Should I Dump My Partner Who Sexted a Teenager?

This guy needs to be reported to the police regardless of whether the parents chose to do so or not. Then LB needs to immediately distance herself in order to not appear complicit. People not only have deep contempt for predators like this but anyone who even vaguely appears to enable them whether this is from denial or shock or whatever. There may be nothing police can do yet in the case local laws don’t criminalize targeting 16 year olds (which is absurd but depends on region) but he should definitely be on a watchlist. There’s no way this was his first or last offense and he may have quite a trail of victims in his wake.

Because of this, LB’s choice is between one of two “roles” in this disaster: Ghislaine Maxwell or Giselle Pelicot and really nothing in between. So I would strongly recommend opting for “Giselle” rather than “Ghislaine” and going to police because reporting it is the only way to wash off the stench and then of course never, ever having anything to do with this monster again unless called to testify.

And believe me, this guy is a monster and I’d also recommend Lotus Blossom or anyone else who’s ever spent time in the presence of freaks like this seek trauma therapy to process the toxic effects of proximity because no normal person can come away unscathed.

I know this from experience because I was in the performing arts since age seven, modeled in NY in my teens to pay for school then worked in the media and entertainment industry starting in college. All these industries are basically magnets for every kind of perv, predator and pedophile and I’ve had brushes with these types all along. Though I was never “successfully” molested as a kid or adult (close calls but I always got away), I’ve seen the face of evil up close– or should I say “faces” since these types come in a variety of guises– and have developed a radar and a bit of a system for spotting them.

I admit that the hardest types to spot are the ones who wear the “sweetheart” disguise and rarely show any aggression. I think that type can be the most diabolical because they really get under your skin and convince you of their kindness and harmlessness (which is why this type also often clusters around advocacy and important social justice causes because– as Jean Paul FW Sartre put it– “everything is permitted the hero.”). Sadly this breed of creeper is able to mimic down to a cellular level a relatively rare type of angerless and generous individual that actually exists but, whenever I encounter people who give me that “Daaaw, how sweet” reaction, I tend to keep my guard quietly up until I can figure out whether they’re the real deals or the dangerous fakes. It’s too bad but, if the real deals are as decent as they pretend to be, they would understand why this is necessary.

Otherwise I can attest that I don’t see pedophiles in every shadow and, except for certain industries, it’s not exactly “dirt common” but they still exist in every corner in all their various forms. As I mentioned in a comment to another post, I think one pretty common giveaway is that normal adults– regardless of age– around active pedophiles often start getting a creeping sense of not only feeling “old” but strangely terrified of aging.

Personally I think what causes this effect is that a lot of pedophiles can’t stop periodically “leaking” out ageistic little asides and gestures that makes anyone in their midst who is not a fellow predator and who is not within their target age range feel past their expiration or very close to it. It kind of emanates out of people like this– by the way they ask everyone’s age or get a bit too excited about, say, a young child’s “perfect skin” or make little cracks about the aging of various public figures, etc., etc.

There are endless ways that predators express objectification. I also think the fact that pedophiles especially are, by nature and as a function of what they do, dangerously callous if not criminally violent gives a strange power to the toxic messaging that’s unconsciously picked up by normal people’s lizard brains, almost like fear is some kind of accelerant for toxicity. It’s also like fear-boosted objectification that’s expressed indirectly has a way of getting internalized more easily because people don’t see it coming and therefore don’t know how to ward it off.

That toxic effect is true not only for bystanders but for the direct targets of that supposedly positive attention from predators. I was very sensitive to this spooky “vibe” as a kid but also sort of curious about why some people emanate it. I eventually figured that compulsive sexual predators, like chronic porn users accustomed to the instant gratification of flipping through a hundred porn videos in 20 seconds, are the height of entitlement. Many seem to get frustrated and angry at individuals who do not meet their rigid sexual specs and seem to have a desire to punish and humiliate those who “fall short”, particularly if those people are “close but no cigar” to the predator’s preferred physical traits. So a pedophile who prefers pre-pubescent children can get very frustrated in the presence of adolescents and one who prefers adolescents can get very spiky in the presence of young adults and on and on.

Another favorite target of predatory rage is anyone who seems like the type who might protect or side with victims– often mothers or motherlly types but also anyone who gives off a genuine rescuer vibe. I knew a young male producer like this who had recurrent nightmares for years after being intensely tormented and persecuted by Harvey Weinstein. The young producer was the one who convinced a high powered attorney he knew to represent me pro-bono after I experienced workplace harassment and stalking as an intern. This friend was always a bonafide “protector” type and I suspect Weinstein telepathically sensed it and felt threatened by it. I think it’s precisely why many predators seek power so that they can use it to clear their fiefdoms of anyone who might potentially thwart their exploits and surround themselves only with complicit proxy abusers and spineless enablers.

Speaking of (ugh) Weinstein… though most predators tend to be very passive aggressive about “punishing” others for being the wrong “type” or age, if the predator has a position of power, they may be very overt and aggressive in attacking others who don’t meet their preferences. The last job I had in media (before I bailed from pure nausea) was working for a semi-famous producer who was later all over the headlines for raping nearly a dozen victims, most of whom were teens at the time. I remember him making a little blond production assistant who aspired to on-camera work cry alone in the restroom when he told her– at the ripe old age of 32 (she frankly looked younger but apparently not nubile enough)– that the position was only open to “young and beautiful” candidates.

I think it wasn’t just the crack but the sheer viciousness with which he said it that sent the woman into an extended spiral. That fear accelerant thing again. I think that was the first time I consciously realized the guy might be a pedophile. In any case, he was a violent and evil man who abused power and the last straw for me was seeing him brutally yank his anorexic wife (likely anorexic because he was also a huge fat-shamer) out of a chair by her scrawny little arm because she sat in the wrong place.

Because I was roly-poly pregnant for half the time I had that job, the boss’s weird misogynistic haterism was mostly focused on how “fat” I got during pregnancy (expressed by silently glaring psychotic daggers at me any time I ate at work which was pretty much all the time due to moderate gravidarum) and possibly just the “mother” vibe of being pregnant so he didn’t attack me ageistically as he did others. But I knew from many other brushes with freaks that the sense of feeling “old” around a pedophile can start as young as tweens in the case the target age for the predators around them is under fourteen or under 10 and on and on down to infant. For instance, that constant proximity to the clusterfuck of pedophiles in the fashion industry is one of the reasons that most fashion models start developing a haunting sense of “age dysmorphia” by their teens. For instance, it wasn’t uncommon for girls I knew to claim to be 15 instead of 17 or 17 instead of 20, etc., maybe partly to preemptively extend careers but also clearly as a defensive response to “pedo radiation exposure.”

Anyway, thou shalt know the predatory objectifiers (a good portion of them anyway) by a creeping internal sense of body or age dysmorphia. The more dangerous the predator and the worse the encounter, the deeper this sense of feeling tainted or unfit can sink.

I think part of it is probably just the “telescoping sense of life expectancy” that’s typical in PTSD, though it might be more than that. In forensic psychology, the effect is something called “projective identification” to explain the tendency of rape victims to internalize a sense of being dirty, repulsive and guilty for crimes they didn’t commit because they’re actually “absorbing” the feelings of being dirty, unfit and guilty that the perpetrators refuse to feel and then displace or project on victims. For that reason I hope the targeted teen in this case gets therapy because she has likely been “infected” just by the traumatic “near miss” which could set her up for depression and self esteem issues over time. And, again, Lotus Blossom should seek support as well as anyone else who was impacted by that poisonous encounter.