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" Relations between the sexes have gotten a little tense. So, in &amp;quot;Women &amp;amp;amp; Men,&amp;quot; a special section in Esquire&amp;#039;s April 2015 issue, we candidly address a complicated question that we should all be discussing openly: What is the state of relations between the men and women of America today? More from the &amp;quot;Women &amp;amp;amp; Men&amp;quot; special issue:  Nick Offerman and Chelsea Handler on Men, Women, and Genitalia Occidental Justice: The Disastrous Fallout When Drunk Sex Meets Academic Bureaucracy Do Men and Women Agree on What&amp;#039;s OK When It Comes to Sex? 9 Writers on Our Current Difficulties  Stalked   \u2640+\u2642 ____________ Thursday, June 12, 2014 / 10:16 a.m. I know what you did with the magazine. I suspected, and then I confirmed. How evil do you need to be? You&amp;#039;ll enjoy this: I am writing a memoir about these last three years. You are going to be in it. And there is nothing you can do to stop it. When she received this e-mail, it had been a year since she had last spoken to the man who wrote it. But in that year, he had not relented in sending a steady barrage of e-mails to her\u2014sexual, angry, menacing e-mails. Sometimes dozens a day, sometimes just one a day, a few days a week. They had once had a brief relationship, but now she feared him, and her family feared for her safety. And then he wrote to tell her that Esquire had assigned him a story\u2014to write about her. &amp;quot;That should be interesting, eh?&amp;quot; his note read. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t name you by name, but obviously a million people will read about your various evil acts.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when she wrote to us. She was being stalked, she said. ***   January 2014 The movements that make up her day. She was out late with friends, and so today she&amp;#039;ll sleep in. No rush. She has always kept late nights anyway, and so she&amp;#039;s a hermit come morning, never setting an alarm, never having to be anywhere early, just slowly letting the energies of the world bring her to consciousness and back to life. No dog or cat to care for or rouse her, no one else in her bed, no meetings until noon, she sleeps. She appreciates her routines and is a very sedate sleeper\u2014where she begins is where she ends up. She doesn&amp;#039;t usually dream, but recently she did have one about her father. They were very close when she was growing up, until she was twenty-three and his affair with a woman younger than her destroyed her parents&amp;#039; marriage. She was getting married herself right about then, and her dad was making plans to marry his affair, and the family trauma definitely took some of the joy out of her wedding day, that&amp;#039;s for sure. In her dream, her father is at her wedding, but he leaves the reception early, before anybody gets there, which is what actually happened, so uncomfortable was he about being in a setting that looked very much like a joyous celebration of a former life. Her father asked that she call his new wife &amp;quot;Mom,&amp;quot; and she told him he was crazy. Call me when you change your mind, he said. That was seventeen years ago, and wherever he is, he&amp;#039;s still waiting on that call. So she obviously doesn&amp;#039;t have what you&amp;#039;d call a happy family story to tell. She&amp;#039;s not close to either of her siblings, and her own marriage collapsed a few years ago. So lucky her, she&amp;#039;s having to figure out dating all over again. So much has changed, she feels like a stranger in a strange land. She&amp;#039;s met a few guys, and they&amp;#039;ve been mostly nice, except for the strident atheist who at first wrote such a thoughtful letter responding to her online profile but then wrote back that she was going to die alone and that her God would be no consolation to her, when all she&amp;#039;d said in reply was something like &amp;quot;How can you be so sure about everything? I&amp;#039;m not.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s definitely a different game now from when she&amp;#039;d last played. Got to be careful about whom you invite in.  Like the very first one after the divorce, the writer. She had always been most attracted not so much to how a man looks as to how he thinks, and this guy was kind of dazzling that way. Earnest, funny, kind. Quoted Yeats and Fitzgerald liberally, if pretentiously. Scowled, even when he was smiling. Had a very high regard for his own talent and could be contemptuous of most other writers. She took this as the supreme self-confidence of someone who might just be one of the rare few whose talent is vindicated by history. And he was bawdy, too, which was new to her. She liked that. The whole thing was intense, all the way through. He was just coming off a divorce, too, and was well versed in her vulnerabilities, because they were also his vulnerabilities. They&amp;#039;d hardly even met\u2014lots of torrid e-mails, lots of time on the phone, sometimes all night, falling in love with the voice of a stranger. They&amp;#039;d said I love you, sight unseen, and begun to make vague proclamations of a life together. The fantasy was overpowering, and they were both so lonely, so they&amp;#039;d had lots of virtual sex, and made videos for each other, too, well before they&amp;#039;d even met. Well, she&amp;#039;dmade videos. Why is it that men never make videos? And then she flew out to visit for that long weekend, and the spell was broken, and things had just kind of devolved after that. But he persisted. More than persisted. Some guys just don&amp;#039;t understand no. And whereas before, the intensity had been the very thing she was after, now it was becoming frightening. Or annoying. Annoying was all she would allow herself. She was an accomplished professional, at the top of her field, with two degrees from an elite university. She had had nothing given to her in life, she didn&amp;#039;t scare easily, and she hadn&amp;#039;t become a success by being careless. But now she felt as if she&amp;#039;d been careless. So stupid. I don&amp;#039;t really even know the guy. What was this thing that she had opened herself to? Whatever it was, she didn&amp;#039;t like to talk about it. She couldn&amp;#039;t talk about it, for reasons that she didn&amp;#039;t entirely understand, as if talking about it would make it real, or make it worse, or make her admit that she had a real problem on her hands. Where she doesn&amp;#039;t have a problem is in her career. Work is her refuge, and her business\u2014the business that she started by herself from nothing\u2014is thriving. She sees to every detail, from smallest to largest, personally. She has a sweet office a five-minute drive from her condo, with straight-back chairs upholstered in velour and a small cherry conference table and walls painted in soothing pastels to calm clients who are most often feeling pretty stressed. It works very nicely, and the effect is of a very intimate restaurant, with only a single cozy table overlooking the street life that passes by silently outside. She has eight contractors who work for her, mostly in the field, and so most often, unless she has a meeting, she is alone in the office. Which most often is how she likes it. But this is where he has sent her parcels. It&amp;#039;s a business, it&amp;#039;s public, a fixed point, anyone can find it. At 8:00 she stirs and needs to pee. And she&amp;#039;s hungry. Her late-morning routine once she&amp;#039;s up and out will take her to the bagel shop across the street. Cinnamon raisin, toasted, light butter. She has to specify light butter every day because they always want to put on too much. She likes things exactly as she likes them. They know her there and upgrade her latte to a large almost every day, or sometimes don&amp;#039;t charge her at all. They&amp;#039;re so friendly, these twenty-two-year-old bagel people. She wonders what they would think of what is happening to her. Could anyone in the real world even understand what goes on? The disruption of this life that she has fought so hard to make for herself? They might think she&amp;#039;d brought it on herself. No, they wouldn&amp;#039;t understand. No one would. Back in bed, she lingers. She normally stays in bed and has a productive hour before getting ready for the day. She writes a bit for the writing class she&amp;#039;s taking, because the instructor says he wants her to write just after waking up, before doing anything else. She gives instruction for a living, and so she takes instruction seriously, and so she writes every day, which is as good for her as it is hard. She finishes that and slowly reaches for her phone to check her e-mail. As always, she hesitates slightly, as if she is bracing herself. Before opening anything, she scrolls through all the new messages, squinting. She looks to see if any of the messages are from an unfamiliar name or from him. She doesn&amp;#039;t want to open one of those unexpectedly, because his messages can have the approximate effect of a sudden home invasion and can completely undo her. By now, so many messages come in from randomized, fictional names\u2014his pseudonyms\u2014that she gingerly moves those messages off the server, careful not to open them for fear that he&amp;#039;s able to see if she&amp;#039;s opening his e-mails (he&amp;#039;s told her he has software that can detect such activity), and then saves them to a different directory on her computer. Then, when she is sure that they&amp;#039;re offline, she opens them. Thursday, January 30, 2014, 12:30 A.M.: Just watched a video of you cumming. Hottest thing ever. Her breath quickens and she feels sick. This has now been going on since May\u2014more than six months. And it&amp;#039;s been that long since she replied to him in any way. She has told herself that if she just remains silent, they will eventually stop\u2014it has to stop\u2014but instead they&amp;#039;re intensifying. It seems to her that though he might have once been enraged by her silence, he is now emboldened by it. She starts to shake, there in her bed. There had been so many other e-mails just like this one. And she remembers another: Sunday, July 7, 2013, 7:20 A.M.: Do not make me use these videos in a public way. I have thought about it. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! She breathes deeply to stanch the panic and forces herself out of bed. She showers and dresses, moving slowly through her studio, pausing to look out her window overlooking the pool. Not casually, carefully. Then she walks quietly to her door, where she removes the chair wedged tightly under the doorknob so that she can open it. She leans slowly out into the hallway, looking both ways, and then takes a step out. From her door she races to reach the street and the safety of other people. ***   March 2013 She heard from a mutual Facebook friend about this writer who was going through a bad breakup, and her friend thought maybe they&amp;#039;d have a lot in common. She&amp;#039;d just gone through a very acrimonious divorce, too, and from the looks of his Facebook page, which the writer used as a diary of his struggles, his split with his wife was sudden and brutal. According to the account on his Facebook page, she had fled in the night without so much as a word. No gradual decline, no counseling, nothing. His heartbreak was evident; he expressed his grief in clear and compelling detail, and even though the split with her husband had been long and torturous, she understood precisely what he was going through. She felt sorry for him. She felt that he had been wronged. She too was lonely. So on the recommendation of her friend, she wrote a Facebook message to the writer with the sad story. I am a friend of a friend \u2026 and we&amp;#039;re on Facebook together. But today, you disappeared from Facebook. And in light of the fact that you have been going through a lot lately (I had my own divorce 3 yrs ago, so I know how hard it can be), well, I got worried. Are you ok? That was on March 23, 2013. He was slow to answer her, but once he did, they fell into a quick and easy rapport. And in the way of social media, unencumbered by everything real, the notes quickly went from flirtatious to intensely sexual. Within a couple weeks, they were masturbating together on the phone. A week after that, she was sending him naked pictures, and a few days after that, videos. The connection was intoxicating, and the relationship began to take up more and more of her time. He impressed her with his writing and charmed her with unfamiliar poetry. Here&amp;#039;s Fitzgerald&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Thousand-and-First Ship,&amp;quot; he wrote in an e-mail. The fourth stanza made me think of us. As only total strangers can really do, they had begun to talk about a future together in which they would be for each other what their terrible exes had not been. By the third week, they had planned a meeting. May 3 was the date. She bought a ticket and would fly to him to spend a few days. He had by now incorporated her into his inner circle, blind-copying her on all of his pitches to magazines and other business correspondence, as he did a couple of his closest friends. A small press was publishing a collection of his stories, and he wanted her to know intimately what his life\u2014the life of a genius struggling for proper recognition\u2014was like. She was honored and thrilled and touched by his consideration, and it made her want him all the more. She was coming to think of him as he thought of himself\u2014as singular and extraordinary: People sometimes ask me if I am super proud of the work I create, he wrote to her, and the things I achieve, and the answer is always no, because I am not where I need to be. I am here for one thing: to change the world to the good more than it has ever been changed, as the greatest of all artists. And until that happens, I am not proud of anything. She didn&amp;#039;t care that she was successful and he wasn&amp;#039;t, or that she drove a new BMW and he walked everywhere, or that she was paying her way out to see him and would pay for the hotel room, too. She had never cared about any of that. The way a man talks and thinks was much more interesting to her. It also didn&amp;#039;t matter to her\u2014or maybe she was just slow to notice\u2014that he would copy her on notes to his ex-wife and to his ex-wife&amp;#039;s parents, in which he called his ex-wife &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; and vowed to avenge himself. Or that he would write her detailed instructions on his tastes in videos and coach her on his requirements for the videos that he wanted her to make, sending her long lists of porn clips to guide her: I like to cum when she does. That&amp;#039;s a thing of mine\u2026 . Wrap your arms under your legs, so that they&amp;#039;re pulled back, feet facing the camera, holes wide open. Or, to reflect his growing sense of persecution at the hands of indifferent editors and others, that he had taken to signing some of his correspondence &amp;quot;NJ,&amp;quot; for New Job, after the book of the Bible. Self-effacing, she thought. Funny. And his kind of kink was new to her, and she didn&amp;#039;t mind a man asking for what he wanted. It was kind of exciting. And as for his obvious enmity for his ex-wife, well, she had dumped him unceremoniously\u2014who leaves like that, without a word? She knew him to be kind and attentive, and anger seemed justified. ***   April 2013 Our first kiss will be\u2014I mean this\u2014the best moment of my life, he wrote. For me. I&amp;#039;m not talking about art or any of that\u2014although in a way I am\u2014but for me personally, that will be the moment. I&amp;#039;ll be in a catcher&amp;#039;s crouch (look it up, if need be) to kiss you that first time. The real &amp;quot;cum at the same time&amp;quot; orgasm between us\u2014or the first one, anyway\u2014will be that first kiss. Look, I sound like a div, I know that, but it will be like a simultaneous orgasm of two people at the level of who they are. Yes, I know that sounds like late night Lifetime movie fare. Got it. I&amp;#039;m hugging you so hard\u2014I won&amp;#039;t hurt you\u2014after that first kiss. His note affected her powerfully, and she wrote back to tell him so. Remember the first time we kissed? And I had to stand up on my tiptoes so your lips could reach mine? Don&amp;#039;t remember that? You will. But he&amp;#039;d also begun to say some strange things, things that she wouldn&amp;#039;t normally tolerate, and she started seeing flashes of inexplicable anger that bothered her. &amp;quot;You need to go on the pill before you come out here,&amp;quot; she says he told her on the phone. &amp;quot;Because I will not wear a condom, and I hate children, and I do not want you to mistakenly get pregnant.&amp;quot; The message, and especially the tone, startled her. And if she had been who she normally was, if she had been the person she had always seen herself as, the harshness of that demand right there would have been enough to break the spell. &amp;quot;It should have been enough,&amp;quot; she says today. &amp;quot;It was initially enough for me to say, &amp;#039;You know what? This doesn&amp;#039;t sound right to me. I&amp;#039;m not going on the pill, first of all, so that&amp;#039;s point A. And point B, I don&amp;#039;t at all like the way you said any of that stuff.&amp;#039; And I said, &amp;#039;You know what? No. I&amp;#039;m not coming out.&amp;#039; And I followed it up with an e-mail. &amp;#039;I know I already bought my plane ticket, but this is not right.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; He became very angry, unleashing a broadside that seemed to have little to do with any disagreement over birth control. April 21, 2013, 3:16 A.M.: My disappointment in you is almost overwhelming in its totality, incidentally\u2026 . You were so determined to cost yourself what you wanted and needed. I saw someone with a life filled with froo froo rubbish, who became alive in a new way when she got what she deserved\u2014I saw genuine happiness\u2014and then a need to destroy it. Respect is a term that gets bandied about willy-nilly, but I think of how hard it became to respect you. And how I hated that. She had not seen this side of him before in their monthlong acquaintance. Or maybe she just hadn&amp;#039;t allowed herself to see it. Then he sent another. April 21, 2013, 6:03 A.M.: Your pretentious remarks were not common, and it was jarring when you aired them, because it showed a person who was something who was trying to force herself to be something else\u2014you have these really twisted &amp;quot;gold standards&amp;quot; in your mind that were probably put there by the scholarly expectations put on you by your parents; expectations that in turn created your ego when the superlatives came back to you. The ego then became the life, and it stopped you from having to live one, at any age\u2026 . The irony is that for all of the gold standard student stuff, you don&amp;#039;t really know anything, do you? About life or art. It was all another house of cards. I have no ego. I am pure cognition and feeling. Purely alive. And look at the difference in where we&amp;#039;re at. You should have profited from me in this area. But when you tried to be less of a human, and trotted out one of your pretentious, hollow remarks, to someone who could pull rank on you intellectually every which way\u2014while, literally, asleep, too\u2014but never felt a need to do so\u2014I felt very bad for you, even as you were being an asshole. He signed off for the day, writing that his plan for the evening was to masturbate to one of her videos, then make some dip. Not a euphemism, he wrote. Actual dip. She was confused by this sudden hostility and was convinced she had to pull out of the trip. It didn&amp;#039;t matter that she had already paid for everything\u2014it was best not to run heedlessly toward a disaster. Yes, she liked him, and often after an outburst he would suddenly be prostrate with apology, and her impulse was to forgive him, but this time her instincts told her that she couldn&amp;#039;t go through with it. He was so willful, he simply refused to accept that she had changed her mind. His notes were coming in a rush\u2014she would wake up to a dozen or more e-mails, which would alternate from aggressive and self-aggrandizing to abjectly apologetic, often from one to the next. A friend of hers helped her come up with a ruse to gracefully end it. She was a wreck, she wrote him, more trouble than he or anyone should take on, and her mother had read his e-mails and become concerned. She was having computer trouble, she told him, and would be offline for a while. Please don&amp;#039;t bother trying to reach her. She tried to sign off: April 22, 2013: I just want you over there creating art and not hassling with me! You are meant to be writing for the world not talking me down off a ledge. To which he immediately answered: No offense\u2014and take this in a positive spirit\u2014but you&amp;#039;re being a fucking dumb ass (smile). You don&amp;#039;t get what you are, what you are to me. Why could you not be what you actually are to me, and thus a priority, and one of the utmost importance? Who reads these things, she says now, and decides to still go visit this man? But it was also about this time that the brother of a dear friend of hers from high school was hospitalized with a brain tumor. Because her friend lived hours away, she took to going to the hospital to visit him every day. And the experience made her more sensitive to the pain in people&amp;#039;s lives and how they react to suffering. She thought she was perhaps being too judgmental. She had been trying to build a wall to protect herself from this stranger, and this man in the hospital bed had her tearing it down. &amp;quot;I thought on reflection that maybe I was being unfair, that maybe I should just give this a chance,&amp;quot; she says now. &amp;quot;It was just a few days, what harm could come of it?&amp;quot; As her friend&amp;#039;s brother recovered from brain surgery, she told him of her dilemma and asked his advice. &amp;quot;Oh, when a ticket is purchased, you must go,&amp;quot; she says he replied. &amp;quot;He wasn&amp;#039;t the only person that told me to go, but I just remember him saying, &amp;#039;Look, you bought the ticket, get on the plane! You&amp;#039;re gonna regret more what you don&amp;#039;t do than what you do do.&amp;#039; People say that alot.&amp;quot; She had a talk with herself. Maybe you&amp;#039;re just freaking out, she told herself. You haven&amp;#039;t been with a man in so long, and you&amp;#039;re just misreading the signs. And so she went. ***   May 2013 He met her at the airport with sunflowers, which she liked very much. He was relieved that she was pleased, he said to her later, because when he had told his mom he was taking sunflowers, she had said, &amp;quot;Well, why are you doing that?&amp;quot; He seemed really hurt that his mother had not been more supportive. But when she saw him standing there with the sunflowers, she thought, Oh, he has a nice face. She was relieved. He refused to take her to his apartment, on account of its squalor, he said. Besides, she had a nice room, let&amp;#039;s enjoy that. And he had no money to take her out to dinner, so almost all of their meals consisted of standing and eating slices of pizza. But she didn&amp;#039;t mind all of that. If she was in love, ramen in a cold-water flat would do perfectly fine. But she was no longer sure she was actually in love. He had told her that his city was to him as Dublin was to James Joyce. He could not thrive anywhere else, he told her, and his art and his destiny meant that she would need to relocate, because she, too, was his destiny. This was just a fact, and he stated it as such, and when she said that she loved her hometown just as much and had worked hard to build her business and could not simply pull up stakes, he was insistent and uncomprehending. She says it was like: Of course you&amp;#039;ll move here. It&amp;#039;s meant to be. It was a declaration. And his friends, the ones he would copy on every pitch and every e-mail and whom she&amp;#039;d felt privileged to be a part of, began to weigh in, too. One of them wrote to her that his friend had never been so happy, implying, Of course you&amp;#039;ll move. The chorus was as insistent and uncomprehending as he was. She began to feel ganged-up on. They did a lot of walking and sitting on park benches, taking in the springtime and putting faces and gestures and flesh to all of those words. And they had a lot of sex, as planned, which was not unpleasant. When she had last dated, almost twenty years before, there had been no Internet, no e-mail. It was all so strange. He was a prolific writer, he told her, even more prolific than he had shown her in his great volume of e-mails. He told her he was working on several books, talked about his love of art and his hatred of the publishing business. And she says he talked about his ex-wife and said that he had sent her a million words since they had split up. She says that he told her he had copied his ex-wife&amp;#039;s parents and that not only had he e-mailed all of that, but that he physically printed it all out and addressed it all and mailed it to them every single day for a year. And he said it just like that, easy as you please, in a way that made her uncomfortable. &amp;quot;You know what?&amp;quot; she found herself saying, &amp;quot;Maybe you shouldn&amp;#039;t do that.&amp;quot; They walked around town a lot, to places that were most important to him, to the places he had once lived, to the place he intended for them to live once she relocated. As it happened, one of her best friends in life also lived in his town. They had been close since graduate school, and she was excited to get her opinion of him. And as her friend was a poet, she thought they might also have a lot to talk about. One night the three of them went out to a fancy restaurant. But, as her friend remembers the evening, her attempts at conversation were mostly in vain, and she thought that he was insecure about the fact that she owned a nice home with her husband and dog when he was suffering for his art. The friend says she remembers him making little noises to reflect his disdain. Trying to make conversation, her friend said to him, &amp;quot;I like your accent.&amp;quot; He did not take this well, and leveled her with his gaze. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have an accent. None,&amp;quot; he told her, as both women recall. He insisted his voice was completely neutral, and then he proceeded to criticize her for publishing in literary journals and praising an acquaintance who was getting an MFA. Her friend made light of it and tried to change the subject, but he wouldn&amp;#039;t stand down. &amp;quot;MFA program! That&amp;#039;s disgusting! You&amp;#039;re so pretentious!&amp;quot; he told her. And with that, he folded his arms and turned to the bar area, where there was a game on TV. She and her friend tried their best to carry on as if nothing had happened. But she felt sick. The next morning, he apologized, she says, and her friend wrote to nicely say that we are all entitled to a bad day and not to make too much of it. But later that day, he told her that her pubic hair disgusted him, and that they would have to get a razor and take that off. He called her Chewbacca. When the weekend was over, he stood with her at the airport and said, &amp;quot;Something tells me we&amp;#039;ll never see each other again.&amp;quot; She had never been so relieved to be on an airplane before. She got home to an e-mail queue full of messages. Only masturbate the way I showed you. Work on that. Think of it like practice. You&amp;#039;ll get better at it, and that will make our sex life even better. *** She cared for him, this complicated, talented, unpleasant man. But the trip had been a mistake, a real ordeal. Good thing that just a couple of days later she was heading off to Europe with a friend, on a long-planned vacation. Just get it out of your mind, she told herself. Take a break from it. But his messages continued, frequent and urgent, increasingly panicked, all saying versions of the same thing: They must be together, why wasn&amp;#039;t she answering, how could she do this to him? His messages seemed to follow every step she took in Rome, and then on to Venice\u2014ruined Italy for her, she says, was she even in Italy? And by the time she got to Paris, she felt as if she&amp;#039;d been in a fog. She wrote to him to stop. Enough, she said, they would talk when she got back. But he didn&amp;#039;t stop, and his notes got increasingly angry. He said all his friends thought she was a bitch. May 13, 2013, 5:26 P.M.: I loved you so much, in every way you wanted, and more. You had it all here. Everything you could ever want. And more. And you had to invent shit. For the first time you had someone in your life who helped you, who did not enable you. Who really cared\u2026 I feel bad for you\u2026 . This is all on you. No one else. But you know that. Or you will. And that sucks. May 14, 2013, 6:16 A.M.: Why must you do these things? Why? \u2026 Why not just be happy with the guy you love who loves you. And work on shit with him. Have I ever steered you wrong? When have I been wrong? Why would you expect me to be wrong? How simple is that? Fucking bitches.  May 14, 2013, 3:27 P.M.: I am so angry with you. I must feel hot to the touch with anger. I also feel so sad for you. So sad for you. This is going to suck, and soon. The friend she was traveling with read some of the messages and told her the guy was out of his mind. &amp;quot;This is not okay,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;This is not something you work on.&amp;quot; By London, she had stopped reading any of his e-mails. She got back home in late May, to a hundred messages of pleading giving way to abuse. She had a lot of work to catch up on\u2014her busy season was coming up\u2014and she had to figure out how to get out of this relationship. For a few days, she corresponded with him, trying to keep it cordial and light. He rated his five favorite whiskeys\u2014You&amp;#039;d like the Lagavulin 16 for starters. She told him that she hadn&amp;#039;t realized the differences between publishing houses before: I never knew there were good and loser places to publish til you. And his self-regard remained extraordinary. &amp;quot;A Day in the Life&amp;quot; is the Beatles&amp;#039; greatest accomplishment, a landmark\u2014that is too limiting\u2014work of art\u2026 . It is the greatest piece of writing I know by someone who is not me. But tension was quickly building. May 26, 2013, 7:14 A.M.: \u2026 .you will not be able to get these truths out of your system. Nor me, nor my art. That total takedown is coming. The hell\u2014and the cognizance of hell\u2014is coming. She didn&amp;#039;t know what that meant exactly, but she didn&amp;#039;t like it. And she was tired of his insults and his taunting. She decided that the only thing to do was to taunt him back, to make him not like her: I&amp;#039;m going to stick my fingers up my pussy and taste myself for you now. I just talked about my pussy to the greatest artist ever, better than the Beatles. God, you&amp;#039;re that good aren&amp;#039;t you? Singular. Wettest pussy ever. She acceded to all the names he had called her, and added more, telling him she was the worst cunty cunt ever, and a head case, saying, I&amp;#039;m glad you won&amp;#039;t let me get to you\u2014I&amp;#039;m awful. And she told him resolutely that she would never move anywhere. But that only made him more insistent, and voluble. She&amp;#039;s mentally ill, he wrote to his friends. This was exhausting, but his anger seemed bottomless. She just wanted it to stop, but nothing was working. It was becoming clear that there would be no cordial end to this. So she told him the one thing that she thought would work: She told him she had never bought his book and that she really didn&amp;#039;t like what she&amp;#039;d read of his writing. That worked. May 27, 2013, 2:36 P.M.: Fuck you. That was a sick sick sick evil evil evil thing to do to another person, let alone me, after what I had been through. Fuck you. I hope you suffer. I hope you fucking suffer so much. I wish I never fucking met you. You are an evil person. And he told her to never contact him or speak to him again. And that he would reciprocate the silence. I hope she fucking kills herself, he wrote to his friends. May 27, 2013, 2:56 P.M.: You are a bad fucking person. No wonder you don&amp;#039;t have a single person who truly cares about you. And no wonder you have to make sure no one really knows you. Because if they did, they&amp;#039;d hate you, and you couldn&amp;#039;t even have your pretend relationships. What a sham of a fucking existence you&amp;#039;ve lived. I have no doubt that your husband was a good man. He was just married to a crazy fucking evil bitch. That was it, wasn&amp;#039;t it? And no wonder your dad left you two fucking nutters\u2026 . I&amp;#039;m never going to let you enter my thoughts again, not once. But you are an evil fucking worthless person. She replied, I will not contact you again I promise. And she never did. *** June 2013 But his notes didn&amp;#039;t stop. Instead, he wrote to her in a frenzy, dozens of notes, each increasingly vicious. June 3, 2013, 1:17 P.M.: I am so glad we do not know each other any longer\u2014and we never will again\u2014but I&amp;#039;m up for videos. I would never wish to know you beyond that. But I was organizing my desktop last night, and I revisited your photos and videos, which are hot, even if I think you are a terrible person. And a crazy one. But more terrible than crazy. Although the crazy is significant. You also have no soul. Nothing that is clearly not a video will be opened from you, now or ever. It was so evil what you did to me. I know you lied about everything, too. You are not human. You are also the most fraudulent, inconsequential entity I have ever known. You didn&amp;#039;t care for my work. You are this rich bitch, without a single ounce of knowledge in your head, who couldn&amp;#039;t even shell out twelve dollars for a book, but who got off on the idea of having a real artist for a boyfriend. That is what a creature like you cares about\u2026 . If you choose not to send any videos, know that I hate you, and always will. You are a foul, foul creature. Just so evil. Who does that to someone? You are a big reason why there is hell\u2026 . You should give serious thought to offing yourself. He began to call her, from various numbers\u2014random numbers\u2014and as the calls persisted, she blocked each number in turn, seven numbers altogether before the calls stopped. His friends called her as well, and she blocked them, too. She couldn&amp;#039;t change her e-mail address because she also used it for her business. She blocked him, but he simply created new randomized e-mail accounts and adopted several aliases to get around that. As the heaviness of her silence set in, his response became even more agitated. He had given her a sketch\u2014a doodle he&amp;#039;d drawn of an idea for the cover art of one of the books he was working on\u2014and he became insistent that she return it to him. He became enraged. Greedy fucking bitch. With that sketch as some kind of trophy. How the fuck do you live with yourself? He told her she kept the drawing only because she knew it would be worth a lot of money someday. Fuck you. Enjoy hell. Sitting at her keyboard in her bedroom, motionless lest he see her somehow, careful not to touch the computer lest she accidentally push a button and respond\u2014she didn&amp;#039;t want to acknowledge receipt of any of these e-mails, show any sign of life at all\u2014she knew that he wasn&amp;#039;t going away, this wouldn&amp;#039;t be going away. She pored over his Facebook page, looking for clues to his behavior, and came upon an old cache of pictures of his ex-wife, taken in what he called his favorite places\u2014here at the spot on the seashore, there in the town square. She brought her hands to her face, she recalls. These pictures, these moments\u2014he had posed her in precisely the same settings. She had stood on those same rocks on the seashore. In that same spot in the town square. For the first time, she was scared. *** His e-mails continued for the rest of the year, and the year after that. They continue now. Though he was at first maniacal at her silence, he adapted to it, extemporizing at will. August 22, 2013, 4:41 A.M.: I wonder if some day you&amp;#039;ll realize what you destroyed. Maybe, maybe not. You won&amp;#039;t even see this, of course, because you lack for character, to put it mildly. The relentlessness of his assault, by now numbering several hundred e-mails, has reshaped her life, requiring her to devise strategies to protect herself. He seems like an invasive species, constantly propagating, steadily taking over. Every contact, regardless of the text, feels threatening. Even as she successfully conducts her business and tries to carry on socially, she says, she lives in fear. October 29, 2013, 4:00 P.M.: Remember how much I came in your vagina and asshole? How it leaked out of you? You are a bad person. You have no morals. Having long been independent, having built a significant business, she isn&amp;#039;t easily frightened, but he has broken her. She feels isolated, and the isolation has made her mistrustful, paranoid. He knows where she works. Whereas before only his violent words upset her, now a simple hello jolts her, unnerves her. He is still there. He will always be there. I just came five straight times to you. Is it possible he would ever show up here? Should she tell anyone? Should she call the police? You&amp;#039;re not going to get away with it, you know. Treating me like you did. I am going to expose you to the world. The day is coming. She doesn&amp;#039;t talk about it out of fear of making it worse and provoking him. And so this is a hidden conversation, if one-sided, sickly intimate, as he whispers fear into her ear. On September 7, 2014, she received this Facebook message: We have been enjoying your videos. Early in 2014, he wrote her one of his withering attacks, and he ended it with: I see you&amp;#039;re going to New Jersey. Button up. She hadn&amp;#039;t told anyone about that trip, especially not him. She had made herself invisible to him on Facebook, which had further enraged him. It was after that note that she began to wedge the chair against her door. That spring, he wrote to her, saying that Esquire had assigned him to write about her, had become an ally in his assault on her, and there was nothing she could do about it. After days of indecision and terrified of exposure, she made a blind call to the magazine saying she understood she was to be included in an article and asked, if that was true, that she not be named. She explained that she hadn&amp;#039;t done anything wrong, other than get involved with the wrong guy. And that she had been harassed and menaced by him in this way for almost a year by then. (He had been assigned by Esquire&amp;#039;s Web site, Esquire.com, to write an essay on another subject.) There are laws against what he is doing to her\u2014&amp;quot;cyberstalking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cyberharassment&amp;quot; statutes\u2014in all fifty states and under the federal Violence Against Women Act as well, punishable by time in prison. These are relatively new crimes, and there are few reliable statistics on how many people are victimized in this way, but according to a recent study by the Department of Justice, more than five million people, mostly women, are stalked every year, and a pattern of intimidating messages is the most common form of stalking that victims experience. She had declined to go to the police, she says, because she wasn&amp;#039;t sure how they would respond and she was afraid of how he would react. A sergeant who works on cybercrimes for the police department in her city, told of the number and kinds of persistent e-mails he was sending her, says he could help, but that a lot of women keep silent for the same reason. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very frustrating, because these are grossly underreported crimes,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;People like the woman you describe don&amp;#039;t report because they are scared, but the laws exist to help them. Not reporting these crimes makes their assailants bolder, and makes them more likely to continue, or to go on and do it to someone else.&amp;quot; She says she decided to talk to Esquire for that very reason, to bring attention to this kind of abuse. She is still weighing whether to get the police involved. February 6, 2015, 12:06 A.M.: I&amp;#039;m coming to [your city]. Sitting in her bedroom, she is jolted. She now monitors social media regularly to see if he talks about his travel plans. If he comes, she intends to close her business for a week and leave town. His note particularly startled her because it came after an unprecedented three-week pause in his e-mails, during which she discovered that he had a new girlfriend. She was filled with both guilt and indescribable relief. Guilt for having not acted to stop him, and relief for the silence. The new girlfriend, she learned, is still in college, just over half his age. They were full of Facebook love for each other, and she recognized each word that he wrote about the young woman, as each word had been written to her before. And there was the girlfriend, looking fresh and innocent at the seashore. She worries about what lies ahead for that young woman. But not just for her. Tomorrow morning, as on most mornings, she will lie in bed for a while after waking up, and then, hesitating a bit, she&amp;#039;ll reach for her phone to check her messages. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a33750/stalked-modern-horror-story/>