. Back last fall I had a passenger who I am certain was being taken against her will. 18 years old, traveling with two European middle aged men (I believe they had Russian passports), would not speak or look up. If I asked her a question she looked at one of the men for the answer. She had a North Carolina drivers license.
I of course called Metro Police and they asked me many questions, one of which was about her ID. They told me that they would go to her gate and question the three of them only because she had an out of state driver’s license. It is too rampant in our city for them to investigate if she had ID from this state, being she was a “legal adult.”
Thank you CL for all you do, I was married to abusive narcissist cheater who left me after 12 years with 3 children, my youngest seriously ill. I am on the other side now and very happily remarried, but sadly sometimes he still really pushes my buttons. Coming here helps me remember how lucky I am to be out and happy, and today I am reminded of just how little choice some women have and how much they suffer. My story pales in comparison.xo
I think we do live in the same place , Brooke. It’s great the airline teaches you about human trafficking and what to do. I really want to learn more. Good job on trying to help that young girl. You may have given her the confidence to break free one day. But at the very least you showed her someone cares what happens to her.
I agree, it’s alive and well here in the US. What’s so sad with all of the emphasis in out culture on acquiring material things it makes it easy for older guys to prey on our overly sexed kids. How many of our celebrities date and sex up women and men barely 18. A 50 year old man or woman who routinely goes after barely legal individuals is a predator.
How about a 65 yr old going after a 25 yr old?
I look forward to an open frank discussion as well. In the age of PC no one wants to talk about sexual predation of children and homosexuality. Having worked with kids, sexual abuse has the most horrific results.
scream it!!
Yes, please and thank you, CL, creating awareness around these issues is so important, and it’s so true that it isn’t rare. Thank you.
I’ll talk about it, scream about it whatever. I was lucky. The ex was just a garden variety cheater but I really think that’s one of those “there but for the grace….” Well you know the rest.
Mine was kind of a garden variety cheater, but I’ve come to realize sexual predators are not just the creeps who book sex tourism trips to Thailand. They come in all shapes & sizes–those trolling on-line for adolescents, watching kiddie porn (even if they don’t do anything about it), signing up for youth groups to have greater access to young people.
And then there are the ones like my X, who used his position of power as a professor to seduce students, knowing he would never have a full relationship with them (several insisted he leave me, but that would have given up his air of normalcy as a family man). I consider him a sexual predator, too (though in this case, the APs bear more responsibility than the poor women/men lured into sex slavery).
I’ve run into this, though none made passes at me. One prof in particular liked a particular type: tall, round face, long hair. One of my friends was very good at fending him off without making him go on the defensive. However, when I was an undergrad, I went to the same institution my father taught at. When one man who had a known predilection for undergrad women complimented one of my friends’ mother (also a faculty member at the same institution) on her daughter’s and my appearance, my friend’s mother told him that if he touched either one of us, our fathers would kill him.
She was blunt like that, and it must have worked, as he never said a word to either of us.
But sexual predators at the grad level are so insidious. At the same institution my dad taught at, there were a couple of very damaged women who’d received PhDs from a Jesuit institution in the next state. Their dissertation director, a priest, told them that they’d never receive their degrees unless they had sex with him.
One of my art professors brought in a young female model for our photography class. He had her undress, and talked about her breasts and nipples. He would point to areas of her body and then say “I know how close I can get before I get in trouble.” The class was full of young women. Back then we were all uncomfortable, but this type of treatment by older men was pretty typical. Later he had all of us do a self-portrait nude. I did a series of pictures of my face in which I took off my makeup. No way I was going to let that slime ball get me to take a picture of myself naked. I hope this kind of crap has stopped, but with the kind of rhetoric coming from prominent presidential candidates, I fear it could come back.
So fucking gross.
I live with the knowledge that predator I was with has tampered with acquired brain injury residents in homes he runs. He has positioned himself as coach and now president of an under 19 year old boys football club and ‘counsels’ vulnerable young guys in his CAR! On his laptop I came across a cache of photos of under aged girls, guys from Internet trawling and HOME photos of young brain injured women nude and some semi nude undressing!!!! He has threatened to sue me for defamation if I talk. No one believes me, I have no proof as he made that laptop disappear. My rage is candescent.
OMG. That’s the sickest thing ever. Who the hell are these people?
WhereisMia, please contact the police/FBI in your jurisdiction and tell them everything you know. If they know who he is and what he does they will watch him. As a criminal attorney I can tell you that they may not have enough to arrest him YET but that doesn’t mean that he won’t make another mistake. Your tip could save several from sexual abuse and misery and that is worth it. Hey, if they can snare former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, they can get the sick bastard.
Tempest- the asshat that will be a has been husband to me someday (please, sooner than later) “groomed” his targets. Oh they were of age and willing! No underage crap that I’m aware, although he did like them “youthful.” 25 was target back then, inched upwards as he did, but still at least 10-20 years in between their ages. I figured out that he would research and look at FB profiles,dating profiles, Google general info and then pretend to run into them, or be working w them on a project only to find out “serendipitously” that they had SO much in common! Fucking asshat piece of shit loser! ?Literally looked up if they were married, had boyfriends, had dating profiles, etc. and also to find out their interests as in if they liked going to movies, karaoke bars, church choir practices (gagging here) etc. Then of course he’d drop some seemingly “innocent” comment when he found an oppitunity to be around them, about how he was so into _______. Omfg!!! If nothing ELSE made me realize this is a conplete deadend, THIS. I was pregnant with 2nd baby, and he went overseas for short term work assignment. It WAS legit work assignment. BUT, the after hours? Yeah, idk, not so legit. He went on DATES at best for God’s holy sake. It makes me sick. And he looked them up, researched them, learned what they liked/their interests…..all so he could woo his target better. More efficiently. Gross. Wtf? All the while I was pathetically begging for his time and attention. That’s called grooming. NOT underage girls, but some of the tactics are the same,which makes me feel even MORE sick. How are there SO many heinous motherfuckers out there?
I think it’s also worth discussing how we Chumps – to a much lesser extent, of course – are all sex workers to our cheaters until we leave. At least, that’s how I felt. Where the Chump sees sex as a way to bond with the one they love, the Cheater sees is as simply the satisfaction of their physical need and the only reason they’re having sex with their Chump is because they were unable to get away and get together with their affair partner(s) in that exact moment. To them, we Chumps are no better than hookers and prostitutes. Some of us are even compensated as such – room and board, a car, clothes, food. Some of us are trapped in that persona, even after we recognize it for what it really is, out of desperation, fear, a lack of support, or because – as mothers – we do what we believe we have to do for our children’s sake. Some of us have PTSD afterwards. Some of us have a hard time ever seeing sex as a loving act again because of how it’s been wrapped up in all the other pain in our lives once we discover our Cheater’s true MO.
Discussing the sex trade would be a lively, worthwhile topic. There is much more of a stigma on the women of that world than the men, for sure. The women are seen as dirty and desperate and skanky and damaged beyond repair, even when they have been forced into sex work against their will. The men? Well, their participation is barely acknowledged. It’s swept under the rug. They’re slapped on the wrist. Some are even revered as heroes. It’s sick and twisted and the worst kind of double standard.
I think it’s good to point out that disordered people objectify others, especially around sex. But I wouldn’t want to make a false equivalency to sex workers, or people who are trafficked. We are unknowing. Chumps ask themselves, why isn’t this person intimate with me? Or why is the sex like this? Or why do I feel degraded?
Sex workers KNOW they are being degraded. They know they’ve been purchased for the soul purpose of being used, not loved. It’s dangerous “work.” And to get out of that life is not as simple as divorce. (And I know many chumps have huge obstacles to divorce whether that’s financial or cultural.)
But I do think your point underscores one of CONSENT.
We do not consent to be cheated on. We did not consent to be used or deceived. The power dynamic is what the sicko is after — in both cases.
Agreed. And, as always, though the known gender balance does clearly lean harder in one direction, remember that men/boys can also be trafficked and not all soliciting predators are men. It is important that we embrace the men in our midst who would never consider these behaviors for a second.
This is so true, I had a fiancé/boyfriend in my twenties who used many women for his needs until we started dating seriously and became engaged. While living with him and trying to work on issues I would bring up he would tell me that he could find any other woman who would be happy with him live with it. Females were interchangeable to him and I think as long as we were breathing we would do. I learned a lot of valuable lessons with that scumbag
It’s true; there is not much worse than the life of a sex slave (a google search will turn up horrid tales).
With prostitutes, the currency is clearly sex & power; with us, the currency is the facade of legitimacy that we give to the disordered + domestic perks (which can include sex). Sex slaves rarely have any options; we have options but are making decisions based on false information–that we have a marriage to a normal human being and that the marriage is based on an equal partnership.
Good point about consent. I think (not a pain contest) that that is what headfucks so many Chumps. I didn’t see myself as a sex worker with Mr Fab, but I was definitely treated like an appliance. There is a retroactive effect which basically amounts to emotional rape. Would I have consented to sex with Mr Fab if I knew he had been ploughing our sister in law (or anyone else-he worked near a brothel)? Hell to the NO. But I had been, without my knowledge, and therefore against my will. Hard to live down, but possible.
YES, this conversation needs to be had, I am in.
I totally agree CL and beyond not consenting to being used and deceived, we did not consent to being exposed to multiple partners and the health risks involved in that exposure. In my case, that exposure was magnified by my ex fuckng sex trade workers and then having unprotected sex with me. I am one of the lucky ones. Multiple tests in the four years since my last exposure have been clean but it is only luck. I was put at risk for any number of STDs while believing I was in a monogamous relationship with the only man I’d ever had sex with. I will never get over the betrayal of realizing I’ve been exposed to the risky behaviors of countless people I did not consent to have in my bed.
“In most states, the law recognizes only four situations where consent justifies otherwise criminal conduct:
1. No serious injury results from the consensual crime.
2. The injury happens during a sporting event.
3. The conduct benefits the consenting person, such as when a patient consents to surgery.
4. The consent is to sexual conduct.
Fitting into one of the four exceptions is necessary, but it’s not enough to entitle defendants to the defense. They also have to prove that the consent was voluntary, knowing, and authorized. “Voluntary consent” means consent was the product of free will, not of force, threat of force, promise, or trickery. Forgiveness after the commission of a crime doesn’t qualify as voluntary consent. “Knowing consent” means the person consenting understands what she’s consenting to; she’s not too young or insane to understand. “Authorized consent” means the person consenting has the authority to give consent; I can’t give consent for someone else for whom I’m not legally responsible.” – From: Criminal Law by Joel Samaha
The discussion of the distinction and nuances between “knowing” and “consent” could fill a semester-long law-school course.
(The above quote from Samaha was just the first one at-hand from a Google search and I don’t endorse it necessarily.)
“I think it’s also worth discussing how we Chumps – to a much lesser extent, of course – are all sex workers to our cheaters until we leave.”
You are so right!
+1
+1
Once I found out about the continued cheating, yes, that is true….I felt like a whore, having sex with him, until I got my ducks lined up enough to move out. It was a horrible feeling. One I never want to have to repeat.
This is the sentence that rang true to me – To them, we Chumps are no better than hookers and prostitutes.
Because they lack intimacy, sex is just to satisfy their need. Sex is sex for them, no matter who they are doing it with. Of course, I didn’t realize this for a long time after DDay but certainly made sense once I did.
–Cheater sees us as simply the satisfaction of their physical need and the only reason they’re having sex with their Chump is because they were unable to get with their affair partner(s) in that exact moment,
–PTSD,
–some of us have a hard time ever seeing sex as a loving act again because of how it’s wrapped up in all the other pain in our lives once we discover our Cheater’s true MO……….
ALL THIS!!!!
Mermaiddani, you succinctly described what is currently my reality. The “compensation” part especially hit home.
Yes, pretty sure mine thought he was fulfilling his marital obligations by being a good provider, attending the odd back-to-school night, having marital relations. The rest–his extracurricular sexual activities? Not my business.
Preach it sister!! I am a strong believer that the truth shall set us free. By not speaking, we are aiding and abetting this evil. And yes, I do think there is a link between cheaters and the criminal activities you bring up. When one is ok with destroying another human being emotionally, it’s a slippery slope.
I have a friend whose husband, the father of her children, who had been molesting his own daughter for eight years! The mom honestly didn’t know until the daughter came to her. She was pregnant. She was 14 years old. The mom had him arrested that day and thrown in jail. He recently went to court and is in prison for the rest of his life.
This is honestly how good some people are at deceiving others. She’s a really good mom. The father had been telling his daughter that the mom knew. He had also been telling her that they would all be taken away if she ever told. As the story unfolded to the mother, she was horrified! She was there in court when he was sentenced and he still took no responsibility! There are so many sick people in this world! Exposing them is the only way to stop them!!
George Simon has an essay on Ariel Castro’s lack of remorse (the guy who kept several women as sex slaves for years in his house in Cleveland):
http://www.manipulative-people.com/i-am-not-a-monster-impression-management-ariel-castro-style/
Ariel Castro’s and John Jamelske’s realities were my Ex’s articulated fantasies for almost two decades. I think I must have been brainwashed to have stayed with this man that long, knowing his fondest fantasy was essentially child rape. I’m right on the verge of making the anonymous report on that website for tips about possible child molesters. This post today which came while I was quite busy at work and therefore unable to post, is probably going to finally get me to make the anonymous report. Because I have no proof that his fantasy WASN’T a reality. And the red flags are very, very, very red.
Worth it. I know you as well as anyone can in an online friendship, Muse, you are NOT a shit-stirrer. Anonymous is anonymous, anyhow.
“If you are a good person, if you are an honest person, your set point is to consider other people are nice and honest too.”
And sadly, if you consider a person to be NOT nice and honest, others will assume that you’re the one with the problem. That is, that for you doubt someone else, must mean that YOU’re mean and dishonest.
“And sadly, if you consider a person to be NOT nice and honest, others will assume that you’re the one with the problem. That is, that for you doubt someone else, must mean that YOU’re mean and dishonest.”
And cheaters use that fear against us.
So part of getting to meh, of building a powerful life, is to get over that concern of what others think about us, so that we live true to ourselves, so others know we are powerful and do put up boundaries, and do impose consequences on others who trample on those boundaries.
But I do agree with your comment, and I do work to get over worrying about what others think.
Just around the bend, I agree with your statement, and add that when I felt or heard things that I just could not understand about my STBX, I quickly assumed that I was wrong or a bad person for thinking ill of him. So not only did I assume him to be a very decent person, but when things did not add up, I blamed myself.
Yes!!!!!^^^^^^This!!!…Please talk about it!!!! People look at me like I have 3 heads when I talk like this. It’s too difficult for normal people to believe so they just think your exaggerating or making excuses. They can’t take hearing about your real life boogeyman or sociopath ex. There’s no one size fits all but cheaters often times have multiple afflictions like mine. He cheated , he was abusive, manipulative, he was addicted to porn, he had no close friends, would stalk me constantly even when we were married…just a real freak. He useta claim he was sexually abused as a kid. May or may not be true and I don’t give a damn now. But sad truth is no one wants to hear about or believe you were with a real life boogeyman.
I was married to him too nutmegpixy 🙁
Glad we’re both free!!!
So SO grateful to be free of satan nutmegpixy 🙂 …today more than EVER. …sick bastards!
This, this, this. To this day, I don’t know whether my cheating ex ever actually cheated on me in person with a flesh-and-blood woman. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But what I do know is that he bought a disposable cell phone for a girl who wasn’t old enough to get her own, and he was on the phone for an hour with a 15-year-old (when he was 27) and he often lied about his age to join teen chat sites, so that he could browse pictures of real 11-year-old girls with “teen” porn playing in another tab.
I have two regrets about getting rid of him when and how I did…1) that it took me so long, and 2) that I was too scared to figure out how to make sure he ended up in jail after we divorced. The other thing, which you mentioned, is that nobody wants to hear that you were married to a real life bogeyman…so I have all these people who are kind of floating in my life who used to be “our” friends and who I had to drop during the divorce because they were unwilling to listen or were deliberately obtuse about what I was telling them. They just didn’t want to rock the boat…so I had to disembark. It still seems unfair to me, even though my life is amazing now. I’m still miffed.
The day I found the flash drive full of proof of Fat Bastards cheating I threw him out. Over the next few days I went through every single thing on that drive. I had to know for myself exactly what I’d married.
The crotch shots and sexts and dating profiles were bad enough, but then I got to the folder labeled porn, and found hundreds of stories about incest between teenage boys and their mothers. Stories of rape and bondage, stories of fathers and sons sharing the mother. It was all I could do to make it to the bathroom in time to throw up.
Everything snapped into place at that moment The constant verbal abuse of my autistic 15 year old son, the insistence on total obedience from him and from me, his obsessive interest in catching my son masturbating and telling me all the details, the constant pushing of my boundaries sexually. It all made sense.
I have no doubt in my mind that he was attempting to groom both of us for sexual abuse.
The stories I found were from a site called Literotica, I didn’t find any pictures or videos, and the site is labeled as fictional stories, so there was nothing that would have been considered as hard evidence that could be turned over to the police.
I did tell him I’d seen EVERYTHING on the flash drive, and that if he ever came near my son or I again I would file a protective order.
Thank you Tracy for raising this subject and for opening a dialogue about sexual abuse and predators. Both my sister and I were fondled by male family friends, my sister at 6 and me at 12. Neither one of us told our parents until we were adults. This subject needs to be brought out of the shadows.
The more people shining a light on it, the better.
THANK YOU.
When I found out my ex husband crawled in bed at 2am with our 19 year old daughter….on a weekend with his whore was not there to service him…. I lost my mind. Our daughter was living with him because she had to…..my mother fucker Ex had me in jail….so he was safe to abuse our daughter.
She didn’t tell me…..she attempted suicide instead. It was months after that happened she blurted it out. She said if she told me she knew I would kill him and be back in jail.
It is by the sheer Grace of God I have not killed him. I pray daily for him to drop dead.
Sick…sick….sick….
And people who shove this under the rug because it is too unpleasant are contributing to victims attempting suicide rather than coming forward.
I am so sorry for your daughter, Tracy, and hope she is healing. I wish something worse for your X than death.
I’m so sorry Tracy. That’s monstrous. I hope you had your daughter report him. Get some intense therapy?
How horrible, I hope your daughter is okay.
Tracy, I am hoping he is in jail where he belongs.
Tracy, what an awfully sad and sickening comment. Your poor daughter and you also. I hope that your rock spider of an ex gets what he deserves in prison. I am sure some big bloke(s) will find him attractive, the bastard. My love and best wishes to both you and your dear daughter. I do hope that she is receiving the care she so deserves and is getting well. xoxo
My ex is a predator but so is the tramp he is hooked up with. She saw him coming, so to speak and I have seen enough to know that this young woman knows exactly what she is doing and she knows that she ‘owns’ the ex. She has him firmly by his manhood and he is loving her attention and if it wasn’t her it would be another Khmer girl. He has it bad.
This post was meant to be a separate comment. Sorry for the confusion.
Tracy……death is too nice for that mother fucker.
Good god, is she okay?!
There is no doubt in my mind that the ex is a predator. With his behaviour during our relationship and things I found out about him before we got together and also confirmed and also with his current behaviour I know that he is a predator. With these cheaters/whatever else you want to call them Nar/ClusterB’s they all feature predator behaviour. The more I study up about these mental disordered beings the more it has been confirmed they that ARE PREDATORS. I had loads of red flags before we started seeing each other and I know I should have listen to them better but just like all of the rest of these Narc’s he was so bloody charming and he worn that mask very tight. Now many years out of the marriage and going full 100% contact and with all the great information out there about these Cluster B’s I know the truth. Knowledge is power and trust me in saying that.
Bringing any awful subject out of the dark and into the light is a good idea.
I work for a child advocacy center. This is where children are brought for their forensic interview if they’ve been the victim of sexual or physical abuse, or if they’ve witnessed domestic violence. If you’re lucky, your community has one too.
I bring this up because there is a newish non-profit in the area who has the noble goal of reducing child abuse by 90% by 2030. They’re trying to find out what communities around the world have done to stem the tide of child abuse. Sounds good, right? It is, BUT — they focus almost entirely on physical abuse.
When they say say “child abuse” they mean children who get beaten.
Those of us in the real world of child abuse in all it’s forms know it differently. Here’s an example:
Of the 800 or so children we serviced last year, about 75-80% of them were victims of child sexual abuse. The other 20-25 or so percent were the victims of physical abuse or witnesses to domestic violence.
The bottom line is that child sexual abuse just seems too horrible for your average person to want to face or talk about.
Since my agency just went to full non profit status a year ago, we’ve struggled to get our name out there for recognition and contributions. We’ve been quietly operating in this county for over 20 years yet the only people who heard of us were people who needed our services.
These days our director and deputy director are out in the community at social clubs and business meetings trying to talk about child abuse, in particular child sexual abuse, so that it can come out of the dark and into the light.
I suppose it’s because it’s so vile and has such a stigma that people simply can’t bring it up, but when they come up against our statistics, well, it’s the enormous elephant in the room.
So yes, the more we talk about sick and dangerous people and the crimes they commit, the better. Maybe in time people won’t behave as though it’s catching — and they’ll hold back on the victim blaming — the better to do something about it.
This post has come at a serendipitous moment for me. I visited a child psychologist this morning to talk about how to protect my children from their father who is a cheating, lying, porn-addicted, prostitute using narcissist, misogynistic asshole, but according to the psychologist “STBX is immature and not sexually integrated. If you are wary of him abusing the children, it will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” When I tried to explain the complexities of abuse to him based on my extensive research, the “expert” shut me down. He suggested I might be angry and vindictive. Here’s what I’ve learned (that the psychologist clearly hasn’t):
From Bancroft Lundy:
“In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
From Vincent Felitti, co-Principal Investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (http://acestoohigh.com/2012/10/03/the-adverse-childhood-experiences-study-the-largest-most-important-public-health-study-you-never-heard-of-began-in-an-obesity-clinic/)
“Instead of asking, “How old were you when you were first sexually active,” I asked, “How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?’ The patient, a woman, answered, ‘Forty pounds.’” He didn’t understand what he was hearing. He misspoke the question again. She gave the same answer, burst into tears and added, “It was when I was four years old, with my father.” He suddenly realized what he had asked.
“I remembered thinking, ‘This is only the second incest case I’ve had in 23 years of practice’,” Felitti recalls. “I didn’t know what to do with the information. About 10 days later, I ran into the same thing. It was very disturbing. Every other person was providing information about childhood sexual abuse. I thought, ‘This can’t be true. People would know if that were true. Someone would have told me in medical school.’ ”
From Jane Ellen Stevens, editor of Acestoohigh (http://acestoohigh.com/2012/06/18/with-45-million-u-s-victims-of-child-sex-abuse-we-cant-put-their-millions-of-abusers-in-jail/)
You might want to keep this in mind when you cringe at the heartbreaking testimony from the trial of former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky: You can’t throw five pebbles in a concert, a congregation or a conference without hitting someone who’s been sexually abused. Throw five more pebbles and you’ll hit someone who has sexually abused a child. It’s likely that about 45 million victims of child sex abuse are walking around the United States today (one in four women and one in six men). That number is the population of New York, Florida and Louisiana combined. And there probably are millions of people who have sexually abused children. They’re our acquaintances, our neighbors, our friends, our relatives. About 60% are known to children, 30% are family members, and 10% are strangers. It’s not a ratio of one abuser to one victim — the trials of priests, coaches, teachers, and scout leaders have shown us that. But the ratio’s likely to be a lot closer to one-to-one than we might imagine, especially since most experts believe that child sexual abuse is grossly underreported.
From Elizabeth Marquardt’s book:
“…it is well documented that children are at significantly higher risk of abuse after their parent’s divorce. More than seventy reputable studies document that an astonishing number—anywhere from one-third to one-half—of girls with divorced parents report having been molested or sexually abused as children, most often by their mother’s boyfriends or stepfathers. A separate review of forty-two studies found that ‘the majority of children who were sexually abused…appeared to come from single-parent or reconstituted families.’ Two leading researchers in the field conclude, ‘Living with a stepparent has turned out to be the most powerful predictor of severe child abuse yet.'” (Another reason to fix your picker, btw, before inviting a new fellow into your life)
I would also recommend “All That is Bitter and Sweet” by Ashley Judd for a discussion of the sexual exploitation of women, and “How to Save Your Daughter’s Life” by Pat Brown, Criminal Profiler. It has a chapter on sex trafficking.
You won’t get the criticism of hysteria from me, CL – you will get a standing ovation for shedding light on the fuckupedness of the world and what we can do to protect our children from overlap of cheaters, Johns and sexual predators. Bring it on!
Blessingindisgise–the child psychologist you saw this morning is an arrogant idiot. Don’t return; it is embarrassing that people like that exist in my profession. I’m sorry.
I agree with Tempest. People like that should not be allowed to practice. The arrogance and incompetence is staggering.
Thanks Tempest and FMT. I left there feeling quite bullied and trampled. The challenge is that he’s the local expert in parenting capacity assessments. I hope I never have to run into him again.
Thank you for this. I bolted after porn addicted partner of six years made untoward comment to me about my pre-teen daughter. I reported everywhere I could, including to his ex-wife. Weeks later the Jared Fogle news broke. He joked “Oh well: guess that means no more porn during my out of state business trips!” I went NC.
He recently contacted me. He is now living with OW, and in love. With the cousin who molested him when he was young. Irredeemable, all of it.
The links and quotes you’ve posted are invaluable to me; I’m so glad he’s out of our lives.
Tracy, Please yell and scream about this and we will be your howling hyenas behind you. I live in San Diego and this summer I attended a lecture for the District Attorney, about sex trafficking in SD, as you can imagine, the border, the military and guess what the NFL. In SD the district attorney, boys and girls clubs (the lowest form of child care here) and girl scouts have teamed up to talk about this and how these predators target middle school and high school girls. Every time I see a fb flyer about a girl who has just disappeared, I think omg, she is being trafficked. Please don’t think it just happens in 3rd world countries, they are targeting girls at your local middle school, and creep pervs like our X’s are keeping them in operation.
To me, sexual abuse is also physical abuse.
…and spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, basically fucking someone up for life.
This post is so smart, so moving. And I recall your job search, ML, and look where you are today. So inspiring.
ML, just wanted to give you a shout-out. You and I came on this blog around the same time, and your trajectory has been so validating and inspiring to me. We missed each other last summer, but I hope we can meet up sometime soon. Major props and blessings to you.
I know one forner friend, married for many years, a couple kids, very active in his church, is now doing time for being a pedophile.
Another guy I know of through a friend, when as a teen raped his sister and her friend weekly for over 4 years. He invited others in on this too including much much older men.. The kicker; he’s now married and is a elementary school teacher. No one knows and the statute of limitations is long since past.
Tell me about karma. These men will go on to have a life with masks coveringvtheir true identity.
What’s really crazy, is I think most of us can think of a teacher, priest, acquaintance, former friend, relative who is a sexual abuser.
And when you read the statistics of how COMMON sex abuse is — why should we be surprised that our paths have crossed with predators?
I had a friend who was the victim of incest — she and her sisters — and she went to an Ivy league school and her father was an MIT-educated engineer. And the abuse went on her whole life, until her 20s, when she got the hell away from him, and tried to get him jailed. (She failed. They told her her “memories” were not reliable. And the medical records were not admissible.)
I should add — per resilience — she gained a life for herself. Married 20 years now to a great guy, three sons. Last I heard the freak was in the woods of New England and had taken up “paganism.”
Monsters live among us.
That is why “stranger danger” is actually counterproductive to teach. Children are far more likely to be abused or molested by someone they know, especially family members.
Yes. Women are also most likely to be raped by someone they know too. And, a pastor I know used to work as a police chaplain. He said the most volatile situation for the cops is a domestic violence situations. As we have discovered, it is the people you know who cause the most damage. Another reason to have good boundaries and separate yourself from those who trample those boundaries.
“Last I heard the freak was in the woods of New England and had taken up “paganism.”
Ugh – that makes me so furious when someone uses the term “Pagan” as a mask to hide behind. I’ve been a practicing Pagan for 25 years now and I’ve met several people at festivals who use their supposed spiritual path as justification for any sort of perversion they can come up with.
That’s NOT what Paganism is about, and people like that are why so many of us choose to keep our spiritual beliefs secret.
I know what you mean, gepster. It’s cringe-worthy when you know that the majority of the people following your particular spiritual path are doing so out of a desire to seek out a greater awareness of the interconnectedness of creation, and yet you see someone engaging in criminal or hateful activities, claiming that their alleged spiritual path allows them to do so. Muslims are taking it on the chin now for the actions of a handful (and even a few tens of thousands is a handful when we look at the total number of Muslims on the planet).
Pagans can sometimes be as bad as the Catholic Church in covering for these trash humans, too. The whole dynamic of being an oppressed subculture causes people to be reluctant to call each other out.
Exactly, and thats another one of the reasons I left the festival scene. I have no tolerance for allowing someone to hide behind a community of otherwise decent people as a way of protecting themselves for being held accountable for their behavior. Anyone in the community that allows that is at best an enabler, and at worst a willing participant.
Saddam took up paganism to find women. He even bought Pagans for Dummies. If you meet a 55 yr old with a fox tattoo on his back. That’s him. Yes, after our divorce he decided the fox was his spirit animal.
Oh I probably won’t. People like that are why I left the festival scene many years ago. I have no desire to be part of a community where you have to tell people that they can’t show up naked or drunk or high to work their 2 hour volunteer shift at the child care area.
Seriously. I actually had to tell people that. I was on site child care coordinater for the biggest pagan festival on the east coast for 3 years.
Not unusual for these freaks to hide behind certain communities, especially communities that were once plagued with being the recipients of prejudice for being different such as the gay community and I am sure pagans sustained quite a bit of prejudice as well. Home schoolers often hide behind some religion, pedophiles hide behind the gay community and so on. These communities will protect one another (and rightly so) but these freaks take advantage. So if they are called out for inappropriate behavior, they can cry out that they are being picked on for being different because they are …………(fill in the blank) and most people will back off or never have the guts in the first place to confront for fear of being called racist, homophobic, etc.
That is why the members of these communities have to stand up to these freaks. It’s much harder to claim being a victim of prejudice if the people calling you out are the other members of your community.
Yes it is and sadly all too often it doesn’t happen.
Sadly, that is true. I had two high school friends who were molested by their fathers. In one case, he groped her breasts. The other, he had intercourse with her for years! Both were “nice” (ugh!) guys and in the military. Awful! Both families seemed so normal, so loving. Both girls loved and hated their fathers. Neither was reported to the authorities.It is surreal to even type this…but the father who raped his daughter actually brought a friend over (an air force firefighter, like he was) for some “fun” with his pre adolescent daughter. Even now, decades later, it is hard to believe. Like a horror movie. It seems unreal.
I had a teacher in grade school (6th -7th grade), the vice-principal, who brought in a rule that all the girls had to wear skirts. He would stand behind our desks rubbing his balls against the back of our chairs. He would offer to “kiss better” any hurts from the playground. He laid masking tape across the hall and decreed that girls had to stay on one side, boys on the other. Except for him, of course. I should also note he was prominently of a particularly conservative religion, and preached relentlessly about it in our public non-secular school.
I am now 60 years old. About 10 years ago my older sister called up that particular school board to find out what had happened to him. She was told that is was and is an “upstanding member of the education community” and that no complaints had ever been lodged against him. Of course they weren’t. It was the late 60s and nobody of our age questioned authority, and we also joked about it.
But we can’t help but wonder if his perversion went further than what we witnessed. He may be dead by now… one can hope. Fucking asshole perverts.
Don’t forget the “Craig’s List” encounters. The X liked the posts that said they were just lonely wives and their husbands just didn’t satisfy them so please big boy I”ll be in town next month to hook up.” I think this type of post gave him the excuse that he wasn’t with a sex worker just a lonely sad spouse like him who didn’t want to leave but who needed the sex that they were “missing” at home.
Yeah, an especially awful situation in the evangelical church happened when a wife decided to annul her marriage after discovering on the mission field that her husband was into child porn. The church tried to put her under church discipline for seeking to annul the marriage. Finally…probably because of the bad publicity, the senior teaching pastor of the mega church apologized to her. Crazy stuff! That was the Karen Hinckley and The Village Church fiasco (more on my blog.?
Just wow!!!! With someone that long and holy cow….. I get it if he had a porn stash on his PC or something like that (which is not illegal) but WOW….
Well, two things I do know about my ex. 1) His favorite website was/is Barely Legal (not sure they even are legal) … and 2) He once told me, “You don’t know everything about me”.
I recently began to watch “hot girls wanted” on Netflix. Rashida Jones is one of the producers. It’s about amateur porn and how the industry entices young girls with promises of fame. The ad “hot girls wanted” leads them to a sh*thole house in FLA (nothing against FLA!) with a scumbag who gets them into videos (a favorite pastime of my ex). At that point,the girls thought they were living the dream. But even just 20 minutes in (when I had to stop watching) I could see their doubts surfacing and I couldn’t stick around to watch the crash. I was too infuriated with their pimp, who was a self-described loser who had managed to come out the **winner** surrounded by hot young girls, drugs, etc. I couldn’t listen to the way this all-around loser – previously jobless, living with parents, uneducated, unattractive, soulless – talked about those girls, which was along the lines of “Yeah, they think they’ll have a long career, become actresses…they’re only good for a couple videos and someone hotter comes along to take their place. Who knows what happens to them.” Sickening.
OMG! I watched it too! So shocking and so sad
I really wanted to throat-punch that dude.
I had a coworker and I always thought he was such a great family man, where I almost looked up to him, thinking there are so few gentlemen like him left in the world. He had 3 daughters, a beautiful wife that always doted on him, he went to church every week, he coached a softball team. And then bam! one day I see in the paper he’s been arrested for soliciting a 14 year old minor girl, and this guy was in his late 50s. He got arrested and went to jail. He was the most unsuspecting person ever, until this happened. Now I don’t put anything past anyone.
Funny, My Ex cheater has been to Thailand 4 times since Dday… humm.. wonder why? He also said to me he wants young. 18. He would go under 18 but there is a law here. Yup, he was saying all this to me at the same time he was trying to win me back.
I lived with a man for 23 years that by all appearances seemed normal. But when his mask fell off and found his AP had been cheating on him it was like balloon that lost air fast and he unraveled right in front of me.
Now he goes as young as he can get them. All the gas lighting he imposed on me what kept coming up is how he desired YOUTH and he was going as young as he could. How sick is that?
So your life blows up and on top of it all you have to take in that he is a sick monster fuck to boot. But… you know… after all I was not meeting his needs and infidelity goes much deeper.
Most of us have not only been chumped and dumped but we had the additional burden of discovering sick shit like this on top of it all.
Yup, we should talk about it more.
I have no evidence nor did I look into any predator behaviors of my ex cheater, but one thing that rings my ears time and again is when I asked him.. what was it with that one particular AP that lured him and his response was “it was free sex”. I did not dig more… convo ended there that day. I simply did not want to hear more.
I am so sorry to read this, and all the comments on this thread. Do you think we also need to talk about rehab for predators so they recognize they are sick but teach not to act on it, to get them to see how they hurt people? I think its unpopular because talking about helping predators may somehow “normalize” it, like they are on the same level as alcoholics. I am of two minds on this. How do we bring the victims to light but also the perps so we can try to stop them? What if that’s one way to curb it? Recognize they are sick and help them?
I am not of two minds on this. Help the victims. Let the predators hang.
Rehab for predators? What a crock of shit.
They are disordered pieces of shit. And they know damn well what they are doing – and get off on deceit – and don’t want to be ‘saved’ and think everyone else has the problem.
If they were honest people with sick urges, they’d control said urges or get help. Not act on it and then blame everyone else for it.
Let the fuckers burn.
I worked the Mich Prison system most of my life. We had therapy classes for the sex offenders. We usually held around 1200 prisoners. Good portion sex offenders. I often talked to the therapists who did the classes. They told me there was no cure. Never to trust these men. They flat out stated they would never release them back into the public. The inmates took the required classes , said the required , “I’m now cured”, and were pushed back out on the streets. Usually I’d see them back within 2-5 yrs. They had all the questions and right answers memorized for all the therapy testing.
Unless the prisoner was a “Baby raper” I did not see them picked on or beaten by other inmates on a regular basis..I did see them willingly get into homosexual relationships more then other inmates. They tended to look and act less masculine then non-sexual offenders. Their hygiene and work ethics were also lacking. They also tended to be “whiners”. Complain they were not being treated correctly on a daily basis. But that was my observations through the yrs.
I found when dealing with these guys harsh, fast repercussions were the best. I had one who would stand in front of his door window nude when he knew I’d be doing a round. I warned him once. The next time I went in his rm, tipped his bunk over and hand ripped all the springs from under his cot off the bed. I sat on a chair put my feet against his wall and ripped his heater system right out of the wall. I threw the dirty parts on his bed. These were 3 man rooms. His bunkies came down and asked what had happened to cause me to rip things up. I told them. He was gone when I came in the next day for shift. Other inmates do not wish to be noticed by Correction Officer staff. They want no trouble. They’ll fix things themselves to avoid it. Once you do this they tend to stay away from making any advances.
While inside I read many an inmate file. These all include Pre-sentence reports. Whenever I had thoughts of “This guy isn’t so bad” , I’d pull his file. A short amount of reading would let me know what a piece of crap he was. The prison even held a few priests. They might talk a good game and appear to have some morals but it is just an illusion. Most who molested pre-teen girls claimed that the victim was in love with them. It was a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. They often had pictures of the victim pinned up on their locker.
I see no cure for these men. A lot of it is dominance and control they want.
I moved to the Philippines with the urging of my ex. He became a professional sex tourist and I’m convinced he researched extensively before pushing me to take this particular job (I was the primary earner and I did have other options at the time). Sex tourism is rampant here, including with children, and much of it is now online abuse. There are people and organisations that try to expose it and help the girls, but it almost seems futile. As far as I know, the ex wasn’t into underage girls (his main consort was a 30-year old bar girl) but nobody can know everything.
Bring on the discussion.
I don’t have anything to add that others haven’t already said, but…thank you for bringing this up, Chump Lady. It needs to be brought out into the light whether it’s uncomfortable to talk about or not. Until we understand that sexual predators are not the typical Ron Jeremy-look-alike in a tinted window van, but actually people who look just like our brothers, fathers, boyfriends, coworkers, etc., they will be winning the war.
I don’t think broaching the topic is provoking hysteria at all, this isn’t an either/or issue and predators exist on a continuum.
Until DDay I would never have thought of my STBX as anything but someone with poor coping skills and and anger problem due to a crappy foo. Then I thought he was infatuated with an ex. Then I saw the texts that indicated HE was the predator there. Now I’m holed up in my house over spring break while he is in NYC with her and seeing him text my kids trying to work out when the house will be empty – so he can bring her on by (wont happen). He’s planning meals out on the town with her and a couple friend that I realized he had been trashing me to for a while. All while trying to pretend to me and the kids that he is in the hospital for heart surgery. He’s not damaged, he’s a sick fuck. And nowhere near the sickness of those who abuse kids (although he’s been verbally abusive to me and the kids for years, shame on me).
Until I looked into it I would never have assumed or believed he had a personality disorder, but when I used the psychopath test, bingo. Had the kids do it for him too, bingo again. It’s all there, lack of empathy, blaming, no conscience. I just thought he was a practical hustler, street smarts to go with my book smarts, no he’s ASPD mixed with a little NPD and some borderline on the side. Fucked Up. And I bred with that.
Timely post, CL. Yesterday someone I knew in school was arrested for child porn & soliciting a minor. He was kind of a douche then, if you looked past the tons of charm. I remember thinking he treated his (much younger) girlfriend like shit, and went out of his way to make her look crazy.
But anyway, all I could think was “this so easily could’ve been my husband’s name on the news.”
This is bound to bring out some extra-trollish trolls. You are fighting the good fight.
Hallelujah !!!! Chump Lady !!!!
I was with a sexual predator who was the NICEST, KINDEST, most SOFT SPOKEN fucking degenerate walking the earth.
They need a normal person to conduct their lewd and lascivious behavior on the side.
I was a patsy for his bullshit. Now, I am trying to figure out the best way to bring men and women like them down. It is my purpose in life to expose this lie.
I am starting with exposure of the massive sex trade in my town via “massage” parlors. There is not a man or woman born who thinks:
“Wow, I want to jack off strangers for a living!”
or “Gee, if I could only screw strangers for the rest of my life, it would be the best job ever!”
The dark, sinister world of sex predators needs to be exposed. Let’s have that conversation. Let’s do it!
“Now, I am trying to figure out the best way to bring men and women like them down. It is my purpose in life to expose this lie.”
If you figure it out, CalamityJane, please let us know. I’ve often thought the best therapy for me – and the best use of the shit I’ve been through – would be to do SOMETHING to break the cycle and help others. But how????
Yes, predators are delusional. I think they really tell themselves that the exploited “like it”. Sooo delusional. I am glad CL/CN are talking about it. I hope (and I vow to never) stop talking about this. Lets bring this out in the open for all of the world to see.
OMG, They DO. On this particular message board my husband was so active on, it was a non stop 24/7 discussion that these johns were having about the providers, and to read it, you would have thought they seriously ALL thought the prostitutes really, really liked them. They all seriously think they’re in some kind or relationship with these women, and somehow are able to compartmentalize the simple fact that money is exchanged. All delusional…. and so sick.
Exactly. It is paid rape not a relationship. So sick!
Just wanted to know you were heard. Yup, unfortunately, I know all about “The Hobby” That’s seriously what it’s called. It’s just a hobby, darlin. You know how you like cooking and rollerblading? It’s just a hobby, like the way you have hobbies…
And yeah, the “get togethers” at local clubs where the “hobbyists” could physically check out the “providers” like to see in person what’s on the menu. And the rating system on the website…. uhhhhh it’s all right there, out in the open, accessible to anyone that wants it. If I was to write the website URL here and my ex-husband’s screen name, anyone here can just google it and see all his posts, even though he deleted the account after D-Day. It’s all there for the world (including this wife as it turns out) to read.
I believe I know exactly which one you’re talking about. I found it after I discovered the private messages between him and several “escorts” from that site. Just the sexting I read him having with this one girls that was 10 yrs younger than his own adult kids, as if they were boyfriend and girlfriend…. It’s beyond comprehension. I have hobbies too, only mine are legal. He keeps dragging his heels on finalizing this divorce and it’s edging even closer to a trial. If it gets that far, I’ve got a whole slide show presentation for the Judge with his family, friends and employees all getting special invitations.
Another term for the behavior is called “mongering” There are many free websites where these creeps can find, rate/review, and recommend their “providers” And easily accessible on smart phones-how convenient! It’s absolutely disgusting. I had no idea who stbx really was when we married. As it turns out, I married someone who I think is a predator. He likes barely legal sex workers and porn. It’s a plus to him if they are asian. He does massage parlors (or AMP’s) craigslist hook-ups, porn, webcam and I’m sure more vile stuff I don’t know and don’t want to know or care about. At some point I’m sure the karma bus will catch up with him……either he will get busted as a “john” for soliciting or end up on “To Catch a Predator” All these websites get through the legal system because they state somewhere on the site that the girls are 18 or older. Trust me, if you saw some of these sites-there is no way these girls are 18! I want to vomit. But to stbx, the porn is reality to him and he thinks that these young girls he pays actually want him. I had been frozen out of any real love or affection for years all so he could save himself for his “pay for play” hooker girls. And the man he works for is no better. His boss had tried to take him on business trips before to Thailand, Vietnam, and Amsterdam-all of which I quashed from the get go. Stbx went on 1 business trip to Hong Kong which was supposed to be for 2 weeks and ended up lasting 45 days. I told him then no more trips or we were over. I should have just divorced him then. ……sigh.
I was lucky to have tested negative for any STD’s and found a great therapist who educated me about disordered freaks who are hooked on porn/hookers etc. These are people who cannot connect on any level to anyone or anything which is why they love the hunt for the strange. Women are all interchangeable body parts to them and not real people. The worst part is that after a while they grow numb to the stimuli and go for riskier, more dangerous actions-ie; younger girls, more violent, etc. My therapist gave me the wake up call that I don’t want to anywhere near stbx when that all comes crashing down.
Of course he puts on academy award winning performance as a normal guy to the public.
You can never really tell by looking at someone…………
I’m now on my way to meh on Tuesday with my precious son and make sure he turns out nothing like his creeper dad.
Calamity Jane, it’s been awhile since this post but if you’ve discovered a way to fight back against these sick fucks, could you let me know?
My STBX is a predator and child molester presenting as the nicest guy in the world.
I would like to see him fry.
until it happened to my child, child molestation seemed like something that happened to “other” people – then I started to do some research and realized how prevalent it is the statistics are startling – “Adult retrospective studies show that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men were sexually abused before the age of 18 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). This means there are more than 42 million adult survivors of child sexual abuse in the U.S.
The primary reason that the public is not sufficiently aware of child sexual abuse as a problem is that 73% of child victims do not tell anyone about the abuse for at least a year. 45% of victims do not tell anyone for at least 5 years. Some never disclose (Smith et al., 2000; Broman-Fulks et al., 2007 1 in 4 girls have been sexually assaulted” http://cachouston.org/child-sexual-abuse-facts/
in addition the improvement of news sharing from far locations has also shed light on how depraved people are
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2479093/Mother-sentenced-54-years-horrific-sex-abuse-children.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3512702/Murder-rape-kidnapping-charges-filed-against-man-22-toddler-dead-remote-area-two-days-vanishing-bed.html
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/02/man-who-raped-6-month-old-baby-to-death-wants-mercy/
http://wpde.com/news/local/four-from-horry-county-arrested-on-child-sexual-abuse-incest-charges
http://wpde.com/news/local/four-from-horry-county-arrested-on-child-sexual-abuse-incest-charges
http://www.dreamindemon.com/tag/child-porn/
CL, Thanks for today’s post and your clear thinking. Abuse is about exerting power and control. We can propagate the lies by referring to serial cheaters as ‘wayward spouses’ or by calling sexual predators ‘overly sexed’ or by saying that physical abusers have ‘anger management’ issues.
The common thread is that abusers use their position of power to control a more vulnerable target. Amazing that sometimes just having an empathetic nature makes us vulnerable to being an abuser’s target. I now keep my empathy on a strong leash.
Yes, let’s PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE have this conversation.
And as someone above me said, it’s true that this is NOT an overseas problem. My cheater ex-husband was buying plenty of pussy right here in the good ol’ USA. Not only that, but he was VERY active on what appears to be a VERY legal local message board where the john’s talked about and rated their experiences with the prostitutes like the same way you or I or a “normal” person might go to trip advisor and post the details about our experience in staying at the Marriott in downtown Tulsa.
I was with my husband for 19 years before D-Day hit. (I found the website and his 4,000+ posts on there). Before that day, I NEVER, EVER, EVER would have thought my husband would cheat on me – much less PAY FOR SEX on a regular, regular basis. But he did. And I got to read all the dirty details. He’s in now in his mid 50’s. I don’t know if any of the “providers” (as he and the johns on the message board call them) were underage, but I can only assume so. He only fessed up to a tiny fraction of the things I had solid proof on, I’m sure the disgusting shit goes even way deeper than I can imagine.
I’m divorced, I’m two years past D-day, but I still struggle with what I now know was my lie of a life and marriage. Just last night I dreamed that I was sitting with him at a table full of lawyers and psychologists and when I said out loud what he did, the whole table of people ran away in disgust, and he was angry at me for talking about it. This is TWO YEARS after the fact.
It’s a mindfuck on every conceivable level.
Yes, let’s PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE have this conversation.
Also, I wanted to mention this side of things….
Believe it or not, even after finding out that my husband was a very active john, I gave reconciliation my best attempt for a short while.
During that time, while we were still talking (and he was still lying) I told him that in my mind, the only thing that separated what he was doing with these girls from rape was the fact that he was paying them.
“If you didn’t leave the $200 bucks on the nightstand when you were done, they would have called it rape instead of work.”
I got that famous cheater blank stare. It’s so damn gross on SO many levels.
Yes, thank you for bringing this up. I believe that my STBX is a predator with some sociopathic behaviors. He has worked in another country our last few years of marriage. After I filed for divorce (he had cheater before), a woman called our house from abroad after finding my husband’s real name. They had dated for a year, with him using a false name and background. He lied about where he had lived so she couldn’t trace him and lied about his family history, job history….basically everything. He would tell her he was flying to Asia for business and then fly home to visit us. He lied about his degrees to make himself look better (he maintained he had a medical degree that didn’t exist for our whole marriage). I could go on. The woman he lied to was a psychologist…she had no idea. I think my STBX pursued and sucked women in using charm, elaborate lies, and various forms of manipulation. He sees nothing wrong with this, shows no remorse, and stated he was lying to the other woman to “protect the family.”
Historically, females have been used as bargaining chips to seal the deal between two parties — one party perceived to have ownership, usually because of family relationship. Arranged marriages are property agreements, too. It is only fairly recently (in the last hundred years or so) that females have gained the rights to be voting members of society. We can vote, own property, have an education, work and earn a living, etc. Sexual exploitation can happen to either sex, of course, but it has been socially acceptable to consider females as property for so long, it is no surprise that some men, and women too, do not consider sexploitation to be anything other than recreation.
In my experience, when the predators I discovered in my own life were unmasked, I was told I was a prude, and they were only seeking new and different stimulation — that they were entitled to gratify their own sexual desires. I was also told the myth that some of the women ( hookers and strippers) were “sexually liberated” women who used their sexuality to make “big bucks” I also discovered some porn sites where the women did not appear to be choosing their actions, but were being forced against their will to do things, or endure the things being done to them, I personally believe these sites are outlets for the extreme anger these men felt when they could not convince a female to willingly submit to their requests, but that is just my opinion. I found these sites on the web histories of their personal computers, and in some of the private stash magazines and films. I also found pictures and videos of AP’s who were no doubt willing to participate in activities I found disturbing, because they thought such sexual activity would persuade my husband to abandon his nice safe normal life with me and marry them. They obviously did not understand the benefits of the mask of normalcy, or the theory of cake.
I was surprised to find I was considered a prude, because many of the activities had never even been asked of me, but perhaps he did know I would not be interested in bondage, or urinating on him, or allowing him to film our bedroom antics, and I did not desire over sized objects placed in any of my prime locations. Be that as it may, I thought I had a good sex life until I found out about all this activity, because I then lost all interest in any activity of any kind. Disgust will do that.
As for the older crypt keepers deluding themselves that young partners are interested in making them sexually gratified, especially when they are no longer able to keep up their “end of the bargain” — well, self delusion is expensive. Sooner or later they will run out of money, as well as any ability to participate. Maybe they will die of std’s first. Who knows, or cares?
I have no doubt that Monsters walk among us. I look for them everywhere now — at work, in church, at charity events. I am as suspicious now as I used to be innocent. It is sad, but necessary, children should be educated about good and bad touch from an early age, and how words can damage without leaving behind any dna evidence. It is a scary world we live in. Sex can be a mutually enjoyable activity, or it can be a prison of misery. We have a lot of work to do to keep unsuspecting chumps out of harms way.
I feel compelled to share my story. My ex was a sociopath predator of sorts for sure. When, during marriage counseling, it came out that he had been serial cheating, he admitted to 15 encounters with “escorts”. Of course those of you on this site know that that turned out to be just the tip of a very ugly huge iceberg. Come to find out through trickle truth, online research, and investigation, he was doing everything you could imagine. Being a raging narcissist/sociopath he had been using me, our four children and our religion as a beard to cover his sick and twisted double life.
I suppose he started with online porn, the gateway drug (although I only caught him at it once). He frequented swingers clubs, Asian massage parlors, hookers, 900 number hook ups, online “escorts” that he met up with all over the country under the guise of war game conventions. He even hooked up with a “legendary escort” while on a father/son trip with our eldest. One of the worst things I found out was that these men who use escorts consider themselves “hobbyists”. They normalized using these women as objects by calling it a hobby. They even have get togethers at restaurants, groups of Johns and escorts, like its just a normal thing! He also was a VIP member of BigDoggie.net, an online place for escort connections and ratings. He made sure to give a blow by blow (pun intended) account of his experiences with the various escorts online and give them a rating for the other Hobbyists to read and enjoy.
When I confronted Dr. Strangelove about the many perversions I had uncovered he regaled me with the details. He wanted me to know what a stud he was, “the women always had to choose magnum condoms with him” don’t you know. The truly scariest part was when he said, “Since I got away with all this I wonder if I could be a serial killer and get away with it?” You would think that would have convinced me to get out but no, I stayed on trying and dancing for 2 more years. He had also discovered the world of online dating. As he said, “I can have sex AND love!” (Narc translation: sex and lots of kibbles for which I don’t have to pay). He was on Match.com and other dating sites trolling for easy pickings. His final OW he met on Match. Unfortunately for him she lived just one town over and was friends with mutual friends of mine. Long story short, his double life started to unravel and his girlfriend sent me a letter outing their continued contact. That letter turned out to be my get out of marriage free card! 27 years wasted being the front for his perversions. They married shortly after the divorce was final. He needed it to look like he just had had a “normal” love affair and had left his family for his soulmate shmoopie. Not that he is a narcissist/ sociopath who needs a “wife” to appear normal.
During all of this horribleness, our local paper headlined a sting operation that had caught two prominent men using Asian massage parlor “happy endings”. It detailed their double lives and also mentioned their wives and children. I showed it to him and asked him, did you ever think this could happen to you and what that would do to me and the children? I got the reptile stare. These type are just plain evil.
Just wanted to know you were heard. Yup, unfortunately, I know all about “The Hobby” That’s seriously what it’s called. It’s just a hobby, darlin. You know how you like cooking and rollerblading? It’s just a hobby, like the way you have hobbies…
And yeah, the “get togethers” at local clubs where the “hobbyists” could physically check out the “providers” like to see in person what’s on the menu. And the rating system on the website…. uhhhhh it’s all right there, out in the open, accessible to anyone that wants it. If I was to write the website URL here and my ex-husband’s screen name, anyone here can just google it and see all his posts, even though he deleted the account after D-Day. It’s all there for the world (including this wife as it turns out) to read.
So sorry GTT that you have experienced this as well. I remember saying to Dr. Strangelove, “do you understand these women are people not objects? How would you feel if horny middle aged men were using your daughter for sex?” Reptile stare.
I came to CN today having just been told by my therapy partner (the one who responds to my hyper vigilance and paranoia and other PTSD symptoms anytime of day) that his vehicle has been tampered with in a way that endangers his safety the past two times it has been at my house. I can’t afford an outside camera to keep an eye on things. It’s all I can do to keep the deluxe indoor system up and running so I can fall asleep at night. So I am really feeling this whole sociopath thing right now.
I live in an area that has taken on human trafficking as a major issue. It’s something we need to talk about. Many people don’t believe it is happening, just can’t wrap their minds around a girl or young woman being kept and enslaved right here in the U.S. agains there will. In some cases they were being kept in trailers in rural areas with no modern technology and men paid to enter the trailer and paid $1 for a ticket to the room. The ticket was a condom. If the women were disobedient they were given disparaging tattoos and told no man would ever want them now, that this was their only hope at earning food to stay alive.
Before I found myself a chump I never would have put these pieces together. Now it seems so logical.
On the camera, you can get a hunters cam for about 25 bucks. You’d have to camo it because it only records to a resident sim in the body of the camera. I used one of those before I saved enough to put up decent cameras.
However much we might think that no-one could possibly want to be a prostitute we could undermine any campaigning by making this false claim.
There are a few people who have genuinely chosen to be sex workers because they like the work and they would rather earn more money doing this work than washing dishes for instance. And there are instances where I could even argue that it is worthy work, for instance when they are kind and meet the needs of severely disabled or disfigured clients who would find it very difficult to have any sexual outlet without sex workers. Personally I can’t understand how anyone could choose this work but there you go.
Here are a couple of instances of some sex workers who don’t seem to have been co-erced into the work and seem to like it
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a44814/sex-worker-answers-all-your-questions-about-what-its-like-to-work-at-a-legal-brothel/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(writer)
I believe Belle de Jour’s father was a divorced guy who was a regular john. She has written about how she felt when she discovered this as a young woman.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6585732/Belle-de-Jours-father-I-slept-with-150-prostitutes.html
You don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.
While I’m here, how about we start speaking out against women’s magazine articles urging couples to ‘pretend’ to have sex for money, or sex with a stranger, in the interests of keeping things ‘alive’?
It would be good if more women realised that a man who wants you to play games like this may have another agenda, or other ‘hobbies’.
Lola Granola, I have actually seen RIC articles that encourage you to act like you are having an affair with your husband, to keep him “interested”. Such degrading advice. Or like you said, a stranger, or a prostitute, or a Brat (underage girl). It’s just all sickening.
I’ve seen that stuff too.
I think there should be more articles on how victims of domestic violence should be more docile with their partners, to stop annoying them. Clearly, if they’d just play along and be less annoying, their partners wouldn’t feel the need to hit them.
And more articles on how victims of crime should leave more doors and windows unlocked, so that they don’t get hurt and have to make insurance claims as often.
My last ex was very dodgy sexually, in ways that I had never encountered before:
Never had a girlfriend and a virgin by the age of 40.
Apparently strict Catholic, but of the type I call ‘Catholic Muslims’ – obsessed with ritual and observances, with a poor view of women, and a really warped view of God as a vindictive and sadistic judge in the sky.
Too many stories about ‘grandad’ and he as a child that seemed to involve pants being pulled down, but of course it was all good fun, ha ha ha.
Strong indicators of closet gayness.
Endless compulsion to go tsk tsk when he saw a girl in a short skirt or low top, and much preaching about this – not because of their dignity as daughters of God, but for other unnamed reasons.
He has been dating (non sexually) a married but separated Catholic lady for two years. She has just gotten divorced. She probably can’t get an annulment, but he isn’t bothered by that, because they can just ‘stay friends’ for as long as it suits him.
This lady has two teenage daughters, one of whom dresses like a stripper.
My alarm bells rang like crazy whenever he was around my young teenage nephew.
OH SO VERY BAD. All of it. But I kept going back because I thought he was the Last Chance Saloon.
NEVER AGAIN.
True. There are those who value money over their bodies and do not mind sexual play for the pay. They are physically detached from themselves. It’s a machine like existence and serves to satiate a disorder in themselves.
Humans need emotional connection. If you don’t, you are a sociopath. These people are sociopaths. And, I would like to know what they like about it other than money because it isn’t love.
Cheater wasn’t a predator as far as I know….I say it that way because I certainly don’t know everything that he was doing. A few things that struck me as odd though were when our daughter was young but getting old enough to where things mattered. I mean, let’s face it, kids crawl into your bed during the night or in the morning and there are some things they don’t need to see or know about.
He used to make fun of me or act as if I was a prude because I would get dressed after we had sex in case our daughter cried during the night and I had to go in her room or if she came into ours. He said it was my excuse for not wanting to sleep naked.
I asked him to start sleeping in shorts or pajama bottoms instead of naked or in his underwear so she wouldn’t see him. He told me I was being ridiculous and refused to do it. She was 16 when he moved out and he was still doing it then. He never walked naked in front of her but he did walk around in his underwear which I don’t think is appropriate for a teenage girl to see.
If our daughter was walking up the stairs in front of him, he would continuously slap her on the butt until they got to the top of the stairs. She would tell him to stop and he would say no – she was here because he helped create her so her butt was his to slap whenever he wanted. (way to teach your daughter that her boundaries don’t matter)
Then once, before DDay, she had several of her teenage girlfriends spend the night at our house. He slapped one of them on the butt as she walked by him on the couch and the look on my face must have been horrific. He immediately said that he thought it was our daughter that walked by. He apologized to the girl and explained. I can only assume it was accidental on his part.
ByeBye, I’m so sorry this happened to you and your daughter. It was totally inappropriate of your husband to do that. My own husband used to slap me on the butt, no matter how much I asked him to stop. He would just laugh. It definitely made me feel like an animal, or a piece of meat. I’m a very sensitive person, and I couldn’t understand why he thought treating me like that was so funny.
ByeBye and Lyn, satan started slapping me on the rear around the time he started losing his mask…??? Controlling and demeaning…
ByeBye, the Catholic writer and blogger Dawn Eden has had a long and painful battle recovering from over-sexualisation as a child, with a very similar situation to the one you described, with her stepfather. She’s written some great books on sexual healing.
One of the hardest things for her was that her mother absolutely denied, well into her adulthood, that what happened was sexual abuse or was harmful in any way to her daughter.
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2903/spiritual_healing_after_sexual_abuse.aspx
My brain needs a shower after reading this.
My ex molested one of our daughters when she was five. It only happened once but it was enough to damage her terribly. She began to use drugs when she was a teenager and despite being very bright didn’t complete high school. I stayed for many years to keep our five children safe, he was such a neglectful parent but he had a lot of money and power and I knew he’d fight for custody of some sort. I had no idea about the sexual abuse, I almost never left him with the children.
She moved away and her drug use escalated the last couple of years, her mental and physical health deteriorated. I was sending her money otherwise she would have been homeless. She became a prostitute to support her habit. It broke my heart, she is a very beautiful girl and to know she wa selling herself was awful. I convinced her to come home while she waited for a residential rehab program. One day I found a notebook in which shed written ‘I am safe’ over and over, page after page. She also wrote about meeting one of her clients, an older man that sometimes just paid her to keep him company although sometimes it was sex. She wrote that he didn’t hurt her. Obviously some of them did.
She’s been clean for almost a year, she’s living with me still and is working. Young men ask her out all the time but she’s unable to trust yet. Of course ex denies the abuse ever happened but she has no reason to lie about it. I tried so hard to keep my children safe but I failed, it a hard thing to live with.
Jenny,
I have a niece who,was molested by her stepfather. He was not convicted of his offences against her, but he did do jail time for indecent exposure with other young girls. She is now 18 and won’t leave home to go to university, and although her mother thinks she’s OK, I can see she’s still terrified.
The SF recently filed to try to get visitation rights with her 11 year old sister. I know this because I was working in a law office when he put through an application for legal aid to support his application. I anonymously sent along his sealed record (which his ex wife had a copy of) to Legal Aid so they had sight of it, and I heard later that his application was refused. I know it’s a person’s right to have privacy, but in this case, he had covered his tracks by moving to another country and filed from there. I knew the local aid office did not have the power of investigation to uncover his record, so wtf it didn’t cost me to intervene. I feel as though this vigilance may have saved the younger girl from him.
Predators can be so clever, and they often take advantage of local jurisdictions where the legal staff are unsophisticated or plain just don’t care.
OUTSTANDING MARCI!!!! YEAH!!! Way to nip his crap in the bud! Nasty, evil abuser! Take THAT! No light saber needed, simple sleight of hand 🙂 Awesome save!
My Cheater pulled a knife on me when I confronted him. Long story, written here before, but a cautionary tale to NOT confront, no matter how much it rots your socks to be unable to call them names. Even mild mannered cheaters turn freaky when cornered.
It helped that I’d sussed him out early with a keylogger because it meant I got his passwords. He’s a cretin and so never changed his passwords in the ensuing years. I still check his emails and online activity occasionally…enough to know he has corresponded with over 300 callgirls (via online sex sites) during his relationship with the OW. At the same time, in three years he has fathered three children with her. He is still married to the woman he was with before I met him…and whom I knew nothing about until he tried to kill me. So this guy is a man of threes…only he works in a minimum wage job, collects housing and fake disability benefits (and so does the OW).
It is simply amazing to me the power of hurt that the internet affords such creatures. It is so important for lonely women to realise the risk they take when seeking Mr. Wonderful via any website.
I’ve made it a hobby to turn the happy couple in to authorities whenever I discover one of their scams. Snitching is big here… OW blogs about her troubles as if it’s god himself out to punish her! Sorry, just little ole me.
It has always been amazing to me that chumps use online dating services and do not take any reasonable precautions when meeting and or dating new people. I am well aware that we can all be fooled. However, at the time I met my predators I was unaware that this type of predator existed, and of course I thought of myself as a “good person” whatever that really means. I guess it is safe to say that I believed I was special enough not to get into a bad situation. I was wrong. The whole idea of “special” is counterproductive to learning to protect yourself. Anyone can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and we are all susceptible to being chumped.
However, lack of information about online predators cannot been used as an excuse, anymore. If you are considering going to a dating site to meet new prospects, please proceed with extreme caution. Be sure you have trusted friends monitor your new friends and choices, and give you feedback to keep you grounded in reality. Do the same for them. Always meet in public places, always leave details about where you are going and who you are meeting. Never believe what they tell you without corroboration. Do not count on their family or friends to provide you the truth. Dating today is like dancing free form in a mine field. Please spread the word about what you have learned, Some may choose not to believe — they are future victims, just waiting to happen.
ByeByeCheater, your X is disgusting. I hope your daughter is OK today. I wish I could hug her and tell her that she is valuable, and precious, and no one gets to touch her, unless she permits it. I think a father has a unique gift- he gets to teach his daughter those things, so she can survive in a world that tries to subjugate women. Clearly he’s a FAILURE. Let’s forget that loser.
Women and men- we need to keep fighting the fine fight, to uplift girls and women to the respected status they deserve. Prostitution isn’t a ‘career’. It’s dysfunction showing it’s ugly head. Would any of these Buyers of Bodies be happy if their sister came home and announced “Hey, guess what? I got a new job! I found a great pimp, and I’m going to be a Hooker! You can catch me standing on the corner of San Pablo and 30th at 7 PM, gotta get my money!”
This is such a crazy argument, that Hookers are running a business, or just really enjoy carnal sex. No. Just no. They need to see a way out, and lots of emotional help. No one should have to be USED by another, just to pay their rent. It’s a sick myth promoted by (probably guilt-ridden) customers. I see those girls all the time, and I always feel so sorry for them, and hope they can get out, and heal their inner self. Poor things, so confused.
And, the same to young men who live this way. God, It’s all so sick, and we need to help keep people’s attitudes straight on this stuff.
I forgot to thank CL! You are right, and awesome, as usual.
Thank you for trying to shine some light on a topic most people rug-sweep. We can’t, because our spouses spent time and money on these sex romps, behind our backs. A world we never wanted to know.
Keep the faith, people! don’t let the bad guys/girls win!
My sister was dating a guy and living with him. She said he always kept his computer locked up. Ironically, she thought he was probably talking to girls online. Ie. Cheating. Story unfolds his computer is full of child molestation of a family member. She never knew! He was caught thankfully.
I’m hanging my head here…omg…2 x 4 (ing) myself a few times too… I can’t believe I didn’t see who satan really is for 36 years…*face palm* Ugh.
This triggered a memory. I really had no idea what I was looking at when I found it. My heart was pounding so hard I was surprised it didn’t just go on and plop on the floor. I looked on his ‘known’ cell phone (didn’t know about the super secret one yet) and there was a web page open…so disgusting, sooo evil…tears were running down my face and I was sure I was going to puke…the site was called ‘Best Gore’ and the scene was a young woman impaled on a pole…I am shivering just remembering it. Oh My God In Heaven! …how in the world, WHAT in the world is wrong with these people… I don’t think I have ever been as grateful as I am right now that I got out and away from him…sick, sick, evil monster. …damn…I can’t stop crying…for myself and all of us and anyone being harmed by these monsters.
It IS sickening!! (((Hugs to you, Jeep.))) My heart goes out to all whom were unknowingly sleeping with monsters.
Thank you Over and Out 🙂 Hugs to you too!! I wish there were some way to help others.
I really am scared to remember whatever I may have stuffed down and not looked at. I’m glad I don’t know more than I know about who satan really is. So grateful.
Omg Jeep, that is awful…disgusting…I am so sorry, and so glad you are away from such pure evil.
Kelly, it was a hard memory for me…scared me all over again. What kind of a human being likes looking at that kind of horror… …I cannot believe I didn’t see how sick he is in, 36 years and I never saw it…I don’t know what that says about me.
Jeep, what this memory says about you is that A) you are brave enough to share it and B) your eyes are wide open now to abuse in all its ugly forms. That’s all. Please don’t blame yourself any further. Hold your Beau close, and continue on your healing journey. You won’t ever have to go through this again. xo
Thank you FMT 🙂 I hope I never have to have that experience again…I wish no one else does either. The horror FMT 🙁 …they walk among us…frightening. These lessons, this wisdom should be required reading, if you will, from a very young age. The knowledge is the only defense we have. We are lost without it…I was anyway. …and I really thought satan was just an abusive narcissist…then I remembered that website…the horror of it. …I am so glad that I can’t understand any of that…of what that horror gives him. And I am so glad I am free and away from him. I wish everyone were free of these inhuman monsters.
Most people have no concept of the reality of sex trafficking/slavery and that it exists in places that you would never suspect. I read somewhere that it’s the second fastest growing criminal industry in the United States behind drug trafficking. I lived in a small rural midwestern community and there was a safe house there for girls and young women who were victims of domestic minor sex trafficking. The numbers are staggering and very scary.
“You know that bullshit — that sex workers are just self actualized, liberated sex-positive creatures, trying to make a wage! Moran instead points to the exploitation, the coercion, and the obvious suffering of women forced to fuck multiple strange men a day.”
THIS! Get ready for the loons from Jezebel to come over here and argue. Believe me when I tell you I’ve tangled with that lot before about cheating, sex workers, etc. and they’re overall bonkers.
I’m really looking forward to this discussion, Tracy. Well done, you!
Nord,
I have personal experience with the Jezebel crew. MatchGirl and I published a site about feminism. I took the site down once we had more exposure; it could have become a liability. So, in the time we were writing the blog we had some high-traffic interactions with Dan Savage, FeministLawProfs, and Jezebel among others.
One day, MatchGirl commented on a Jezebel article that women don’t have prostates, so the sexual pleasure from anal sex is different from men’s anal sex. (Something along those lines. A biology argument in the context of sexual-power dynamics.) Well, she was banned from the site, and the Jezebel’s took great pleasure in attacking our site. The most common response was that women like getting fucked in the ass just fine, and how dare MG slut-shame?
Jezebel is a good example of young women (and some men) with first-world problems unwittingly adding to this sex-slave-trade problem. It would appear that the U.S. is one of the biggest consumers of the sexslave-trade. Addressing the problem with young feminists is a great way to combat the problem.
I see some posters here trying to make this a more gender-balanced issue. While it is certainly true that some women are consumers of the sexslave-trade. Men are the ones at the helm of this industry. Be it boy or girl “product,” it’s men who are selling it.
And, yes. I agree. This is not a far cry from garden-variety cheaters. If a cheater can flout the law when it comes to adultery, it’s that much easier to move on to the next sex-crime.
It’s the entitlement. Ian, I so wish we could have a pint. You are correct, the patriarchy does run these ships. And you are bang-on about the Jezebellies # firstworldproblems. Sexual revolution, my ass. Our entire (Western) visual culture panders to the priapism of potbellied middleaged mediocre wheezebags, and appropriates Non-Western or any other non-white male tropes or colonial stereotypes that sell. I could rant for days….
But I will hedge when it comes to discussing any generalizations. I worked at a Uni, so I shake my head at Tempest’s wandering prof, all too familiar. But there were some SHARKY women, too, quite a few were gay, and they always picked their chumps carefully. ICK, either way. And born of entitlement. It can be color, relative nationality, or social class, but, yep, overwhelmingly it is the godamn patriarchy that fosters the narcissism/socipathy necesary to sexual predation or cheating.
x-Meh
Haha. Mehphista, A drink with you sounds like a blast.
I did toy with changing the language of my post regarding men as the predators. I settled on placing the blame on men because I *is* one. I think it makes a stronger statement about the problem when I indict all men, so for improved rhetoric I tend to say “all men.” I realize there are women who are on the “opposing side,” but I figure that excluding them from any given generalization is no loss. Because they are the minority, because they are more nuanced (like your example), and because a woman, like yourself in this case, will come along and round out the case against sex-traffickers. And because if I try to disclaim and include everyone in my argument, I think it loses power. Wow, fun pub-talk huh??
Cheers! Everything reduces to absurdity in the end, but nice to see someone who is conscientious of their semantics.
I find young feminists completely out of touch at times. Jezebel is a good example of a lack of critical thinking, as well as a tendency to boil everything down to race, sex, and gender politics. And woe betide anyone who disagrees with the groupthink going on over there. I’ve tangled with them and fortunately am too old to do anything but laugh when they get all butt hurt that someone has a different point of view. They’re pretty extreme and often disturbingly off balance.
I should add that I am a proud feminist but am also a realist – and am old enough to know that blanket acceptance of any and all things is a sure path to chaos.
Ian, I’d love to read that site.
If the people at Jezebel are so stupid as to argue (a) they like anal sex, therefore all women do, or (b) a few individuals in the sex trade have made a deliberate, enlightened decision to be in the sex trade, therefore all men/women in the sex trade have made a conscious decision, I’m pretty sure we can track down stats to refute both claims, and make a compelling case that their self-centeredness is showing. Bring it on.
Because…errr…logic!
^This. Diehard feminist here, and it’s the blanket statements and assumptions like the ones you’re talking about that hinder women instead of help them. Amen.
This is an incredibly important topic. I’m so glad you’ll be having these conversations.
And it makes me think of the “Cannibal Cop” case and how the worst sectors of online porn allow sick fucks like this guy to find validation and acceptance. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/12/cannibal_cop_an_exclusive_interview_with_gilberto_valle.html
Here’s the problem. The moral equivalency and rationalizing it takes to commit adultery is so vast and expansive it’s really a short step from that to other horrid behaviors. I agree it’s abuse. I had my ex wife threaten my life, and god knows there’s plenty of stories where AP’s and cheating wives go after the faithful husband. So I took it seriously at the time, and part of me still wishes the police had been there on day one to witness the hell I was put through. So why would it be a shock that someone willing to stoop to such unbelievable lows would then transition into further creepy behaviors? I don’t find it alarming, as much as I find it logical. You want to be a twisted mess, feel free to really twist.
It’s kind of like the guy who murders someone. After the first one, why would it shock anyone that he’d do it again? Once that huge moral boundary is crossed, nothing is off limits.
“Once that huge moral boundary is crossed, nothing is off limits.”
THIS!!!!!!!
I spackled the day I found him browsing a photographic collection of “jumpers” (read de-limbed suicides).
I thought it was the paramedics way of coping with what they see.
I also spackled his teenage “friends” and 6 months at a time “business” travel and all sorts of other events that don’t quite add up.
Absolute charmer and caregiver — and then victim.
I later realised I married my mirror — until he wasn’t. Then I started naming the emotional abuse. I suspect he hid my things so he could find them. Hard to prove except I’m still hypervigilent and aware of my gut YEARS later. He also told me if I knew him I would not like what I saw. Chameleon.
Of course he left pages of hand written letters blaming me for making him feel guilty for all sorts of things including the traveling, even though he noted I never said anything.
But the “can’t prove” rabbit hole has so many furrows. I still question my sanity and so does everyone I try to have a discussion about it with.
Words cannot convey the experience.
A good friends daughter is an official observer of cease fire villages in the { I don’t know if I can state the country }. Along with that position goes the area of children trafficking, almost hand in hand.
This is the worst case scenario of young girls and boys having no visas, no way to escape once entered into a different country. They literally have no legally recognized nationality. You can not equate what these children are abducted into to being a betrayed spouse. It is not the same.
Many cheaters are just entitled, self deluded jerks, like mine. Many cross over the line into illegal activity, that is really never discussed much, I agree.
We live in a white washed world of “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t tell – finally DON’T TELL!. Someone has to start telling.
This is a huge topic that needs to be talked about. Have you seen the documentary “Tricked”? Tracy, I saw it at a private screening at a theatre sponsored by a group fighting sex trafficking. Try to find it.
Not sure if this charity is still operating, but “The Red Dress Foundation” in Chicagoland used to have 5K races as fundraisers to raise awareness about the sex-trade industry in the Chicago area. At one race, an FBI female employee and the undercover woman she worked with spoke after the race. Their speech moved me to tears. The undercover woman was once a trapped girl in the sex-slave industry, and she was thankfully rescued. Her goal was to rescue others just like she had been. Up until then, I was not aware how bad the problem was in the area where I lived. Thanks, CL, for having the guts to write about this ugly social disease that is plaguing our communities. Here is some data from the old Red Run website:
Quick facts:
It is estimated that 25,000 females are exploited in Chicago
It is estimated that 100,000- 300,000 children are victims of child sex trafficking in America
The average age of entry into the sex trade in America is 12-14 years old
It is estimated that 27 million slaves (labor and sex) exist in the world
There are more slaves today than at any other time in human history
These pervs pictures need to be on billboards next to freeways.
Well after reading all this, I guess I can say, luckily my STBX *appears* to be just an idiot, not a predator. At least there is that huh.
Here’s a growing program to combat sex trafficking: http://www.freedomlex.org
Each month they send out multiple teams of 5-6 volunteers to distribute chapsticks labeled with the hotline number to businesses in areas at high risk of coming in contact with trafficking victims (i.e. hotels, parks, bus stations, truck stops, etc.). Chapstick or lip gloss is easy for a person to conceal in their pocket or purse, or with their other toiletries, providing information for the National Human Trafficking hotline – to call when they need help.
Thank you SansCheater. I am sharing the link around. Good information to have.
This is a good topic there is a “consent” when we are with the cheaters before knowing. I am now putting my things in order & being with cheaters is a nightmare!! I just take care of myself I can not imagine all the Chumps doing the RIC for years ? tHis would be a good topic for a Chumplady “What do we think when we are intimate with cheaters pants?!” I sometimes dream that I have a hand like Wolverine ? full of knives and use it ? . This is a serious website and will not mention the rest but if CL makes “Fun Friday” topic I will write for sure!!
Very important conversations…And we need more of those conversations that point us to the direction of what is and how to have healthy relationships. I am still unsure if my EX is a garden variety Sociopath or Narcissist or simply a Douche. It took me half of my adult life to learn that my relationship was not healthy. It never occurred to me to talk to someone, anyone at DD#1 or earlier for that matter, because I am a smart and strong person but I internalized it as being my fault. Today I am more aware but the 14 – 18 – 21 or even 30 year old me did not know it.
And we need to keep reminding people that it is never a sign of weakness to ask for help for yourself or for someone else.
I’ve recounted the progression of XH’s behaviour within our relationship before.
Online porn/EAs/Prostitutes/OW. It looks like a neat timeline but I realise it was probably anything but. It’s just how it seemed to play out with me.
The biggest argument we ever had was around my discovery of his viewing ‘teen’ porn whilst his teenage daughter (from his first marriage) was staying with us. I saw what he had been viewing and the girls looked just like his younger daughter.
I handled the situation very badly. Screaming and shouting – in front of his daughters. Their view was ‘that’s just Dad’ and his was- ‘all men do it. Get over it.’ So I ended up being the ashamed one – for making such ‘a big deal’. And I stayed.
Well obviously his behaviour didn’t improve and he felt vindicated and entitled to push boundaries.
Hence progression to prostitutes. Again I felt partly to blame – well yes, I had gone off sex with a man who was into teen porn…. He was also drinking alcoholically again and yes, I felt guilty (and codependent).
Around this time, he had a young girl on work experience. I started to feel unhappy with the dynamic and felt something was not right- she was under 16. I told her he was unwell and she had to stop working for him. I don’t think he did anything he shouldn’t but I didn’t want to take the chance- for her sake. Of course, she thought he was Mr Wonderful- and he sulked.
The we get to the OW-who now, I can only thank for releasing me from someone with a very dark side. He once said ‘ You don’t want to know what goes on in my head’.
There were threats and violent outbursts too throughout this relationship- which I now clearly see was abusive on every level (yeah, we had financial issues too).
I’m like many women who, once they leave such relationships, find it hard to comprehend how and why we stayed. Why we didn’t ‘see’ what was going on, even if we were aware things weren’t right. Nearly three years since DD and a year and a half divorced I’m still figuring it out.
And like a good NPD he periodically tries contact-like on Monday- phoning, drunk, in the middle of the night. He just wants to talk to me. He’s still ‘with’ OW but I suspect his old ways are still at play. I’m NC and don’t speak to him- or want to. He’s still boundary busting and he’s not just an ex. He’s dangerous to women- me, the young girls he ‘views’, the prostitutes he visited/visits, his daughters- even my one time nemesis- the OW- who is probably unaware he’s contacting his XW, let alone the rest.
I believe the Limited is a predator. After DDay my old computer was frozen on a child porn site requesting money. For accessing it and he wondered what he should do. He asked this in front if his adult son. I was mortified. He denied accessing it and said he clicked on the wrong thing. I believed this until my therapist said he didn’t believe him. Ten years earlier he was accessing porn and blamed it on our son. When I looked up the times it was accessed my son was in school.
I recently pieced together the timing of his moves to my daughters reaching adolescence as well as my granddaughter.
On DDay weekend I was embarrassed as he was staring at young girls crotches. What a fucking sick man. Mr nice guy with a twisted mind. It was always there.
I’m glad to see this blog going in this direction. I’ve found this place incredibly helpful in dealing with what was done to me but it’s bothered me for a long time to see people in the comments talk about “OWhores” and stuff like that. Because slurs like that are meant to demean all women but, more importantly, it’s demeaning women who are FORCED to cater to disgusting men to survive the vast majority of the time. Whether it’s being kidnapped and forced into it by the threat of death or being forced by a lack of other opportunities, it’s still not a choice and nobody should be shamed for it.
The girl my ex cheated on me with was a minor when he met her and had been in really unhealthy relationships with older men. She basically grew up trading sex for security and money and validation. I’m still angry and disgusted with her for pretending to be my friend and I’ll never forgive her but she wouldn’t have been that way if it hadn’t been for disgusting men like my ex husband grooming her and manipulating her. She was a victim too. She was only barely a legal adult and had a really shitty upbringing. It was my predatory ex who decided to go after her!
Like… I get it. I’ve said things about her that are horrible out of being hurt but I’m not proud of myself for it now. When there’s an imbalance of power going on and these women are just trying to survive it’s not really fair to hate them. They didn’t choose this. They were put into that situation by shitty, abusive men that hate and exploit women. After reading about what the women who work in the sex industry go through I can’t hate them anymore, even when they’ve indirectly hurt other women. They’re already suffering enough.
And anyway, looking back I feel like I basically wasn’t any different to him. I thought I had to marry him and make him happy and in exchange he’d take care of me. He basically groomed me into dependence and he singled me out when we were young because I was an easy target. I beat myself up over it a lot but I always try to remember that at least I had good intentions and was naive and he was a manipulative sociopath. That’s what we should always remember as Chumps. That there are people out there who are just sick and screwed up and we should be angry at them for being monsters, not at ourselves or other people they manipulated.
I get why people have names like “OWhore” for the affair partners who help Cheaters blow up their marriages. Many of them are not victims; they are predators themselves or simply amoral and lack empathy. When Chumps say these things on this site, I take it as a kind of venting that they can’t do in ordinary life–no way to call the AP “OWhore” in front of the kids.
But time sometimes changes how we feel about those things. I detested Jackass’s AP and frankly couldn’t wait for a series of Karma buses to run over her. But going on 3 years later, I see that she became his next victim, and strangely enough, I have contact with a member of her extended family through work. I detested her, too, for all the wrong reasons–kind of mentally taking it out on her for her relative’s sins. Over time, though, I’ve made myself see her as a distinct person and found many things to like about her as a young person. And that has made me feel some empathy for the AP. In the end, that is what makes us different from them: empathy.
LAJ–I have thought long and hard about this issue, and have two problems with viewing APs as merely victims (except in cases where they were minors, harassed, or did not realize the cheater was married): (a) at what point do we hold people accountable for their actions? There is just no way I can agree that cheaters are 100% at fault. I resisted the advances of several professors in graduate school, despite a wide range of FOO issues myself. My daughters grew up in a dysfunctional home with a narcissistic father and my daughter at 13 had more sense than many of my X’s graduate student APs. (b) The ‘sympathy’ card to APs seems to fall when it is a male cheater and a female AP, as if we women really are the ‘weaker’ sex when it comes to any kind of responsibility or consent. We can’t demand equal rights with claims that we can do everything men can do just as well (except for program the remote), but then pull a victim card when we are held accountable for our actions.
By adolescence, people know that societal and personal norms indicate that cheating is wrong. If you look at children’s responses after infidelity, it is the 11 year olds and up who are most likely to judge the cheater as immoral, and are most likely to cut off ties to the cheater. The second issue is impulse control, heavily influenced by the prefrontal cortex. That is completely developed by around 20/21. After that age, APs must be held accountable for knowingly sleeping with married people, even when they know they have children. Might they have FOO issues that made them susceptible to being in cheating or abusive relationships? Sure, but so did most of us, and we did not fuck married people.
I agree empathy and trying to figure out why other people may have behaved badly is a hallmark of chumps. But I hope we’ve also learned that boundaries and accountability are important.
Absolutely, Tempest. I can’t give the MOW in my case a pass because she was married and had kids herself. So many people were hurt in the long run. But I see now that she might not have even known about me, as Jackass was great at the George Costanza “don’t let your worlds collide” thing. I only knew something was up because of the drastic changes he was making.
LadyChumpleton: As I said in response to LAJ, I agree APs who are minors deserve special consideration, and may not warrant the OWhore label.
But, “it’s demeaning women who are FORCED to cater to disgusting men to survive the vast majority of the time”–when are APs *forced* to fuck married men/women? Do we then let male APs off the hook because evolutionary theory suggests men are pre-programmed to spread their sperm as widely as possible due to a reproductive strategy? In virtue of our FOO issues, evolutionary predispositions, & societal expectations, we are all subject to a coterie of desires, habits, predilections. But BEHAVIOR is under our control. Cosmides & Tooby (two evolutionary psychologists) have argued that humans evolved to crave fats and sweets because they would have been scarce in most environments & thus valuable. But that doesn’t give me the right to knock down a kid in the mall and steal his Cinnabun. Nor does the need for security or sex or affection give APs the right to screw our husbands or wives. If you read individual stories here, most are blatant examples of entitlement and lack of empathy on the part of APs as well.
“But that doesn’t give me the right to knock down a kid in the mall and steal his Cinnabun.”
Uh…I don’t know about the Cinnbun, can you use another example. Just saying.
I’m never going to mall with you, CalamityJane (at least not without the number for a defense attorney in my pocket).
I also work with college students every day who eat Ramen noodles and occasionally fall asleep in my class because they were up late waitressing or working retail the night before. It’s not the case that working as a stripper or prostitute is the only way to put yourself through college.
I don’t feel demeaned by women who cheat with married men being called OWhores for a couple of reasons. First off, I’m not one and neither are the other chumps. And yes, banging other people’s spouses is what I consider being a whore. Male or female. If they don’t want the label they should not choose the behavior.
Someone I care about deeply recently had her life, and the lives of her children, blown up because her husband–who was well-known and respected in the community–was discovered to be having a full-blown affair with a 16-year old he coached in a sport. She goes to the same school as one of his kids. Thank God–she kicked his sorry ass to the curb as soon as she learned the truth. I so admire her strength. Let’s keep talking about this and hopefully providing a place for those whose lives are devastated by these creeps.
The “she” who goes to the same school is the 16-year old. Sorry for the unclear pronoun reference.
This is an excellent post. I had a colleague where I work, nice guy – you would have never thought it but he was part of a pedophile sex ring of people who and shared thousands upon thousands of images of young children. I also heard he and his wife made a few trips to Thailand as well.
He is in jail and his wife from last I heard, was still his wife.
Sick, sick sick. But if you looked at them, you would have never thought in a million years they were that demented.
My cheater ex is a sociopath. A therapist, of all things, who married me and continued secretly visiting BDSM sex workers at lunchtime. Two books that really helped me, both recommended to me, were Trauma and Recovery and The Sociopath Next Door.
I have hesitated all day about posting. This is part of my training and job. One of the most vunerable people to a pedophile is a chump. If your self esteem has taken a hit a predator can see you a mile away. They will groom you and marry you to get their hands on your children. Their focus begins at puberty and never changes. I have dealt with people who had already molested 6-7 children before they were in their twenties. At training I learned that for every square mile in the US there is a sex offender. If I could give one warning to new chumps it would be that when someone seems to good to be true then be very wary. Units in police depts that specialize in this will tell you that everywhere children gather there are child molesters….churches, schools, scouts, parks, theaters. Everywhere.
Years ago I was traveling for my job and visited a govt facility. A man in probably his 40s had come in to use the restroom. He left his companion talking to the director. The girl was 19 years old. Her father had sold her to the man when she was 13 and they had spent the next six year traveling the highways stopping at truck stops while he pimped her. She had never known another life. He came and got the girl and they left. I showed up with my coworker about 30 minutes later. The director had not tried to stop them, gotten a license number, nothing. There was no way to find them. The director retired not to long after that with poor health. That is the only reason I can think of that she did nothing.
I have tried to warn people that in plain sight are families with this sickness in them but we don’t live in villages anymore and barely know our neighbors, consequently children fall through the cracks.
What a powerful story. And what a very sad one. I sit here wondering where she is now, if she will ever get away.
Thank you Tracy for tackling this issue. There are so many layers to infidelity that go unacknowledged. People who can rationalize the betrayal, lies and abuse that accompany infidelity, can rationalize and justify pretty much anything.
I believe my EX is predatory. I didn’t see evidence of it early on, but about five or six years into the marriage, he was accused by a college-aged store clerk of coming on to her. He was insulted and insisted we speak to the manager. At the time, he convinced me she was trying to cover up that she had not called him regarding some store merchandise he was hoping to secure if they got in more of it. I, of course, believed him and defended him to the manager, who stared at me as if he felt sorry for me. Fast forward several more years and escalating use of pornography and I catch him watching my daughter (not his biological daughter) through her door while she was getting dressed. He swore he was suffering from some sort of a depressive mental breakdown, he didn’t know why he had done it and that he would go and get help. As a childhood sexual assault survivor (which he knew) it was an almost an out of body experience for me. I had always been very careful with my daughter and had never brought any men I dated around her. He had been a father figure to her from the time she was 5 or 6 years old. I believed him when he said he was having some type of an emotional breakdown and stayed with him. He never got the promised help. Did I mention he was mental health professional who worked with children?
I never caught him doing anything like that again, but I continued to be hyper-vigilent. Fast forward and I discovered his relationship(s) with the college-aged BDSM prostitutes who “were working their way through college and who were very bright.” I stayed because he said he wanted to explore BDSM and he was afraid to ask me because he thought I would judge him. By the time the last D-Day rolled around and I was looking for all the evidence I could find, I found semi-nude photographs that he had taken of my daughter while she was sleeping. It was then that I knew he had never really stopped violating her whenever he found an opportunity. He had just been able to hide it better. He destroyed those particular pictures (I believe) but apparently there were other suggestive pictures which he had taken and stored with his porn that my other children found and which they told their sister about. At that time, no one told me that particular set of photographs existed. My daughter and her husband actually confronted him about the issue because they had recently had a daughter, and he initially attempted to deny he had done it. Then he said he didn’t want to live in the past and that he would never harm my granddaughter. No one has any plans to leave her alone with him to test that. Of course, his predatory (in a different way) OWhore, now OWife, knows none of this. However, she wanted him so now she’s got him. And she wasn’t some naive young thing. She is near 60 and he is her fourth husband – at least two of which she poached from marriages.
Absolutely NO ONE would believe any of the things about him which I have just shared (except the few friends with which I have shared this information) because his poor sausage/good guy persona is just that convincing. There have never been any complaints about him and I have no idea how far-reaching his sexual activities have gone. I’m just happy it is no longer my or my children’s concern.
Let me just say I struggle to this day about whether I should report him, but in reality, I have nothing I can actually report. I have no information nor evidence that he had sex with anyone or abused anyone except the prostitutes (who were of legal age) and women his own age. I did alert my one sister-in-law so she would at least be aware that he had a problem.
Chump Princess you have enough indications that he is using and even making child porn, to make a report at this site:
http://www.missingkids.org/cybertipline/
That is where I am going to make my report. Let the professionals decide if it is worth law enforcement investigating.
Sadly, my STBX had sex with prostitutes before and during our marriage. I don’t know the ages of the prostitutes he used. I think that most, if not all of them were young Asians (girls and boys?). I feel sorry for all of them. Interestingly, he has accused me of soliciting male prostitutes while married to him. He told a psychologist and my sister (also a psychologist) that he had read email from me to my sister saying I planned to hire a prostitute for my own use. He twisted the words I wrote, which he read when he hacked me email. The email said that I would NEVER betray him by doing such an awful thing, especially as he had claimed that his wife had cheated on him in lesbian affairs. In reality, he cheated on her, but I didn’t realize that until a decade after meeting him. (I never had even considered having sex with a prostitute or engaging in any form of casual sex, paid or unpaid.)
CL and chump nation
So where do you place cheaters who have affairs without any intention of leaving the spouse? Aren’t they sexual predators. After all they look for willing participants just for sex and then only to leave them high and dry after the affair is found out ? Most cheaters are in it for the strange sex right ? And maybe some ego stroking. But then the OW divorces her husband hoping the MM will leave too and then he doesn’t. She’s tossed out like last years Christmas paper. Unwanted, un-needed anymore. Wouldn’t these guys be considered sexual predators ? After all their intentions going into the affair are certainly less than honorable. Curious!
Good question, Anon. I think it might depend on whether your cheater (buser) is predatory or parasitic. Mine kept the Schmoopie (he likes having a fuckbutler).
I’m not sure what your question is Anon. I’m probably wrong, but I am thinking you might have been the then-married OW who was disappointed the MM didn’t get divorced?
In that case the OW in question was a perpetrator, and the MM was a perpetrator. However, the victims in your scenario were the wife of MM, your (I mean the OW’s) husband, and most assuredly *not* the OW.
Please set me straight if I have overstepped my logic.
I think you pegged it Ian 😀
So, if the married man dumps the whore, she becomes a victim ? Uh, no. That is the most common line of thought on the Other Women blogs. Once you knowingly behave inappropriately with a married man, you lose victim status, permanently. You chose that path, and all consequences.
I agree with Ian; yes, cheaters who have no intention of leaving their spouses (despite possible promises to the OW/OM) are predatory, but married OW/OM are certainly users and not victims. In this case, the predatory stalker is dependent on the assent of the prey (also see my arguments above for why APs cannot be considered victims, except under very limited circumstances).
HI Ian. Thanks for replying. No I’m not the dumped OW. Quite to opposite. I understand how you came to that conclusion. I’m the betrayed spouse. I think women go into affairs with different agendas than men. I think the MM sell them a line that they have no intention of sticking to. Many, and I will dare to say most MM, will not leave their spouse for the OW. So there’s promises made, promises to leave, cash incentives for the OW to stay, manipulation sand machinations in place to keep the status quo. More so to the OW/mistress, after she knows all the secrets. Seems the MM is being predatory. Getting what he wants and payment for her silence. I am not trying to compare this to young women being kidnapped in Darfour, or young children abused at the hands of priests, or even young sexually abused women who go into the sex trade. But definitely these married men are in positions of power. Especially if they are the OW boss. Also I believe the MM are pretty certain about the level of intellect or lack thereof of many of these OW and they use that to their advantage. The OW is a victim alright, of her own stupidity and lack of self worth.
I don’t think any person over the age of 18 who who knowingly becomes involved with a person who is married can ever be considered a ” victim”. Choose the behavior, choose the consequences. Whether you get dumped , mistreated, whatever, you knew you were getting involved with a lying, married cheater. Not really sure why you think this person who treats their own wife and family like shit should give a co cheater a “victim” pass. Hopefully they learn from it but I doubt it happens often. Remember the rattlesnake’s warning in the old Native American tale. “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”. Don’t be surprised when they turn on YOU.
I do think that paid sex workers can be victims, and usually are, mistly due to most of the circumstances they are in. But they don’t have an actual relationship with the cheater. It’s a business transaction. Although, cheaters seem to be too stupid to realize that fact.
And minors are victims due to their legal status. This is a criminal offense if the sex partner is over 18. That’s the most heinous situation of all, think creepy Jared Fogle, Subway pervert
Ian+Tempest. A marriage made in logical heaven. Sharing their valuable wisdom with the collective. My brain hurts but +1 following. Love to CN.
Ok I admit I’ve lurked 16 months now. Now I come out of the closet. It’s just that so many of you live my life and it physically sickens me to see your/my pain. Especially you Tempest, as you live my life. I just wanted to weigh in about uni professors & consent. My STBX accepted Chinese students whose English was poor, into Masters & PhD programs. You guessed it, he wrote entire theses & dissertations, but the Gratitude! You see, theyre from families of the new Chinese middle class, who’ve scrimped & saved to get her here to Australia, and she can’t go home empty-handed in shame. So she puts out, and at graduation daddy & mummy fly over & gift my ex with monetary rewards as well (as well as their daughter’s innocence). But it’s worth it for the guaranteed professional employment back in China. Is this consent? It gets murky. Are there many overseas students at your ex’s university, Tempest? Here in Australia the uni’s are dependent on foreign student tuitions. It’s like high class sex trafficking huh?
GSBID – Welcome to CN, I am so sorry you have to deal with betrayal and cheating! To me too it is sickening to realize that higher education can become such a viper nest and exploitative system, it turns my stomach.
My X is the cowardly I-deserve-to-be-happy type who I found out was fucking a grad student half his age. He comes all equipped with the manipulative passive-aggressive gaslighting mastery that erodes a chump’s self-esteem in the most subtle yet effective of ways… And since the mask came off, well he’s been alternating through the textbook three channels…
CL – Thank you, you are incredible! Yes, it is a tough conversation, but a needed one. As a chump mom I must say that the comments made to this post have been a baptism by fire in terms of my education about sexual predators. My kiddo is right at the age group where she can become a target, I am trying as hard as I can to be the sane parent so she can learn how to build healthy boundaries and avoid exploitative relationships. Forging on!
GSBID–A number of us (besides Chumptitude and myself) have had professor-cheaters who specialized in preying on graduate students. What you describe is particularly heinous–to lure Chinese women to graduate degrees abroad with the express purpose of extracting sex from them in exchange for a career. That is certainly high-class sex trafficking by sick human beings.who warrant the label “sexual predator.” I’m sorry you married a monster, too, GoodSexBeforeIDie, and am glad you have started posting. It is worth getting out the word about the seedy side of higher education. (love your name, by the way!)
My ex left me for a Chinese woman half his age he is 58, she is 31. He met her whilst teaching at a London university. He lied for 5 years and broke my heart until I had the guts to throw him out and take action. I was telling a British woman who lives in Hong Kong my sad and sorry tale and she said that she had heard this story so many times, in Hong Kong it is a real cliche and it is very common. Old white man young Chinese girl.
It is really sickening on both sides. She knew he was married and didn’t care. They both lied to everyone. He even employed her at work after they started screwing around.
I think that these guys just want young women and they don’t care who or how or what they wreck to get it. Some like my ex have just enough sense not to go for children.
Anyway , you just take care of yourself as CN has your back
Hugs to all
Yes, that’s the flip side–the AP-visa-seekers are themselves pretty manipulative. And it doesn’t hurt any less that our situations are cliche.
Tempest (love you :D) and Polly, these cheaters are, seem to be anyway, all cliches…satan is a ‘traveling salesman’ …yep…sayin…
http://www.buzzfeed.com/melissagiragrant/no-one-is-making-decisions-for-me#.vheZ8xnv0
Since we are on the topic of sexual predators, I came across this story about an escort who had to kill a man in self defense. He tried to choke the living daylights out of her. It’s believed that he has killed other women and had plans to go after six more. .
Pass a law charging ‘punters’ who use obviously foreign women (trafficked modern slaves) with rape. A Labour MP in UK, Dennis McShane, advocated this. I think he is right.
Slightly off topic here but speaking of predators, my exes “love of his life” pretty much let it be known from day one of being in Australia from Bhutan, that she was looking for an older man as the younger ones at Uni didn’t interest her. She needed someone with money and a secure job to “keep” her while she studied here for two years doing her Master of Education. Now she’s finished her studies and he’s moved in with her, she is trying to get permanent residency. He has spent at least $20,000 that I know of, helping her pay rent, buying her a new laptop because she lied and said hers was stolen, buying her expensive jewellery, clothes and taking her on holidays and possibly paying her tuition fees as well. She’s 34, he’s nearly 60, but of course it’s true love. He blew up our relationship of 25 years for a scheming, sly bitch and he can’t see her for what she is, he never was very bright poor dear. Our home is sold and I’m taking half of his retirement savings. I think in time he’ll hate that bitch as much as I do, but at the moment his dick is blissfully happy. Yep some of these girls are predators and whores and no one forced them into this role except their own over inflated sense of entitlement to someone else’s ready made money and life.
Wow! I cannot imagine finding out out you’ve been deceived by a pedophile/sex trafficker/ etc!! My X was a predator of a slightly lesser degree. He was (is) a voyeur. I have felt so dirty, ashamed, and horrified by the videos he took of me in unsuspecting moments that one has every right to privacy (ummmm….taking a bath….going to the bathroom, etc). And he was a classic up skirt / down blouse perv who spent a large amount of time figuring out how to video his prey without their knowing or their consent. All of this was in addition to the usual affairs, Craigslist Hookups, one night stands, etc. CL is correct; it’s a different kind of shock when you realize you’re dealing with any kind of predator. Cheating, criminal behavior, and predatory behaviors all thrive on secrecy. We HAVE to open the dialogue and bring these issues to light in order to protect ourselves and others.
A heartfelt thank you to Chumptitude & Tempest for your support. And to CL & CN, for my sanity & (fledgling) recovery. Posting here was a big step for me, because as caring & supportive as CN is, that’s how much denial I’ve needed to pretend I was OK & keep powering on through the process of extricating myself legally & financially from the predator. Maybe I can exhale now. I don’t know what we can do to stop creeps preying on vulnerable people but you’re right, we can at least talk about it as a start. Oh and my name, well a girl can dream…
Another unfortunate side effects of being married to these selfish pricks (in all senses of the word). On topic it is my worst fear that my kids who are 50% with him since <10 yo could be abused. No evidence, but how can you trust someone who plots his escape for years by first trying to financially ruin you and reduce working hours to make a play for shared custody? Here I was thinking we were a modern family doing what's best for the kids.
Thank you for bringing this problem to light. I am seeing a lot of posts regarding the predators fate. Personally, I would like to see more resources directed towards the victims. Despite the fate of the aggressor, it is important for the victim to seek help. Otherwise, it can consume you. Please go to the hospital as soon as possible, seek help, and take care of yourselves.
Going to the hospital can make a world of difference.
What’s REALLY normal in dealing with Sex Addicts is telling them to fuck off. Nobody needs that shit in their marriage. The cheater can get divorced and fuck themselves right to death.
satan appears to be living proof of that being true Anita 😀 You just described his life after our divorce…
Thank God you are away from that, Jeep.
My piece of shit ex cheater was a predator. He used ANY social media to get girls. He had 2 targets. 1. Underage girls for sex. 2. Older women to take care of him while he screwed the younger girls. I read his Facebook, kiks,meet me. He was like a robot. “Hey gorgeous, I just want to say you are absolutely beautiful”.some fell for it. Some ignored him. (Strengnth in numbers i guess..there were hundreds)He would then ask them if they wanted to make $1500 just for showing up to an interview for adult modeling. 15-16 year old girls who he would friend off other friends etc. I read one in particular where the girl said yes (though there were quite a few that did)but this one in particular said she would. He had her meet him at a hotel room, he offered her more for oral and anal. $5000 more. Even more for no condom. The next thing I read was the following week where he messaged her again, said I’m still working on your money..it will be here any day. Then he proceeded to ask her to meet him again (he,was the producer) she said last time I let you do anal and orgasm inside and I still haven’t been paid. He promised her he would have all the money as,soon as they were done this time. She agreed! He told her he was glad,that he liked her more than the other girls he’d had. Next message was her cussing him out another week later because,she still hadnt gotten her money. He had the NERVE to ask her to meet him again she never messaged him back. But as I read, on several occasions he would message her , I miss you, I wanna see you. I have your money. She never responded. There were many of these messages on his social media. I mean hundreds. When confronted he said he had hada problem..until he met me. Well his past long standing relationships (6 months to a year) were with older women who were taking care of him financially. He acquired them in the same fashion. Only not offering money, but pouring on the compliments. And lies. He would live with them,eating living free. I know. I was one of them. My story is on another page. When I told him it was over,he spent the next 3 months begging cheating begging swearing I was his soul mate.threatning suicide if I left him…the only one who could help him. I took him to a rehab out of state he,was also on drugs I found out.he immediately started screwing the female addicts all while calling me professing love and adoration for me helping him. Begging to come home. This went on for a month and a half when I finally wore him down he confessed to sneaking into several girls rooms having sex with them. Then he dumped me.lol. after 2 days earlier saying he couldn’t live without me. This is a 25 yr old man. I wrote the coordinator there to report him,she never responded. I’ve messaged a few girls he’s added to Facebook while there just to get the word out,no response.. I went to the local police with the info I had months earlier after copying some of the messages. They didn’t do anything and I lived in fear of him retaliating if he found out. I had an epiphany while reading this forum tonight. He was keeping me close only because I knew of all he’d done! He was good. Very good at what he does. He plays this innocent shit , he is play acting for 2 different parts! 1 the sex agent. The other..to get his financial needs met. Looking back on our “intimate life i realize now what was happening. He was always a taker from the start. It was all about him. But he would withhold the intimacy saying he was tired, or sick. Or not in the mood. Made me feel rejected. Then when I’d say something he’d say, stop being insecure. Omg what a mind fuck. I realize all of this,yet I still want something. I’m not sure what. His birthday is in 2 days. I’ve been pondering for days now if I should text him happy birthday. How sick is that??!! But writing this out on here has helped. The day he just vanished I’d called him out on another lie..it was 2 am and Id called him on the phone to say goodnight ..he told me he couldn’t talk he was trying to help someone who’d od’ed. I could tell by the way he was,whispering that was a lie. I called him on it..he said” way to go ruining things just days before my birthday, someone could be dying and your worrying about me seeing some bitch”. He blocked me on the phone and on Facebook. At first I thanked God for that. Then the thoughts kept creeping in..maybe he was telling the truth. I caved 2 days later and messaged him ,he said he wanted to be with me but it was stressful, they’d put him on staff there and he needed to focus on that. So now he’s in charge of going in these girls rooms doing searches and over seeing them. He asked could he use the motorcycle I’d bought him (but had took back when I found out about the drugs)for a few days up there for his birthday. Lolol that was all I could take. Could he shove the fact that he’s a narcisist,lying rat bastard, egotistical,self serving,con artist, $#÷$,&_% <, %^^ in my face any harder? And I'm worried about telling him happy birthday? I got some good advice from this site after posting my story. I'm trying hard to recieve it and follow it. I'm so anxious everyday. Sick feeling but each day does bring more peace. I realize I have to find out why I stayed involved with such an evil thing. I'm reading many articles along with online counseling. Maybe it's working, maybe not. But I do know every day will be better than the last. I just need help with this no contact. I know his history. I know he will be crawling back any day. He ruins everything g he gets into. He has zero family or friends who would help him. And when he does this he is relentless. He uses other peoples phones, social media etc. The good news,he is in another state. Right now..while typing this..I have no desire to speak to him and feel nothing but hate..I know that once I hit send though, I'll be alone in my thoughts again. And those doubts will creep in. But God writing this has helped me thru this moment to see him as the monster he absolutely is. I've dealt with cheaters before. In fact I've never known anything else. But this , I feel stunned.how can this thing be allowed to walk the earth as free? With no locked gates to hold him in. I pray pray pray that God will protect the innocent from IT. he has a warrant for failure to appear for probation in this state . 2 of them I think. But I called to tell them his whereabouts before I took him to rehab, they said "they'd look into it" I gave them 2 weeks! Before I had to get him away from me. I had to reassure him if he went to rehab I'd stand by him. Or he wouldn't have went. I was so relieved to have him gone. Why do I keep fantasizing of a future and missing him??!! I've lost myself. But I will find myself again! Thanks for yalls help!
I haven’t been responding to posts on CL lately – I’m in the middle of a divorce that seems to be going nowhere and I’m dissatisfied with my lawyer but am already $12k in the hole with her – and I’m moving and my car was just rear-ended…
But I wanted to write here about this topic because, even though it’s been six months, STBX is a predator and I’m fucking disgusted by my situation.
He’s such a lying hypocrite – spending all of our savings of twenty years on webcam porn, prostitutes, Craigslist ads, and strangers = and all on a quest for teenage Asian girls. He fucked his little sister for six years when he was a teen male and she was aged six – twelve.
I didn’t know any of this until after D-day because he is a church-going “friend to all” – women constantly told me throughout our relationship that he was so ‘special’ and ‘kind’). HA.
I cannot believe it. Even after six months. But I now recognize all the myriad red flags (for example, once, when we were dating, he told me that the nine-year-old across the street from his then house was coming on to him…WTF?)
I FERVENTLY HOPE AND PRAY THAT HE GETS ARRESTED FOR WHAT I BELIEVE IS A LIFETIME HORDE OF CHILD PORN.
I HOPE HE IS RAPED IN PRISON. REPEATEDLY. BY PEOPLE WHO HATE HIM.
I HOPE HE DIES A SLOW, AGONIZING DEATH, PREFERABLY WITH OOZING PUS AND FESTERING SORES.
I’ve reported him to online cybersex reports and online cheater websites. I’ve told my counselor and my lawyer.
For some reason, I just can’t seem to get past it this week (after a month of almost-meh).
I HATE THIS SO SO MUCH!
Oh, Roaring–that is so much to process. I’m sorry. The horror of realizing you were married to a monster is overwhelming. Huge hugs to you.
Roaring, Bless your heart! I went through the same thing with satan. I’m now a little over a year divorced and doing so much better mentally, emotionally and physically…financially, I’m okay…but…sure could use the money I had to throw at the lawyer to get away from him. You will get here! It gets better once you can put the period at the end of that chapter of your life. I promise! Then it is all up to just you. In December I was t-boned in my little Jeep, a week ago Mighty Monster Eater Beau had to have surgery and last Sunday my roof blew off…but, everything is gonna be just fine and I truly believe that! And Beau is healing nicely and is still mighty!!!! Stay mighty!!! You got this and we got your back!!!! HUGS!!!! Big ones and LOTS OF EM!
Roaring , I’m sorry you are going thru that. I can’t imagine how hard it is day to day. How do they just keep getting to skate through life with no repercussions??!!!??it’s beyond me. Mine had 2 warrants for not showing for probation. When I called to tell them his whereabouts they could have cared less. When I tried to show evidence to the police of his soliciting young teens ,they did nothing! Why doesn’t the world care anymore that these sorts are roaming the streets? Just look at it this way I guess..in a little while we will be over it. We WILL move on. To bigger and better. They have to stay stuck. They can never really win. They have to wake up to themselves everyday. There is no cure for them. Although there is one for us!!!! Hang in there. I pray we all get to see the day karma shows up on their door.
Tracy, thank you for writing this and addressing this issue. I found out in November that my husband is a “sex addict” (which I put in quotes because I have many issues with this cowardly excuse), and he is surely a predator and possibly a sociopath. He fucked hundreds of strangers, men, women, prostitutes, strippers, Asian massage workers, trannies, etc, over our entire 8 year relationship. He used prostitutes who were working for a local human trafficking ring in my area that runs a website with online reviews of the women. I didn’t think of the word “predator” as applying to him until I read this post, and now that I can think of him as that, I will have a much easier time serving him with divorce papers next week! You have helped me survive this.
If you haven’t already, phone your local law enforcement non-emergency number. Dispatch will ask for the suspect’s name, DOB, and city of residence, maybe even physical address. You can have an officer out to you to discuss it. They may not do anything initially beyond checking him against a sex offender list or registry but at least you’ve put the name out loud into the universe.
Then call the child help national child abuse prevention hotlines. They may not be able to do anything either, and might not ask his name. But you’ve actively spoken in advocacy for the children, and that’s critical.
Take the kids and go NC.
If you know he is doing something to kids, call the police. Don’t be afraid of blowback.
This definition: Sexual Predator (n.) Anybody who obtains sexual contact via less-than-honest means or a person that enjoys “hunting down” their prey. The man who presented himself as single and available, wooed me and captured my deep emotion, was not single and was serial cheater, many, many times, as I would learn. Very painful, very long, slow and at times, no recovery from this predator.