Bad Date

by Ellery Lloyd

A no will always turn into a yes if you only persist—that’s what my mother always said.

Yes, but not when it comes to dating and access to people (celebrity or not). No means no.

Fay will never know all the effort, all the devotion, it took to meet her.

All because you’re a creepy stalker who went to abnormal lengths to explore a once parasocial relationship.

They really should teach kids more in school about online safety, make them aware that any old weirdo could be out there, talking to them.

Irony being that this is coming from an old weirdo-stalker talking to his stalking victim’s teen.

they don’t seem to care about the stress they cause her. They don’t stop when you ask them to, when 32you tell them she’s scared. That she’s not eating, not sleeping. That she’s scared for her son’s life. They don’t stop when lawyers send letters. They don’t stop when the police tell them to. They’re never subtle, these guys. Not very bright either, most of them. Some even use their own names, or at least reuse the same fake name across accounts—podcast reviews, social media, one-star fake vet reviews. Online Mortal Kombat. That’s how I identified Oliver Sharpe.

Creepy stalker has been clocked!

The ingenuity and foresight that he displayed in over twenty years of stalking seems to have entirely eluded him in this setup. He’s been a sitting duck, and tonight he’s getting hooked.

None of it managed to disguise the man that I’d sat opposite from, giving evidence of every creepy thing he’d done, all logged in detail, and watched as the county court judge handed him a restraining order, twice.

Fay has always been down on her acting skills, but honestly her performance pretending to fall for the man who has made her life a misery was Oscar-worthy. The rage she must have felt, knowing he groomed her son and was responsible for all this mess.

We would never have known, had Danny’s lawyers not gotten in touch to say his son had been sending them letters about how he had been talking online to his father.

We put spyware on Wolf’s computer to capture chat logs, and everything became horrifyingly clear. Fay was physically sick when we read Oliver’s name, realising that he must have found her son’s gamertag and invited him to Mortal Kombat matches.

I’m nothing like those guys I helped him get rid of.

It was hard work, and not cheap. I bought books on the dark web, downloaded manuals. I even procured the drugs he needed and posted them to his house (I knew the address, of course). Then the brat decides that I’m 45his own personal pharmacist and starts asking me to get hold of steroids and testosterone