S19 E14: [Lenora Claire] I Caught My Own Stalker (finale)
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I'm so incredibly thankful to be closing out our season, especially where we're focused on stalking with you because you are such a legend in this space.

Jake Deptula, who I kicked off the season with, raves about you. Luckily, we've gotten to meet once in person very briefly. You've been on What Came Next. We're so incredibly thankful for all of your time that you've given and that you give to the community. I'm honored to have you not only on the show, but during a season where we're talking about something where you are such an expert in the field.

If you don't mind just introducing yourself a little bit and who you were pre-stalking. Thank you for having me. It's so nice to do anything that's survivor-led, that is such a rare and special opportunity. So thank you again. For people who don't know me, my name is Lenora Clare. And I love that you asked me who I was before I became a survivor because it's now so meshed with my identity, which is kind of a weird thing when the worst thing that happened to you is the first Google-able thing as if all my other accomplishments weren't there.

The person that I was prior to being a survivor, I've always been a lot. I'll just say that. I've always been a lot. I was a very precocious child, a bit of a Wednesday Addams. I was very fortunate to grow up in a really progressive household. My father, in the 70s, he helped pioneer gender affirmation surgeries.

My dad was originally a urologist. He had a very rare disease and we always knew that he would die young. And then later on, because of his health issues, he became a psychiatrist, which is a very strange pivot. But that's what he did because no matter how sick he was, he could do that. I was raised in a home that was very loving and very supportive. I

I was in a highly gifted magnet growing up, so it was really nice because not only was it a bunch of really wonderful, creative, smart kids, but I was really insulated from bullying because I didn't even know how weird I was. The only negative side too was that I really had a hard time once I realized that the world isn't always so kind and loving because I was raised to think that it would be. So when I abruptly found out that was not so, it was really, really hard.

When you raise children to just feel loved and supportive with however they show up, you really are capable of anything. Like I was never made to feel that I had any limitations. I graduated high school when I was 15 and a half, which is early. That was in part with the fact that my father, he had a lot of health issues. It was this need to expedite things because he could pass at any time. So I was always rushing through so that I could do the things so he could be present.

When I was young, I was one of the first hot topic models, which is a funny, weird thing. In some universe, maybe you would have walked into the hot topic and it would have been me modeling pleather prom dresses. That was really fun at the time. And the reason I bring that up is that I was one of the first alt goth girls with a website in like 1998. Having a social media presence really early on in the early days before I understood how wonderful and simultaneously dangerous that could be.

That's how my now ex, a rock star who shall be nameless, discovered me and brought me out to London. So I had some fun times there. I came back to LA after that wild experience, deciding that...

I really wanted to have a career in the creative field. I started throwing parties in Los Angeles that became really popular and doing art shows. My first grown-up job, I was a writer at a magazine, it's now gone, called Frontiers, which was LA's oldest and biggest queer publication. So it was really great to be there. I was really young and interviewing people I later became friends with like Paul Rubens and Cassandra Peterson, Elvira. It was such a great time to be able to be paid to be a writer in print.

In the early 2000s, I was a full-time writer and it was amazing. And so many great experiences that came from that and really understanding journalism and storytelling to make a living doing something you love is really special. In 2007, I bought this nude oil portrait of Bea Arthur that I thought was really fabulous. It inspired me. I curated an art show called Golden Girls Gone Wild, which was erotic depictions of the Golden Girls. It was one of the first stories on TMZ and it went super viral.

We had 2,000 people at the opening. Other people said it about me, so I'm quoting them, not me. They would say things like, I was the it girl of Los Angeles. I would throw these huge parties. I'd have my birthday party at the Houdini Mansion. And I was posing for a lot of famous artists, like my friend Olivia, who was the official artist of Playboy magazine for 30 years. I was co-hosting a club called Mr. Black, which is where a lot of the early people from Drag Race would go. I was the face of a Vanity Fair ad campaign.

2008 or so, my friend Marla Rutherford photographed me for an ad campaign. If you remember the NBC USA characters welcome, it was like me, Iggy Pop, all these people. And I was on billboards in Times Square. I was on every stop of the subway. If you went to the 30 Rock, the Rockefeller Center famous building, there was my giant portrait in the window. I had a lot of amazing things like that happening and it happened really organically. I was that person where you're like, how is she always on the red carpet? Like, who is this girl?

When I try to explain how much fun my life was before all this happened to me and really, frankly, how much I've lost. I mean, I'm proud of the work that I've been doing, but my entire identity, who I was, is completely wiped away. His birth name was Justin Masler. He legally had a change to Cloud Star Chaser. So he goes back and forth. My origin story in regards to my stalker was back in 2011, the LA Weekly. They used to do this People of the Year issue. And it was super cool. I was named one of the People of the Year.

I'm from LA. This is my hometown. So it was a real honor. It's really hard to make a living in art. So to be able to say that I was running a gallery and able to support myself, it was a big accomplishment. I was really proud of it. And they did this really cool cover story where I have this capuchin monkey friend that I've known for 20 years who was in my wedding and one of my bridesmaids. But there was a really fun portrait of me holding the monkey in my lap. So very noticeable. And if people don't know what I look like, I have really bright red hair and a look about me. So...

My stalker was completely unknown to me. He was living in New York at the time. This is 2011, so a very different time than it is now. I want to preface all this by saying that I'm in no way stigmatizing people with mental health struggles, but it's important to note my stalker is schizoaffective, which is the combination of schizophrenia and bipolar.

Besides being schizoaffective, he has a disorder called erotomania. And erotomania is where they have a false relationship with you that doesn't actually exist. He was not getting treatment and he was stalking multiple people, including Ivanka Trump.

He had exhibited some dangerous behaviors. He had tried to kill himself in her store. He had been arrested multiple times for stalking her and he jumped bail and he came to Los Angeles. He opened up the LA Weekly. He saw me. He became fixated on me and he came to my gallery. He was wearing a space suit, which sounds strange, but when you're coming from working in the arts, you're used to kind of fun, eccentric characters. So that was not a red flag to me because there were tons of people and tons of wacky get-ups.

I was like, okay, whatever. Ziggy Stardust, Spaceman, that's fine. I engaged with him and we had some conversation. He looked at me with sort of alarming intensity. And he said, you look like Jessica Rabbit. And I said, I hear that sometimes. Thank you. And then he's like, and Leeloo from The Fifth Element. And he starts naming all these characters that have bright red hair. I'll never forget it. And that's when my life completely changed course. He looked me in the eye and he said, and I'm going to stalk you. Who says that?

In that moment, all I could think to do was remove him from the gallery and I didn't think much of it. I just sort of brush it off as like a weird experience.

And then a couple of days later, a bunch of friends were sending me blog links about this man who at that point, the Trumps had hired bounty hunters to extradite him back trial in New York. And he went to jail in Rikers Island. While he was there, he started sending me unhinged letters to my gallery. They weren't threatening at first. They just sort of were rambling and all over the place. And I didn't really know what to do about it. And then they very quickly escalated to incredibly graphic images.

violent, sexual assault, kidnap, and homicide fantasies about me. It was so terrifying. All I could think to do in that moment was to close my galleries. Think about what you do for a living, this thing that you work really hard for. I could not have a public-facing job at this point because he knew where I was, and I was just in such fear. That was the thing that made sense to me. How old were you around the time that the stalking started, if you don't mind sharing? I was 30. Okay.

I went to police seeking help and I brought this stack of really intense, very heavy threats. And they looked me in the eye and they told me to dye my hair and get off the internet.

I kept saying, this is a well-documented person with a long history and I have these threats. I go as far as to say that they victim blamed and shame me. That was the Northeast Division of LAPD. Part of the difficulty is that law enforcement, for the most part, they're not given adequate risk assessment training. So they don't even have the knowledge to know when something is just harassment or when you're under real threat. So they just brushed me off. At that point, I started realizing I

I wasn't going to get any help. I lost my livelihood. I didn't know what I was going to do. This was a very stressful, awful time. I wasn't married yet. I lived alone in like a really small apartment because LA is expensive.

What was especially scary for me was that my stalker fantasized about gassing me through my door with Zyklon B, which was used to kill my relatives in the Holocaust, and then rape me and kill me, right? So very intense stuff. The lack of sleep, the insomnia, that's where all those issues started kicking in. I would used to put towels under my doors.

I didn't even know what to do. I wasn't getting help. Under any normal circumstance, my dad, who was my best friend, I would have definitely talked to him about this. But my father was dying at this point. This was like a year before he died. It was really, really heavy because the person I wanted to go to, I didn't want his last thoughts to be about me in this condition. I was really holding it all inside while going to visit him in the hospital.

When we talk about victim impact with all crimes, but stalking really infiltrates all areas of your life. That was really, really, really heavy at that time.

He was sending me these death threats and these rape threats. And I really didn't have anyone to speak to because stalking is such an isolating crime. It's the kind of thing where even when you're sharing it with people who are your loved ones, who are well-intentioned, a lot of times they don't know how to help you. They're uncomfortable with it. It's too scary. Or they maybe give advice, which is well-intentioned, but not great advice. Like everybody was saying to me, just block him, just block him. Because when he got out of jail, he had online access and was then sending me all the threats.

When you're truly being stalked and not just harassed, you don't have the luxury of blocking them because that's evidence.

You need to collect all that evidence, not to mention do the risk assessment and know what the threats are. Everyone said, you have enough threats, you can get a restraining order. The difficulty I had at that point was because he moved all over the country was the serving of the restraining order. Just because you can get a restraining order granted, if they evade, you have no way to get it to them. And restraining orders don't go into effect until they're served. Because my stalker, he came from a wealthy family and he would bounce around the country. You kind of have to become your own detective when law enforcement isn't helping you. The

On the timeline, we'll say this is around 2013. I had to learn how to track his IP so that I would know what location he was at, so I would know what level of risk I'm under. If he's in California, I'm in heavy risk. If he's somewhere else, I'm okay for the day. That's when I started to learn how to advocate for myself and do that sort of work.

I would get increasingly frustrated with the lack of resources and the lack of help. And especially at that time, if your stocking didn't fall under domestic violence, you're in this weird gray area. There were no resources. I mean, still, there's still woefully few resources for people. And even when your stocking does fall under DV, the nonprofits, they're so overextended. There isn't enough help to go around for really critical situations. So I just started going, okay, this is crazy. I had lost my gallery.

Everything I did in nightlife, like all the cool clubs I was running, I didn't do that anymore. So my income was just gone. Now that it's been almost two years, throughout law enforcement is saying we can't do anything about this and you're just continuing to document essentially? Exactly.

I'm trying to learn risk minimization techniques for myself. What can I do? And going, okay, I don't post where I am when I'm there and the hypervigilance. And that's what a lot of the health issues that I have now started to because the toll that it takes on your body is just so intense. So giant impact on your physical, mental health, your ability to earn a living, your identity, your freedom. Yes. Dating and relationships. I mean, just awful, awful.

All areas of my life were impacted. So it was then I started working in reality TV and I became a casting producer on a lot of people's favorite reality shows. I've reinvented myself in my early 30s. I start working at a really top casting firm. I love everybody that I'm working with. Things are going great.

And then my stalker starts sending death threats to my boss. I have a pretty high tolerance for when you do stuff to me, but when you start to do stuff to people that I care about, that's on a whole other level. My boss, who's a very close friend, this person who saved me from my situation and is mentoring me and giving me a whole new craft is now getting death threats.

So I take his death threats to the police and I'm like, it's not just me. I thought maybe it's happening to a man. I still got absolutely nothing from LAPD. So that's when I was just like, I work in TV now. I'm media trained with stalking. A lot of times, almost 50% is domestic violence overlap.

A lot of times survivors, they don't have the capacity to come forward in this particular way. Or, you know, there's children involved. It's a lot more complicated for them. Or they're just anxious around media. And I'm like, I was made for this. I've been on TV since I was five. I got this. So in 2015, that's when I decided to go public, which also the important thing to note was this was before Me Too. I bring that up because...

It's already hard enough in the current climate to be a public survivor. But back then it was even worse. I did a show called Crime Watch Daily, which is the first time I told my story in public. And I did that not because I was attention seeking. I'd been on TV a million times. I did not need this. I did it because I needed help. I didn't want to die. I didn't want this person to take my life. My dad was dead and I didn't have anybody protecting me. And I was just like, you know what? At this point, I have nothing to lose. I'm just going to be really loud with it.

Jezebel did one of the early articles on me because I was like, I'll go to feminist media. They'll be supportive. And they were great. Now I'm being more public with this. That was a wild experience. Here I am, this woman who's getting awful threats of which I can back up with insane amounts of evidence. And as soon as I did that, my Twitter was blowing up with people shaming me because of how I look, acting like I'm attention seeking, dress how you want to be addressed, a lot of weird internalized misogyny, the public not understanding

believing me. That was a whole other experience. Right around that time in 2015 is when I got my first temporary restraining order served. And the way that it was served was

was that my stalker who stalks many people besides me, I want to protect her identity, but there was another woman that he was stalking and he went to that person's workplace and told the front desk that he was there to rape her. The police were called and the police detained him. They didn't arrest him. They detained him and they saw my pending restraining order and they served him and then let him go.

That's when the more activism side of stuff started kicking in. I'm friends with Polly Perrette, an actress people might remember from NCIS. She has a stalker. She's been kind of private about her situation. She created this support group of other people who are being stalked in LA, just a sort of friend circle. So for the first time, I had people who we could talk to.

She was friends with Congressman Adam Schiff, who at that point was just my local congressman. He wasn't House of Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff. She brought me over to him. And then I started working with him, which was amazing because very rapidly, he took me in to meet with the chief of police, the then district attorney, and got all that stuff going.

And then as I was doing more articles, people started coming to me for help because I would talk about risk minimization and the tracking and all that stuff. And I started realizing, oh my God, this is how bad it is that nobody is getting help. And they're just writing to me, this random person. To date, I've done over a hundred restraining orders for people. I was doing that for people. And I do court support as well because it's something people don't realize is that the way restraining order court works is that there's two sessions, a morning session and a night session, and they book you at the same time. So they overlap and you're there for hours.

And you're there with your stalker, your abuser in the hallway for hours. When you go to like Olive Garden or something for your table, they'll give you one of those little like ding, ding, your table's ready. How hard is it to create a green room where we could put victims in where they can be safe? That's when I started seeing all of the gaps in services and all of the weak spots.

I started doing all this work as I'm struggling with my own situation. Because this is ongoing, right? Can you go into a little bit of detail about was it daily contact? It was almost daily. So because he's schizoaffective, sometimes it would be quiet and other times I get like 100 emails in a day. Sometimes they'd be like hypersexual and other times they'd just be nonsensical.

My stalker at different times will think that we're married. He just gets these ideas that are not true. He would see something on my social media that was really innocuous. I'd be at a party and then he would send me an email that says, "You're not using your superpowers correctly. I need to kidnap you so that we can fight ISIS together and I can harness your powers." Every little thing about my life was hyper scrutinized and ultimately like a threat. Any sort of normalcy was constantly being taken from me. And I kept trying because that's all you can do is just go, "I'm going to try and do my best here."

I'm getting nearly daily threats. There's rarely a day that I didn't hear from him. He became really fixated on my dog. And at one point, he tried to kidnap my dog from the dog groomer. That was really difficult. He never figured out where I lived, which was great because I did everything to hide my address.

Your listeners, if they don't know how to wipe their home address from the internet, I could send you a link that they can follow or their services like delete me. We'll get all the links for y'all. Yeah, people don't realize that for a whole dollar. I can find out where you live, what your car is. It's insane the amount of information that's out there that's being aggregated.

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In 2016, he assaulted somebody on the Harvard campus. He was very fixated with the school of divinity because he thought he was Jesus at that point. It's my understanding that he actually got up in the lecture hall and started to give like a fake lecture. And then the security chased him around and he decked a security guard. I was at work. I was casting MTV True Life at that point. And I remember having to step out and be like, oh, excuse me. And then having to deal with Harvard police who they were really cool. My stalker stalked a lot of people. It's a very prolific stalker.

In 2016, we started filming, I'm not going to say the name of the show for a bunch of reasons, but one of the biggest true crime shows. I decided to go public with my story again because I was just in such a bad way. We start filming what would become a two-hour special. The last hour is almost exclusively my story. As a producer myself, which I am, I produce a lot of TV, I understand why

why on some level the producers made this decision. A lot of these true crime shows, they're used to covering homicide stories. They're not used to covering living survivors. They're also not used to doing unadjudicated cases. The exciting producerial choice for them, they decided to do without asking me. They took away my consent. They interviewed my stalker.

They just did it. That footage, it is terrifying. And in that footage, you see all the things. He's screaming. He's threatening to kill me. He's going off like it is terrifying. So on one hand, I'm grateful to have this footage because the 17 million people who watched that show, nobody doubted my story anymore. I'm like, is that what it takes? Do you need to be on like one of the biggest shows showing the footage for people to believe you?

So that happened. I was emailed by my stalker after he did the interview telling me that he did this interview and that we were going to be together forever. So I learned from my stalker. And then I reached out to production. I was like, what the hell have you done? And what they did to sort of remedy it was they brought in a top forensic psychologist who I'm now friends with, who then evaluated it. And then he was able to look at the language my stalker was using and realize that my stalker spoke about me like an object. And it's much easier to do harm to an object than a person.

My case, because of all of that and being on the show, was then elevated at LAPD. They have a unit called the Threat Management Unit, which is the best in the entire country. What's really messed up is that the most elite, educated unit on stalking that's really only for celebrities is

celebrities are people who, for the most part, have the income to hire security and lived in gated communities. And that's who gets the best resources. So my case got elevated there. I had one amazing detective. His name is Cletus Carlton, who in a funny twist is now one of my two partners in my PI company. So very full circle. 2016, Trump wins. I'm devastated, as are all of my friends. My stalker, who wasn't even supposed to be in the state of New York because of his crimes towards Ivanka, was

was caught a block away from Trump Tower. So my stalker went to jail again in New York. And then shortly after he was being transferred to a psych facility, I was thinking like he's going to get some real time. But people need to understand that stalking in most states is a wobbler. And if you don't know what a wobbler is, it's a crime that could be a misdemeanor or a felony. And for the most part,

Most stalking, unfortunately, they only get a misdemeanor, which is another thing. When you're being stalked by somebody across state lines and it's a misdemeanor, they don't extradite on a misdemeanor. So even if you have the restraining order and they're violating the restraining order and they have a misdemeanor warrant, they don't move on it.

And that's when I was walking my then-Minister Pinter Nomi, and I get this call, and I thought that I was being clowned. I thought it was fake. And it said, LAPD and Secret Service are on the phone. And I was like, who the hell? Like, who is this? Like, what? It was, in fact, LAPD and Secret Service informing me that my stalker had escaped from the psych facility that he was in. And because Ivanka is now the first daughter, that it was their duty to let me know that he was out. I remember thinking, they're going to get him. Like, whoo!

Again, he went to jail for a short amount of time and then he was out and then he was very actively stalking me.

He was literally stalking the president's daughter and the laws could not keep him in jail. That just really highlights, if we haven't already hit this home already, how needed legislation is. Right. And we can also get into it's not even just the legislation, because if law enforcement doesn't believe you to begin with, it doesn't matter what the laws are. They're already not enforcing the laws that currently exist.

Then in 2017, Vice did an article on me where they called me the Erin Brockovich of stalking, which went super, super viral. Badass comparison because Erin Brockovich is everything. She's everything. It's a lot to live up to. What's interesting was that I had gone super viral. So I'm doing tons of restraining orders. I'm going to court with people. I'm on the phone all the time because I'm very accessible. People could find my social media. It

explaining things to them, explaining to them what a wobbler is, how a temporary restraining order is longer than what they call a permanent restraining order, but it's not really permanent. Like I'm just walking with people through all the education that I've amassed, how to track the IP, how to look for a GPS when they're in your GPS on your phone. I just amassed all this information. I'm doing all this stuff for other people, but yet I'm very much at risk myself. So I'm like in this weird space.

After he gets out of jail for stalking Ivanka again, now he's very, very hyper fixated on me. My now husband, we just started dating. Very early on, like maybe two weeks into our relationship, he starts sending my husband death threats and my husband's a lawyer and sending the threats to his law office. My stalker at this point is really fixated on kidnapping me. He then comes to L.A.,

with the sole purpose of kidnapping me with the intent to rape me and kill me. He was sending me kidnap threats and he told me where he was going to kidnap me from. If I had just blocked him and brushed him off, then I wouldn't have known that.

My stalker told me he was going to kidnap me from LA Comic Con, which was on the weekend. I'm telling LAPD, even the special unit that has my case, what's happening, this unit, they don't work on the weekends, which is insane. My stalker was also stalking at that point, Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow. I don't know if she still does, but Kim had this amazing security team, like the best of the best.

And so I was in interaction with them. And I thought for sure that Kim Kardashian's security team was going to catch the stalker. That's not what happened. It was me. When my stalker told me he was going to kidnap me from LA Comic-Con, he didn't know that I know the owners. They were wonderful. I want to say those kids were never at risk. They're so amazing at LA Comic-Con. And I work with them and we hired extra security. We dressed them up as Batman and Robin. And when he came to kidnap me, that's who grabbed him and we held them and turned them into LAPD. So I caught my own stalker.

I had to do that. I didn't have a choice. We capture him. He gets arrested. While he's in LAPD holding, Kim Kardashian's people are able to serve him the restraining order. So you're welcome, Kim. And then there was some kind of incident prior. And I always want to be clear about this because I just know what's been reported. There was some incident with him and Gwyneth Paltrow's children at her school. I don't know exactly what happened, but Gwyneth Paltrow also served a restraining order.

Then it took about a year. I did not know that I was eligible for any services. Every state has a victim's compensation fund. I didn't know that in California, I was entitled to $5,000 of therapy with any therapist of my choice because there was only a domestic violence advocate and I didn't fall under that. I just fell under stalking. It

It took a year. I was getting no services. It was super intense, like all the stuff going on. I was working with the deputy district attorney who was really cool. But I always tell this story because there's a lot that goes into this. I'm somebody who's been raped. So as awful as my rape was, I think most people can agree homicide is worse.

My deputy district attorney, when going through the threats, because a lot of the threats mentioned Zyklon B, he said, okay, we're going to keep your rape threats because I believe his penis could be used as a weapon. But Zyklon B, I don't think that's really going to hold up in court. They didn't use any of my death threats. They just let them go. And the reason why I bring this up is very timely because there was a ruling recently with our current Supreme Court, which I find very questionable,

The ruling is called Counterman. And Counterman, he's a stalker out of Colorado. He's a convicted stalker who was stalking a female musician. He was convicted and he thought that that was a violation of his First Amendment rights because he wanted to send her death threats. And the current Supreme Court ruled in his favor. So a lot of people don't know about this ruling. And what's extra scary about that is that it all revolves around intent. It's really dangerous when you have a deluded stalker like mine who their counsel could argue...

They thought that they were married and they didn't mean to scare her. I don't know that I would have gotten the conviction that I got after this ruling. Terrifying. So at that point, my stalker was on a million dollars bail, which was so lucky. This is 2017. You would never get that now. He wasn't able to bail out. He was there for the year. And that's the other thing too. Like when you're going through this court stuff, they kept pushing the date.

It's just a nightmare. You're constantly having to relive it. You're constantly having to do your own discovery. And paperwork and phone calls on top of currently being stalked, having to have a job. You have to survive in life. Real life is just fucking hard enough.

Right. So it was about a year and then we were about to have the trial. I was literally walking up the courthouse steps. I had worked on my victim impact statement. This is a lot of years in the making. I really put a lot into it and I get there and the DDA, I quite like him. So I don't want to sound like I don't like him, but he says, I'm going to do a plea. I go, what do you mean? And he's like, this is the best thing for you. You don't want to go through a trial. And we got felony stalking.

We weren't going to get kidnapped because he didn't forcibly take my body more than 10 feet off the ground. So that was out of play. The criminal threats, they bargained it down to felony stalking. So I got the thing, which is so rare, which is a felony conviction. It has to do with credible threat. I had death threats. I had rape threats. So it would have made him a felon for the first time. So that was a big win. But one thing people have to understand is that California has this proposition called Prop 57. And I very much understand why people voted for it.

Prop 57 is sold as reduced sentencing for nonviolent offenders, which sounds great. But what they don't explain is a list of crimes that are considered nonviolent in the state of California, which includes rape of an unconscious person, forced sodomy, human trafficking, and stalking. All of which I consider to be violent crimes, but they're all deemed nonviolent. So even though I got my stalker on felony stalking max, which should be a four-year sentence, it was immediately turned into two. All that worked for two years.

I decide to just accept the plea because I was really not given much of a choice. He was in jail for two years. Somebody who worked in the jail who's not supposed to tell me this information, but they did because I, you know, my story is so public that people will like find me. They told me that the whole time he was writing letters to me, but he didn't have an address for me. So they didn't actually go out. So that's very telling.

I got married a month before he was released because I wanted to have my wedding day free of all this awful stuff. I was very public with my wedding. I had Morgan McMichaels from Drag Race dressed as Nomi from Showgirls and a capuchin monkey and mermaids at the swimming pool. I had the most fabulous wedding because I really not only just wanted to like savor those moments of freedom because I didn't know what my life would be like afterwards, but I really wanted to show survivors that even after all this shit, you are deserving of healthy love. You can find somebody...

It's very difficult, but it is possible. I'm also a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault at different parts of my life. So I come with a lot of trauma.

I'm not saying that romance is the answer to everything. Like, it's not. It's nice to have people who love you unconditionally, especially after so much trauma. And to your point, it really speaks to the freedom that incarceration of your stalker gives you as a victim. That feeling of the clock is ticking is something I continually hear from stalking victims.

So I got married October of 2019. He got out December of 2019. He's released after serving two years. Within three days, he's making YouTube videos about me. Three days. I've lost track of how many times I've put him back in jail. Unfortunately, every time since it's been a misdemeanor. So it's not very long because he's gotten slicker about how he does it. People constantly say to me, I'm so sorry that happened to you as if it's past tense. And it's not. It's ongoing.

I did have an ankle monitor on him, especially now that we're moving away from incarceration. For a lot of crimes, that's a good thing. But when it's a threat to the community, that is not a good thing. I wrote this op-ed for the LA Weekly, and it's about what it means to be a progressive person who's also a crime survivor. Why does it have to be all or nothing? Why is it black or white? Why is it everybody in jail or nobody in jail? If we're going to move away from incarceration in general with these lighter sentences for some of these crimes, going back to the ankle monitor.

that seemed like a reasonable thing. I was living in a different condo than I'm in now. I'm always in secure places and somebody broke in. So immediately my first thought was, oh my God, it's my stalker, stalker.

I called up LAPD. Here's the thing that they don't tell you when you have an ankle monitor on. Besides the fact, yes, I know they can slide off. What they don't tell you is that nobody at the Department of Corrections is monitoring that thing. Just isn't a thing. They only use that after the fact to prove something. So it took me a really long time to even find out that that wasn't my stalker. For years, I've been advocating saying, listen, we have GPS on our phones. Why can't survivors be given an app?

where let's just say your restraining order is a thousand feet. Why wouldn't it give me advanced warning? Why don't I have an app where I can monitor this myself?

It's common sense. So that's something I've been advocating for for a long time. Another thing that I've been advocating for, if you can send me a death threat over email, why can't I send you a restraining order over email? There's ways to know if the document has been opened. That is not hard. We have precedent for a lot of things like foreclosure notices, and there's other ways that you can electronically process and deliver these documents. We have to do better by people.

A restraining order is just a piece of paper. It may not ultimately do the thing, but it's the best thing that we have towards getting you to where you need to be. The other thing that I always really want to talk about too is that when it comes to stalking, people always go, we need better laws. We do need better laws. That's true. But again, if from the jump, if law enforcement doesn't listen to you and doesn't take you seriously and the judges don't understand the crime...

You're not getting anywhere. It doesn't matter what the laws are because they're not enforcing the laws that we already currently have. So we need a lot of education. We need a lot of prevention. There's actually a million dollar grant that's going through to help this issue. So that money will be allocated to doing all these things. The Office of Violence Against Women is very appropriately named. It's handling all gender-based violence issues. 30 years ago, Biden wrote VAWA and got it passed back when he was a senator.

Almost all the protections that we have as women, they come from this. That's what the office is allocated to look over. That's part of the exciting thing. The group, we just went to D.C., we went to Department of Justice, Office of Violence Against Women in the White House. There's an amazing survivor advocate and activist that I'm friends with named Anna Nasset. Our crimes are actually really, really similar. So we vibe very well.

We were looking at this thing that the Office of Violence Against Women was doing where they would have these listening sessions and they would invite survivors to the White House. They did one for image-based sexual abuse, which is what we call it now. We don't say revenge porn anymore.

They did one of these listening sessions at the White House about a year ago. And I sent it to Ana and I was like, this is so great. We need one for stalking. So the two of us started brainstorming and talking to Spark. And that's exactly what happened this year. Debbie Riddle, who is the founder of Stalking Awareness Month after she lost her sister Peggy 20 years ago. Caitlin Mathis, Ontheat.

Ana Nasset, who I mentioned earlier, Aziza Murphy and myself, along with Spark. We were invited to speak at both Department of Justice. We did like a four-hour session. We did a panel. It was unbelievable. And then the following day, we did the White House. When we were walking up the White House steps, I just felt like we are here. We deserve to be here.

We were heard in such a major way. And I feel that we did a really good job of explaining everything from the domestic violence side of it to the stranger acquaintance side of it, and really expressing to DOJ and White House the impact of this crime, the terror, what it's like. And a couple of us, like myself...

We're policy people. So we were also able to not just come with concerns, but come with calls for action. One of the things that I brought up right when we got to Department of Justice was I said, I am a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault. And the way that this crime stalking is different than those two crimes. And again, sometimes there's overlap. Sometimes the offender does all those things. But what's different is that I've had 20 years to heal from my sexual assault. 20 years is a long time. I've put in a lot of work and I feel like I'm doing okay.

Stalking, you never get to heal because it's never really over. The hypervigilance, all of that, what that does to a person is so intense.

I also mentioned both the Department of Justice and the White House. When it comes to stalking, a lot of times when we're looking at statistics, you have to remember that it's a widely underreported crime. So for a long time, we went off these old stats, which went back to like 2013. And the old stats were like 7.5 million Americans. At that point, it was more or less 90% former intimate partner with a DV overlap, probably 10% stranger acquaintance like mine. We got these new stats this past year. It

It's up to 15 million. So real silent epidemic. And it's very interesting in that the statistics reflect it's very close to 50% former intimate partner, 50% stranger acquaintance. So what does that tell you? The internet. We live on the internet. And again, I'm not saying don't enjoy it. It's a wonderful thing, but we have to be really conscientious about how much information we put out there because there's people who create these parasocial relationships and it could get dangerous.

regarding lethality. When we're looking at statistics, when it comes to the underreporting, we're never really gonna know. There's huge communities. Sex workers don't report this crime. A lot of times people of color don't report this crime. Trans people don't report this crime. It's really underreported. The only time that we get an accurate reporting is when there's a body, when there's a homicide. Except with stalking, we don't because you never see that additional charge. So we can't even prove a lethality. There are so many crimes.

For example, take Nicole Brown Simpson. OJ stalked her. That's never part of the conversation. There was never a stalking charge. So...

If we're trying to look at how severe, like this is a crime which is constantly minimized. And part of that is because we're not doing that additional charge, right? So we can't even say X amount of homicides a year have a stocking component. We don't even have that. I think that's a huge part about why people don't realize the severity of the crime. I am now on the LA District Attorney Crime Victims Advisory Board.

When I got on the board, I brought up the fact that I wasn't given social services because we didn't have any stalking specific reps. Tanishia from the District Attorney Bureau of Victim Services, we worked and we were able to bring Dana from Spark over and then she trained 15 stalking specific advocates. So we have 15 that are there, which is so awesome.

The then new district attorney said that he wasn't going to be prosecuting trespassing because in LA, that's like a lot of houseless people or kids just smoking weed and stuff. And so I had to point out that when it comes to stalking, we need all the charges we can get. And we basically made a carve out so that they would include that. So that's kind of like some of the stuff that I do with the DA.

There is an amazing nonprofit called Spark. As amazing as they are, they're also limited. And they'll tell you this too. What Spark does is they do education and information and they are wonderful. They're the ones who have the best social media with all statistics and they do trainings. They have a really great free risk assessment model, which is really validating for a lot of people because a lot of times people will say to themselves, is this harassment? Will this flame out? Or like, am I in danger?

It's called SHARP. It's the Spark risk assessment tool. And you plug in your information, then it tells you what level of risk you're under. It can be really affirming for some people who haven't been able to like name what's happening to them. Survivors, much like perpetrators, are everyone. Anyone can be stalked. Let me tell you about Tracy Walder. I love Tracy. Tracy is unbelievable. Talk about a legend. So Tracy Walder is ex-F.

FBI ex-CIA. She wrote a book called The Unexpected Spy. My stalker became fixated on her. He starts sending her terrible things. She then contacts me. We develop a friendship. I don't think she said this exact quote, but I'm not outing her. She mentioned it on social media.

She said that the stalking experience, and I want to be sensitive about the threats, but the threats that he was making were scarier than when she was interrogating terrorists in Afghanistan. And again, stalking happens to everybody, including ex-JA, ex-FBI. Anybody can be a victim of it, just like anybody can be a perpetrator.

I think about Tracy a lot and she's so amazing and her videos are amazing. She's a correspondent on News Nation. I'll say it a million times. It's a complicated, nuanced crime. It's a weird crime. And with stalking, like there's little things that only we as the victim know to be a crime. Patrick Brady said something where he called it homicide in slow motion. It's a really powerful quote. I'm sure I said it wrong, but that is what it is.

When I started meeting other public survivors, I started realizing my experience was not unique. That's why I started my company, Lenore Clare Consulting. I started seeing a lot of my friends who were doing this cool new job called intimacy coordination, which is for scripted TV and film. And it's where like, let's just say someone's playing a sexual assault survivor on a show or a love scene or something. It's somebody who's there to make sure everything is kosher and everyone's respected on set. And I was like, that's so wonderful. It's

It's great that they have that, but they have that because there's unions protecting them. When we do all these crime shows that people love to watch, these documentaries, there's no union. It's unscripted. So there's literally nobody looking out for you. A lot of us who've done these shows, we've had producers force narratives on us that are not authentic. They're really hungry for a soundbite. They really push us. For me, even, they've had me recreate my own trauma, like in recreations. They've had me play myself and I disassociate when that happens and that's not healthy.

There's a lot of really not great stuff that happens on these shows. There was another true crime production that was quite big on a major network. I'm not going to say what it is because I know the people involved.

But it was also an unadjudicated case. And the producers thought they were doing a nice thing by putting all the victims together. When this case is unadjudicated, the offender's counsel is basically trying to say it's a conspiracy. So what have they now done? They've now filmed them all together. That's going to further that, which is why with the Cosby survivors, they didn't get to interact with each other until after litigation and then eventually the criminal stuff. They were kept apart because they're not supposed to cross-pollinate stories.

These producers don't understand the law. They don't understand what they're doing. They think they're doing a nice thing and in some ways they are, but they're also jeopardizing our case. So when you hire my company, we come with that knowledge as well.

The reason why I call it Lenora Clark Consulting was not out of ego. I just thought it was only going to be me. And I thought it would be me being a victim-survivor liaison on set because I'm a survivor. I've told my story on camera, but I've also been a producer and I can speak the language to make the most ethical, kind, respectful, intentional, meaningful experience for people. And then I got a panel of other crime survivors together so we can make mindful recommendations for

For example, Amanda Knox is part of my company. So if you were doing a film on wrongful conviction, like you could talk to her about what that experience is like, or Tara Newell, you could talk to these people. And I also provide trauma informed, amazing homicide detectives, genetic genealogists, forensic psychologists. From my casting background, it's like a one stop shop. If these productions want to make ethical choices about everything from forming how they do the interviews with survivors to having a fellow survivor on set to I

I advocate for things. In the UK, they have what's called duty of care. Unlike here in the US, when you put a crime survivor on camera, they do psych evals to make sure they're okay to do it, which is so crucial because there are a lot of times where someone is so fresh in their trauma and maybe shoving a camera in their face at that moment is not the move. I didn't know there was a term for that, duty of care. I just did a very big production. This production that we did is unbelievable. And I've kept in touch with the survivors.

We did everything, making sure ahead of time that everything that the survivors were being asked, they were comfortable. They didn't have a camera in their face feeling they were interrogated. I feel like a lot of the projects I've seen on stalking are really sensationalized. They don't have any call to action. I've had three TV deals and none of them have made it to air because a lot of the networks, they say that they don't want content that's helpful. They love a homicide with a twist.

They've been pretty awful. And I really do hope to get to properly tell these stories in a meaningful way with like a call to action. And that's just something that I've been working on for years. I've come close. It's been really frustrating. You have every qualification to do so. I'm sure it's just a matter of time. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away.

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I cannot thank you enough for being willing to share so much of your story and your knowledge with all of us. I also would love to hear about your PI work and all the other things that you're doing.

Yeah. So the way that it works in California is you need a couple of years of 2000 hours each. So I'm technically an investigator. I don't have my license yet to be a private investigator, but my two partners, they're both former LAPD with a combined 60 year experience. They're both licensed and we're licensed in California, Nevada.

The origin story there was Cletus Carlton, who I mentioned was the one really good detective I had at LAPD, and he retired. After he retired, he became a PI. And what would happen is people would come to me and they would say, you know, XYZ is happening. Law enforcement isn't listening to me. I would do the restraining order stuff. And then for some of the people, I would send them over to Cletus. He would take them on as clients, and then he would do security assessments of their home, risk assessment, monitoring their stalker. Basically,

Basically all the things that you wish police would do that they don't do. Going to court with them, all that stuff. When the strike happened and entertainment slowed down, Cletus said to me, why don't you come join the firm? You should be a PI. And I thought about it. I was like, oh my God. He's like, you're already doing it. You're already doing it. You're trauma-informed. You're coming from the survivor perspective. And not to mention a lot of people, they rather talk to you than us because we're ex-cops. So now we have our company, which is Special K Investigations, Inc. I'm so proud of the work that we're doing.

It's kind of complicated because we aren't a nonprofit. It is a company. You have to hire us. You have to retain us. Our two specialties are stalking, obviously, and missing persons. Those are the two spaces. A lot of people don't realize that for the most part, unless you're a minor, they're not looking. That's a really brutal fact for the most part. A lot of times with missing persons, they don't know the crime has been committed. That's how they kind of see it.

but the work that we do is literally all the things that you need. We send tech experts to your house. We walk through and put up your security camera and we do all the monitoring. We do everything that you need. And we're 24 hours a day, literally 24 hours a day. You can call us and we'll come in and we'll intervene and do what needs to be done. One of the things that I think that's really interesting about our company is that the majority right now as it stands of my PI clients are actually sex workers. And I really want to get into that because I want to talk about all the communities that don't

to do the traditional way. There are other options for them. We have a lot of sex workers, a lot of queer community. A lot of our clients are OnlyFans creators. If you're a top OnlyFans creator, besides the fact that like you get a lot of attention, the top OnlyFans creators, you have teams that interact with your fans. You may not know who your problem person is. You may not know who's threatening you. So when you go to a feature dance or a public appearance, this problematic person who you're not actually interacting with may come to see you and you don't even know. And

And we really are full service. If you're anxious about what to wear to court, I'll help dress you to, do you want to do media about this? I got the media. I can help you with that. To law enforcement liaison, because Cletus and Leo, my partners are former LAPD, cops listen to them if you need that intervention. We have like a lot of people who are just not comfortable with traditional law enforcement and prefer the way that we handle things. And that's such an awesome space to be in. And I'm so proud of that. It's very incredible.

You're trauma-informed, you're a survivor yourself, and this is why we are important in the media, in the work, and in the law. We have a perspective that's important. Something that I've heard both from retired officers who are now PIs or people that are currently working in the system is even when cops want to investigate things, they also have limited resources.

So that's another reason why private access to someone like yourself or your company can be really vital for victims. I've had shooting victims who have had to hire private security or PI for certain things. And they work a lot of times with law enforcement too. It doesn't have to be one or the other. You're absolutely right with the private investigations. You have their 60 plus years of investigatory experience. And the other thing that we're doing too, which I'm pretty sure we're the first in the country,

Since PI stuff can get kind of expensive and I want to be as inclusive to everybody as possible, we're going to be putting up a Patreon. There's like a multi-tier component to it. And for a really small entry, you'll be able to like watch videos of me talking about how to do restraining orders.

The next tier of services, we have an app. It's like a cloud where we can safely store your evidence. The next tier would be you'd get those videos and then we can help you track your case and safely do that. So you also have access to the cloud that we have. And because a lot of times people, their stuff gets hacked into, or maybe it's a former partner who has access to things, whatever that is. So we're rolling that out really soon. Jake's going to help me set it all up. What is the stocking like today? Yeah.

Is it still a daily basis thing that you're having to navigate while you're doing all of this epic shit? Yeah, because I've been public about my stalker, I've also had incel men's rights groups threaten me. So that's not the only place that my threats are coming from. At one point, they tried to dox me unsuccessfully. They put me on a rape list.

Being a public survivor is not easy. It is very complicated. As for my stalker, the convicted one, I've had to put him in jail multiple times. Unfortunately, I've only been able to get him on misdemeanors after the original felony. So it's not for very long. He's gotten slicker. He does a lot of third party contact stuff now. So he'll contact nonprofits I work with and friends. I did get an indirect one with him last year, July 4th.

But there have been a few accounts that I suspect are him following me, but no direct contact for almost a year. And he's busy stalking other people. And he's still out right now. He is. And he's in Los Angeles with no ankle monitor, no monitoring, no nothing. For somebody who's experiencing heightened stalking right now, is there any other tips that you could offer? Jake had mentioned documentation is huge. You touched on that as well.

As I mentioned before, the wiping of your personal information off the internet is really great. No one needs to be able to access your home address for a dollar. That is wild. If you think that you're being stalked, it's so important to be really conscientious with your social media usage. Again, I'm not saying don't be on it. Don't enjoy it. Just use it responsibly. Don't post where you are until after you left.

Make sure you're checking the geotags. Don't check suspicious links. For me, someone could send something like 50% off at Sephora. Let's say I click on that. They can get to the GPS on your phone. So don't click any suspicious links. Don't share your kid's school or pictures of them with their school logos. I think with kids, it's teaching them situational awareness as well.

My dad did a lot of forensics because he was a police surgeon in New York, which is something that's kind of weird that they have there. So I grew up with cases at home and I would sneak at them and look at them. When I was a kid, it was the 80s and that was the height of the kidnapping panic. That was just a big part of 80s conversation.

I remember my father being out with me and I was little, three or four, and a guy would come in and my dad would go, tell me. And I'd go, white male, approximately 30 to 40, about six foot tall, the scar over the eyebrow. And he'd be like, here's some jelly beans. Good job. He did that with me.

That's kind of legendary and also sounds like would have been right up my alley as a kid. I think it's obviously served you in your life. Yeah, but I mean, you got to teach your kids that, right? Because a lot of times if something happens, any bit of details helps us with the investigations. This is really important.

So if somebody is sending you threats online, what you really need to do is gray rock. Don't respond because if you respond with kindness, you're not going to make them go away. They may go on one harder. And if you're aggressive, that may exacerbate things. So what you really want to do is just gray rocket, hope that they get bored and eventually move on, which sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Definitely keep all the threats coming to you, but do not interact back. That is literally the worst thing that you could do.

One of the things that I'm sorry to call out law enforcement yet again, but we need to hold them accountable. One of the things that I'm seeing is that people will come in when they're trying to file a complaint about what's happening to them and the officer pretends to like write it down. You need an actual crime report with a number that

That crime report is a documentation that you need to potentially get the restraining order, which is the next level. So if you go in and you're not being heard, you can ask for the watch captain. That's their job. Definitely make sure to get that documentation. It's really important to have that documentation because law enforcement is way more likely to work with you. Definitely come with everything in order. One of the other things that I wish law enforcement agencies had was forensic psych to do evaluations because that's who understands the risk assessment.

They can never like fully predict, but they are able to sort of understand when there's a higher propensity towards violence or what the individual may do next. If people have access, I love forensic psychologists evaluating if you can get them involved. That is something that we do at my company. It can just be so informational and such a helpful tool. And again, I wish that law enforcement paid to have them on staff to like red flag people who are really at risk.

We always go justice. They can't see me, but I'm making your quotes. Like, what is, I don't even know what that is. What is justice? And we never really talk about healing. And I really want to change that conversation because even after getting incarceration, which I guess is justice, I'm not any safer now. It's the healing component. I'm still a person. And some days I'm not okay. I have really good days where I'm high functioning and things are going great. And I have some days where I'm just like, holy shit, so much was taken from me.

I look at my old photos and I'm like, I'm never going to be that person again. I mean, I'll do new things and my life has meaning and my life has beauty, but that person who I was and that trajectory that I was on, I cannot be that anymore. And that's really hard. I had all these accomplishments. It's so far down the Google search, no one knows. It's really hard to lose your identity.

I have 8 million medical issues that directly correlate with what's happening to me. I know Ana does. A lot of the survivors that I talk to, we all just check in and like, "How's your stomach?" Because we're all unwell. I do the work that I do because for me, it can't all be for nothing. I try so hard to be the person that I needed when I needed them. And I hope that I'm successful in doing that. Like, I'm really trying. I just need people to know, even when you're this many years in, even when you've had the felony stalking charge, which again, what I got was really rare.

Even when you have all those things, there's still some days that are just really, really hard and to give yourself grace and to just do whatever it takes for you to heal. That can look differently for all of us. What healing is, our needs are all so different. The crime is not the same. Our individual needs are not the same. And it's just to really meet people where they are. If you have a loved one that this is happening to, you may not have the answers, but being present is so meaningful because stalkers so frequently try to isolate you. They make it sound like they'll threaten your loved ones. So you avoid them.

When you're being stalked, it's really important to find your community. There's a really cool nonprofit that I'm friends with called Stop Stalking Us, and they've just started a support group. That's a great thing that I really believe in. We live in a culture right now where we're telling everybody to put yourself out there, be a podcaster, be an influencer, be on YouTube, which is amazing, but we're not doing anything to protect people. So we're living in this very bizarre time where we're putting ourselves out there, but we just have to do better by people.

This story I'm working on for season 20, this woman has been cyber stalking and harassing and catfishing people for 18 years now. And we're working with a bunch of her victims. The cops are just like, yeah, it's cyber stalking, but there's nothing really we can do about it. And I'm just like, they don't even understand federal law. Half of these cops that I've met that work in dual task force barely even know how the internet works. And they're working in cyber crimes. And I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but it's very disheartening.

Exactly right. So that's part of what the grant that we're getting is going to go for tech stuff, which is super important. Typically, there are less than 20 federal stocking cases per year, because that's just not something that the FBI is really focused on right now.

I had FBI and Secret Service on my case, and then eventually it just got kicked down to Los Angeles. And if I had gotten federal, I could have gotten like 25 years for the same situation. I was going to do the FBI Citizens Academy anyway, and I got Jake to do it with me. But literally the reason why I did it was so that I can make those relationships, that I could have this conversation.

Right now, they're really focused on like Russian and Chinese interference, which is totally valid. But we know for all these cyber crimes, we need this help. A lot of times what happens is the multi jurisdictions, they just kick it to the other one. They go, oh, didn't happen over here. Kick it over there. And then they don't extradite when it's a misdemeanor, which a lot of these crimes are. It's really hard to like get up to a felony level with stalking. People always ask me about legislation. There's some things coming. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I am working with a politician. So there is something coming.

What do you think is the most common misconception that people have about stalking victims that stands out to you as a survivor?

There's a lot. Okay. So I work with so many survivors that are former intimate partner and they have like a different thing than those of us that are stranger acquaintance do. A lot of times they have the guilt. I invited this person into my life. I brought this person around my children. I always want to say to them, you're already going through the hardest thing. Don't make it harder on yourself. And if your friend had the situation, you wouldn't blame them. So give yourself that grace.

When we're talking about misconceptions, I always use this analogy and I think it's really accurate. Imagine you saw a dog. It's a cute dog and you pet the cute dog. You didn't know the dog had rabies. The dog is sick. That's when it's formative partner. Like you just were being a kind, loving person who dated somebody or had a relationship with someone. There's nothing that you did. Just like me opening an art gallery. I didn't do anything. And a lot of times we blame ourselves

I can't tell you how many times from law enforcement to friends or people just telling me to tone myself down. And I would be like, Ivanka is so conventional looking. It has nothing to do with my hair color choice, why this is happening to me. And the other thing too is because it's reported with celebrities so often, people think it only happens to celebrities.

The 15 million people, and it's more than 15, that's just what reported, they're not all celebrities. Yes, it does happen often to celebrities. That's just who gets the media coverage. It's literally everybody. I don't even know how many survivors I work with, but it's a lot. When I started working with survivors, I started having really lovely friendships. And at first I was like, are these lovely friendships? Is it because we're bonded with our shared trauma? And I thought, no, you know what? That's doing a disservice. It's not just the trauma. All these people are fierce.

My theory, which Debbie Riddle has a similar thing. So we both were seeing eye to eye on this with the sparkle, right? Which is why we dressed wearing sparkles for January for Stocking Awareness Month. I call it extra sparkly theory, which is where all these people that I was interacting with, all these victim survivors, they're really charismatic. They're really likable. They're really talented at their chosen field. They're just sparkly people.

That's why like a lot of these crime shows, people say so-and-so could light up the world with their smile. But there is something to it. And I think it's because these predators want to obtain, possess, and control all of which they're not because they're not shit. They're drawn to these charismatic, wonderful people. But stalking really does happen to everybody.

It's from the meek church mouse personality to the overtop person. Like, it could happen to anyone. And that's why we have to do better, because it is everybody. This is a crime that transcends gender, sexuality, socioeconomic background, race, religion. Disproportionately, it's more women, but it is something that happens to everybody. And yet the one commonality is that we don't get the help that we need.

I am really honored to have the opportunity to speak with you and to be able to share your story with our audience. I just think you're absolutely brilliant. I am so thankful that Jake introduced me to you and informed me about all the incredible work you're doing. And again, I just feel like it's such kismet that we are closing out the season with you.

I'm really easy to access. People can always write me if they have questions. I do my best. I can't always get back to everybody all the time, but I really do try if people have questions or need resources. Again, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe, friends.

Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production created and hosted by me, Tiffany Reese. If you'd like to support the show further, you can share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review, or follow Something Was Wrong on Instagram at somethingwaswrongpodcast. Our theme song was composed by Glad Rags. Check out their album, Wonder Under. Thank you so much.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.