‘I need to make you suffer’: My near decade of violent harassment by a man I barely know
Zeni Gibson has been stalked and harassed for nearly nine years by a man she rejected when she was 17. This is her story.
As told to Madeleine Holden.
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Content warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of threatened violence, including sexual violence. Please take care.
Since 21-year-old AUT student Farzana Yaqubi was murdered by a man she rejected in December 2022, I have followed the story, and associated commentary, closely. Like anyone reading the details of her case, I felt devastated for Yaqubi and her whānau, and outraged by the litany of police failings.
But I also felt a sickening jolt of recognition.
For almost nine years now, I have been stalked and sadistically harassed by a man I rejected when I was 17, who is eight years older than me. Apart from the fact that he has been terrorising me since January 2016, I do not know the perpetrator, Greg, at all.
The story of my harassment is not for the faint of heart. It recounts in detail the brutal online abuse I have experienced since I was a teen, violent and sexual in nature, which escalated last year to include harassment of my parents at their home address. It details the various failures I encountered in the legal system after I reported the behaviour to the police, and the emotional, social and physical impact on my life.
Until last year, I kept the entire ordeal a secret. But reading Farzana’s story shifted my perspective: if relaying my experience can trigger in someone else the same reaction hers did in me – the flash of recognition; the realisation I was downplaying a serious and dangerous situation – I figure it’s worth telling my story in full.
So here it is.
‘I don’t always obsess over girls who show no interest in me’
I first met Greg in September 2015 when I was 16 years old, working at the Aro Valley School Holiday Programme in central Wellington, close to where I was living at my mum’s house by Aro Park. I was an outgoing and social teen, spending my time hanging out with my best friends, playing social volleyball and football, attending piano lessons, and working ridiculously hard at school to get good NCEA grades. I was studious, fun, silly, and well-liked by my peers.
Greg was 25 when I met him and dating my boss, a woman around his age I’ll call Rebecca. When I was working on the school holiday programmes or if I saw Greg hanging out at Aro Park, I would smile and make small talk with him in passing. Given he was dating my boss, I felt I owed it to her to be friendly to Greg, but our interactions were always surface-level: polite smiles, “hi” and “bye”, maybe the odd “how are you?” – but nothing more than that.
One rainy evening after work in January 2016, my mum offered Rebecca, her five-year-old daughter and Greg a lift home from the holiday programme, given the terrible weather. On the drive home, Greg and I sat in the back seat with Rebecca’s daughter between us. As we drove, I absentmindedly drew hearts in the window’s condensation with my index finger, daydreaming about my high school crush. I was 17 years old.
It was a teenage-girl moment of such little significance I should never have thought about it again. It’s ended up being the moment in my life that’s haunted me the most.
Shortly after this car journey, I found an anonymous letter in my mum’s letterbox addressed to me. It said something like, “I love you too!” Then I received a text message from an unknown number asking whether I had received the letter. Assuming the sender was one of the boys from my high school joking around, I replied, “Who is this hahaha”.
Greg identified himself, and I was immediately a little unsettled, because I’d never given him my phone number. He asked why I was laughing, and requested that I meet him at Aro Park.
At this point, for reasons not worth getting into, I thought Greg was friends with the anonymous sender of the love letter, not the sender himself. For this reason, and also because Greg was my boss’s boyfriend, I didn’t hesitate to run the short distance to the park to meet him.
When I got there, I saw Greg sitting on a hill with his cute, scruffy dog, Toby. I joined him, ensuring Toby sat firmly between us. Greg told me that when he saw me drawing hearts in the condensation, he thought I was telling him I loved him. He said he loved me too.
I was caught off guard and immediately felt anxious and uncomfortable. My heart started racing as I thought about how to remove myself from the situation without upsetting him. I stammered out a polite rejection, explaining that he’d misinterpreted the hearts, clinging tightly to Toby to keep some distance between the two of us. I vividly recall the grease that coated my fingers from patting Toby so anxiously.
Shortly after this interaction, Greg began contacting me through Facebook, asking me to meet up again and requesting that I give him a chance. I told my mum, and together we decided I should never reply to him. My plan was to delete all messages, block him, and rinse and repeat if necessary, and I executed it faithfully. His messages didn’t stop.
The single exception to my “no reply” rule occurred in May 2017, when I was 18 years old; 16 months after Greg put the anonymous love letter in my mum’s letterbox. I was living in Melbourne on a gap year, and received a text from Greg asking if I had seen him recently. I replied, “I’m not in New Zealand.” I hoped this would stop him lingering around my mum’s house in the hope of running into me. Greg’s response was rambling and apologetic and I felt sorry for him, so I replied, “It’s ok Greg thank you”.
Even though that was the first and only time I ever replied to Greg’s messages, he seemed to take my response as licence to message me repeatedly, sending a flurry of messages in June 2017 until I blocked him on Facebook.
For the next five years, Greg continued to message me in flurries like this: I would go months without hearing from him, then he would bombard me with weeks-long confessions of love, links to love songs, customised memes and pleas for a response. Because I never replied and would block the accounts he contacted me from, Greg would create burner accounts on Facebook and Instagram and message me using those. I’d block those accounts and he’d go quiet for a while, then he’d pop up again a few months later, like Whac-A-Mole, with new burner accounts and a fresh flurry of messages.
On the surface, these messages seemed harmless enough, if a little obsessive and sad, but there was a threatening undercurrent that creeped me out: he said over and over that he would not give up on pursuing me, despite my lack of interest.
I moved back to my mum’s house in Wellington from Melbourne in January 2018, when I started uni, and then flatted in Wellington from October 2019 onwards. During these flurries when Greg was bombarding me with messages, I felt anxious and on high alert: Wellington is so small, it felt like Greg could be around any corner at any time. I felt like he was constantly monitoring and seeking me out, and given he knew where my mum’s house was, I was on high alert that he would turn up there.
I also felt totally isolated: apart from laughing off the memes with a few friends, I didn’t share my experience of harassment with anyone. Whenever I imagined telling people what was happening and how nervous Greg’s obsession was making me feel, I pictured them dismissing me as dramatic. I became less outgoing and struggled to make new friends. My approach at the time was mostly pretending the harassment wasn’t happening.
But of course it was happening, and it was starting to impact me in serious ways. I began to withdraw socially, and body dysmorphia that started for me in high school got worse during this time. Because I felt so observed by Greg all around Wellington, I started finding it hard to leave the house. In 2018 and 2019, I started writing myself motivating notes on my phone so that I would get out of bed the next day, because I was languishing the days away in my room (“time to get out of this rut and exercise to feel good,” one read. “only way to get out of this funk is to CHANGE”.)
I considered going to the police to report Greg’s harassment, but figured none of it was serious enough in isolation to warrant a report. Besides, what was I supposed to say? “I want to report a man who’s making memes about me?” I figured that, at best, I wouldn’t be taken seriously, and at worst, I’d be ridiculed.
I also began to doubt myself: had I inadvertently made the situation worse for myself by ignoring Greg for so many years? He was clearly struggling with his mental health: maybe I should have met up with him, explained the misunderstanding, and asked him clearly to leave me alone? But surely that would have made things worse? I felt like my hands were tied, and second-guessed every decision. Greg messaged me several times saying he’d once seen me laughing at him with a group of my friends. I knew this wasn’t true, but I still sometimes thought, Am I responsible for hurting his feelings?
This dynamic – constant, low-level creepiness from Greg, the way I talked myself out of telling anyone, and the spiral of isolation and shame this threw me into – persisted for five years. Like the proverbial frog in heating water, I figured I could stay in the pot.
But it wouldn’t be long before it boiled over.
‘I fucking hate you so much’
In March 2022, when I was 23 years old, the tone and sentiment of Greg’s messages completely transformed: instead of pleading and lovesick, they became gruesomely violent and threatening. I had – and still have – no idea what triggered this shift, given I never replied to Greg again after May 2017.
One night while I was winding down for bed, I received a message from a new Instagram account @usernametime8888. “Not kidding last chance to get back to me or your mum’s gonna find Lola’s head in her letterbox,” the message read (Lola is our family’s cat). “YOU ARE NOT GETTING AWAY WITH THIS.”
“Seriously something major is going to happen if you don’t get back to me,” threatened one of the many follow-up messages. “Believe it or not. It’s up to you.”
After I blocked @usernametime888, terrified, a new account, @zeni.checkmessagerequests, sent a screed of messages three days later. “You are the most horrible person ever,” parts of the message read. “Like the most horrible bitch. … You are a mentally fucked person.”
“It’s been 6 years this isn’t going away,” the message continued. “So accept that it’s not gonna end until something happens.”
For the following month, this pattern continued: I would block Greg’s burner accounts – and there was no doubt in my mind that this was Greg – only for him to immediately pop up with another one spewing screeds of violent, misogynistic abuse. They detailed step-by-step how Greg was going to rape and torture me; how he would “fuck [my] decapitated head”; how he would keep me as his “little toy” and “stab [my] fucking throat”; how I had “shit tits”, a “stank vegan vagina” and “no ass”; and how he saw an “Ed Kemper or Jeffrey Dahmer” future for himself. (These are the names of serial killers.)
Greg stressed constantly that he would never leave me alone. “Have you considered that I might not get over this for 10-20 years,” he wrote in one message. “You’ve ignored me for 6 years and now it’s way worse.”
Messages like these would reach me at all hours of the day, thrusting me into a state of terror. I would be at work about to launch into a presentation, or at home cooking dinner with my flatmates, or sliding into bed at the end of a long day, and my phone would light up with a message detailing my imminent rape and torture, or forensically detailing my physical flaws as Greg saw them. I was always in fight or flight mode.
Greg also messaged two of my best friends via burner accounts on Instagram – “Imagine how much fun it would be to drown Zeni”, he wrote to one of them – and attempted to sign into my social media accounts hundreds of times, at all hours of the day – sometimes three times every minute – and each time the attempt would generate an email or text notification.
On two occasions in April, 2022, four Meat Lovers Domino’s pizzas, with extra meat, were ordered for delivery to my mum’s house. (The “joke” is that I’m vegan.) I considered this too low-level to report to the police or tell anyone about; dealing with it, once again, alone. Still, it was chilling: I felt like Greg was reminding me that he knew where my mum lived, and it was a clear illustration of the lengths he would go to get under my skin.
I wish I could say it didn’t work.
During this time, I started to feel intense self-loathing. Greg would constantly reiterate what an awful person I was – “the most horrible bitch” and a “mentally fucked person” for not replying to him – and I began to believe everyone saw me this way. My self-esteem plummeted.
My body dysmorphia became debilitating. Greg described over and over exactly what he hated about my body and how he would relish in violating it. Stick a knife up your puss then start to poke. Stab your fucking throat. I want to have you as my little toy. Rag doll your little virgin runt. So I started to picture my body as this disgusting, violated thing. I couldn’t take my clothes off without thinking about Greg promising to stab, slice and decapitate me.
I became a worse friend and family member. Because I was so terrified of what I would see on my screen and exhausted from the toll of the harassment, I started ignoring phone calls, cancelling plans and failing to reply to texts, and in person I’d be bad company, distracted each time my phone lit up with another reminder of Greg.
Once a hyper-organised, Type A person, I became incapable of staying on top of personal admin, which made me feel useless.
I also began to have unsettling problems with my memory. My mind went totally blank. Before Greg’s harassment escalated in March 2022, I was a confident public speaker, for example, but now it didn’t matter how well-prepared I was, I physically couldn’t recall what I was meant to say. I started writing presentations out verbatim and the second I looked away from my notes, I couldn’t remember what words came next. That made work so difficult and really shook my confidence. I felt stupid all the time.
On April 4, 2022, after week upon week of graphic, threatening harassment, I broke down and reported Greg’s behaviour to the police for the first time. A lovely woman at the front counter of the police station took my report, listening to me relay years of history with Greg. This woman assured me that police would take action on my file, and for the first time in years, I felt hopeful. I had no idea the worst was yet to come.
‘Hi Cutyourthroat’
On April 13, 2022, Greg was served with a criminal harassment letter which prohibited him from contacting me. For months afterwards, I stopped hearing from him. I was awash with relief. For seven years, Greg had been making my life a misery, and now I could begin to imagine life without him.
Around December 2022, a few weeks after my 24th birthday, I received a flurry of notifications that Greg was attempting to log in to my social media accounts again, in breach of the criminal harassment order. I didn’t want to ruin my family’s Christmas plans, so I kept quiet about the login attempts, trying to push it to the back of my mind so I could enjoy the holidays. On New Year’s Day, 2023, I was on holiday with a group of friends from high school, and I’d been offline since just before Christmas. As my friends lazed in the sun, swimming leisurely and playing board games, I took a moment to compose an email to the police officer involved in my case to inform him about Greg’s login attempts.
When I logged into my Gmail, I saw 1,300 unread emails received during the week I was offline. I felt sick.
The emails were from dozens of different companies and organisations. Presumably to evade the legal prohibition on contacting me directly, Greg used my email address to sign me up for updates and subscriptions, and entered my contact details into the form sections of various company and NGO websites. Instead of inputting my name, Greg entered violent and humiliating messages to me, which would then show up in the automated greeting of the email.
“Hi Cutyourthroat”, read one. “Kia ora I need to slice your smile off your face”, read another.
There were hundreds of them, promising gruesome sexual violence, mutilation of my body, and again, detailing my physical flaws in humiliating, forensic detail. Every time the organisation generated a new email to me, they would address me by the “name” Greg inputted. I spent hours unsubscribing, but the messages were relentless.
Greg created a Facebook account using my name and photos of my face and began leaving vile comments on public community pages. Friends and I reported the account several times to Facebook, but we received the following response: “We [Facebook] reviewed the profile your friend reported and found that it isn’t pretending to be you and doesn’t go against our Community Standards.”
Every time my phone lit up with a notification from Greg’s automated emails or login attempts, I was consumed with dread – and it lit up constantly. Whether I was in a work hui, grabbing lunch with a friend or getting ready for bed, I received regular detailed missives from Greg, describing his seething hatred for me and expressing a wish to rape, mutilate and murder me.
In January, 2023, after I returned from my holiday, I went to the police station to report the latest developments. I took a compiled document of screenshots, annotated and highlighted to assist the officers, including an IP address I found in one of the emails. As sick and anxious as I felt, I was hopeful that the police would take the harassment seriously and that it would come to an end. Greg was in such obvious violation of the anti-harassment order, I thought. Surely they could arrest him now?
In the following months, Greg continued to harass me with hundreds of emails and login attempts every day. I would forward screenshots to the officer in charge of my file – between January and May 2023, I would estimate that I sent the police around 90 screenshots of Greg’s threats and harassment in addition to those I filed in person in January. Apart from an acknowledgement of my emails and one update from an officer in April, I heard nothing from the police during this time.
This left me with so many questions: what were the police doing to protect me? Were they investigating all the emails, or were they going into the abyss of my police file? Did the officers care about the attempts to hack my social media accounts? Was anyone trying to help me?
In May, 2023, Greg’s harassment moved offline. My mum found four letters in her letterbox between May 21 and June 26, some of which were addressed to my stepdad, and which contained statements like, “Does your daughter like eating shit off your destitute nazi cock”. The letters also issued death threats, encouraged my stepdad and me to kill ourselves, accused my stepdad and his brother of being child rapists, and luridly detailed sexual acts between my stepdad and me.
One week in July, 2023, my family found human faeces on top of my mum’s letterbox on three separate occasions, causing immense distress to my mum and stepdad. Each time a letter or more faeces showed up at the letterbox, I reported the incident at the police station in person. I hoped this would make the police take me more seriously, but each time I was told I should call or email 105 (the non-emergency line) instead, which felt like a punch in the gut.
Each time I reported the letters and faeces, I spoke to a new police officer, and because the offline harassment targeted my mum and stepdad, it was treated, to my knowledge, as a completely separate matter to the online harassment targeting me. This meant that each time I reported something new that had shown up in my mum’s letterbox, I had to explain the whole story, again and again. I’d often get the impression officers weren’t taking my fear seriously, because from their point of view it was “just one letter” that wasn’t even directed at me, until I filled them in on the entire context and why it filled me with terror. This was exhausting, frustrating and, frankly, retraumatising.
I inquired often about evidence gathering, and tried to assist the police, but felt like these suggestions were brushed aside: for example, I asked if the police wanted samples of the faeces from my mum’s letterbox, and they said that wasn’t necessary. One officer took a photo of the letter and returned it to me, and I asked them to keep it so they could run fingerprints and obtain handwriting samples. I felt like I was doing the police’s job for them.
Each time I made one of these police reports, I lost hope. I found the process of reporting demoralising and confusing. By this point it had been seven months since Greg breached his anti-harassment order – why weren’t police arresting him? Were they taking this seriously? When would I hear from them? In some cases after reporting a letter, I wouldn’t hear back from the police for another month. I felt so unprotected. The mornings I visited the police station to report were some of the worst and hardest of my life.
Meanwhile, the emails escalated. Some were relatively harmless but seemed calculated to remind me that Greg knew details about my life, including where I worked: he made dinner reservations under my name at several restaurants around Wellington; signed me up to donate blood and volunteer; emailed bands to request they play at my old workplace; signed me up for WOFs at various garages around the city (with sexually explicit notes in the “requested services” section); and emailed tattoo artists requesting ridiculous tattoos like a PETA tramp stamp (PETA is a vegan organisation; for some reason the fact that I’m vegan was often a focal point of Greg’s harassment.)
Other emails were more overtly threatening. “I’ve hurt the ones I love the most in anger. What do you think I’ll do to someone who I hate? Your suffering will make me jizz I’m not kidding I jerk it to torture I’ll enjoy raping you,” read one message. Another said, “Your mum owns [redacted home address], I can kill her whenever I want.”
Between December 2022 and August 2023, there wasn’t a single day I didn’t receive messages like these. My self-loathing and body dysmorphia became paralysing, to the point that I had to work from home because I couldn’t face getting dressed. My memory and organisation problems worsened, and I reduced my visits to my mum’s house after the letters started arriving in her letterbox. I became very isolated and extremely depressed during this time: during the winter months in particular, I woke up every day nauseous, with a pit in my stomach and an ache in my chest. I constantly felt sick. I cried so often – most mornings before work – that I had a chronic rash on my face. Last year was the worst year of my life.
It felt like there was no end in sight. I couldn’t imagine a life without Greg’s harassment in it.
‘This is the final straw’
In August, Greg was finally arrested – but not before putting me through the most terrifying few days of my life.
At 8.27 pm on August 2 2023, Greg generated another “name” email to me on the Dental Council website. The first name was “36[Redacted]StreetStabYourCunt”, which is my old workplace, and the last name was “43[Redacted]StreetRapeYourMum”, which is my mum’s address.
Around 3am the next morning, I received the following salutation: “Hi ImComingSoonBitchYoureGivingMeNoChoice”.
At 5.19 am, Greg submitted the following message to the Mental Health Foundation website using my name and email address:
“I am homocidal [sic] and suicidal i don’t know how to talk about it with anyone and im so worried i want to kill everyone at my work i have this desire to end my life in the craziest way possible but i think i should just kill myself to stop it please help.”
The same morning, while I was getting ready for work, a police officer called me to say that MBIE had reported a form message received through their website under my name threatening people at my old workplace. The officer told me the threats were so graphic he wouldn’t be repeating them. My former colleagues were advised not to go into the building that day, and I had to contact my old manager and attempt to briefly explain the situation. I cannot express how mortifying and stressful this was.
That evening, the following messages rolled in by email:
Hi Howareyousodumb Yourrealizeiwontbeinjail4life
Dear ThePoliceAreAlreadyInvolvedYouStupid-BitchAreYouActuallyRetarded?
GoodByeZeni WhenThisSituationComesToAResolve
(I later learned that, following the MBIE threats to my old workplace, police officers visited Greg to perform a welfare check. I assume this welfare check alerted Greg to the fact that I was reporting his emails to the police, hence the above messages, which struck me as a serious failing by the police, putting me at greater risk.)
I forwarded all of these emails to the police with “Important” in the subject line, and messages like “I’m getting really anxious about these” and “This one is really threatening. Not feeling good.”
These emails were a breaking point for me. I didn’t tell my mum about the threat involving her because I didn’t want to scare her, but all night I waited with my phone ringer on loud for a call from her or the police. My guts were churning and I didn’t sleep a wink. Even recalling it now makes me feel sick.
The next night, a Friday, I was getting ready to go out with a friend I hadn’t seen in years when a police officer called me to conduct a welfare check, after someone from the Mental Health Foundation reported “my” message to the police. Luckily the officer who called was familiar with my case and put two and two together, but when I hung up the phone, I cried and cried. Then I finished getting dressed, cleaned up my mascara, and went into the living room to meet my friend.
On August 9, 2023, during the day while in a work hui, I received an Instagram DM from one of Greg’s burner accounts. “SO ONE FINAL TIME: if you don’t message me back… then this is the final straw. You’ll be the horrible person you’ve shown me to be and whatever consequences you suffer is on you.”
The same day, the police finally arrested Greg, presumably because, since the beginning of the month, I had been begging one of the officers involved in my case to help me – constantly expressing how scared I felt and forwarding him the above threats. I expected Greg’s arrest to herald a period of relief, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Greg was charged with two counts of Causing Harm by Posting Digital Communication, and one count of Criminal Harassment. None of the offline harassment – the letters and the human faeces – were brought before the courts by the police, and hundreds of harassing emails weren’t brought to the court’s attention.
Greg’s first court date was set for September 5 2023, and his bail conditions were clear: he couldn’t contact me, directly or indirectly, nor go to the suburb of Mornington.
This struck me as another major failing of the justice system. If you recall, all of Greg’s offline harassment targeted my mum’s house, as he didn’t know I had moved to a flat in Mornington. However, the bail conditions narrowed my whereabouts down from potentially anywhere in the Wellington region to the tiny Mornington suburb, comprised of only a few streets. My heart was in my throat.
The week before Greg’s first court date, my mum received another letter in her mailbox, which said, among other things, “Put a rope around your inbred cancerous nazi neck and kill yourself” and “Does your scab mouthed aspergers pustule ravaged daughter like eating her illiterate autistic brother’s shit off your impotent nazi cock”. I reported the letter to the police, but remember the officer telling me it wasn’t a breach of Greg’s bail conditions because (a) it wasn’t addressed to me – it targeted my stepdad – and (b) my mum’s address was not included in his bail conditions. This struck me as wrong and nonsensical. Greg’s bail conditions explicitly prohibited him from contacting me indirectly, and also from threatening or using violence.
On September 5, 2023, Greg pleaded not guilty.
At 7.30am the next morning, my mum called me to say that more human faeces had been left on her letterbox overnight, meaning Greg must have left it after his court appearance that day. We were gobsmacked.
‘You’re disgusting, you’re such a sack of shit’
At a hearing on November 29, 2023, Greg changed his plea to guilty. I was elated. His “not guilty” plea had felt like a slap in the face, and I was relieved he would face some kind of accountability. His sentencing hearing was set for February 1, 2024.
Over the summer months that followed, I reflected on the preceding eight years of my life with Greg in it, entirely against my will. For my entire adult life and much of my adolescence, he tormented me. Everything I set out to achieve (finishing high school, completing bachelor’s and honours degrees, embarking on my career) and every ordinary event I experienced (heartbreak, loss, illness, insecurity, family struggle) I did under the weight of Greg stalking me.
Greg has sapped so much joy from my life, and I have carried such deep, deep shame about my body. Since high school, I have swum in the ocean only a handful of times, because the thought of walking from my towel to the sea, with my “disgusting, mutilated” body in full view of everyone, was debilitating. Greg’s words echoed in my mind and merged with my inner monologue: you’re disgusting, you’re such a sack of shit, I fucking hate you so much. This tainted every aspect of my life.
At a time of life when most people have expanding social worlds – uni and young adulthood – my social world constricted. Greg twisted my self-image to the point that I struggled to meet people in person – professionally, and even close friends – because I thought people looked at me and saw the person Greg described: disgusting, violated, evil.
The isolation was harrowing.
It’s hard to explain how insidious and all-consuming stalking is. Greg was with me while I was eating dinner with mum; while I was showering; while I was driving with my friends. I couldn’t lock my door and feel safe. He was there, wherever I was, every day, describing my sexual torture in bloody detail.
I have spent years in fight or flight mode.
Greg didn’t break me. I have a great life, and I adore the people in it. But as I waited for him to be sentenced in February, I felt myself change. For years, I downplayed what Greg did to me. I didn’t want to be dramatic. I spent a long time feeling sorry for him. Now, I felt angry.
On February 1, 2024, Greg was sentenced to supervision for 12 months and community detention for six months, a sentence which struck me as insultingly light given the years of torment Greg had put me through (he could have received two years’ imprisonment for each of the charges). Before sentencing, and against the advice of both the judge and victim support officer, I opted to make a victim impact statement which detailed the full duration and extent of Greg’s harassment, given such a limited picture had been presented to the court by police. If I hadn’t done this, I believe Greg would have got off even lighter. Once again, I felt like I was doing the police’s job for them.
Given Greg’s disregard of the criminal harassment order, I wasn’t confident that his conviction would make him leave me alone. My worst fears were realised as I received another threatening “name” email just hours after leaving the courtroom.
On March 10, my mum found a letter in her letterbox in the same handwriting as all the others. “KILL YOURSELF CHILD RAPIST COWARD WHITE TRASH ASPERGERS BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS SHIT EATING RAPIST CUNT”
I reported the letter to the police and Greg’s probation officer, along with subsequent threatening emails from Greg which have arrived in my inbox sporadically since February. Nothing came of those reports, as far as I know. In May, I made a complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Authority (IPCA), which found no wrongdoing on the part of the police, and I have contacted MPs about my experience, none of whom replied.
A few weeks ago, my stepdad was walking through Aro Park, which he does a handful of times every day, and noticed a large amount of paper littering the park. On closer inspection, he recognised Greg’s crazy, hostile words and handwriting scribbled over every piece of rubbish. He collected all he could find into a rubbish bag. When, a few days later, he discovered even more similarly scrawled paper and cardboard scattered around the back of the community centre, he mentioned it to the staff, only to be directed to a whole wheelie bin full that had already been gathered up – enough to fill two large rubbish sacks.
The full-circle nature of this latest stunt amazes and depresses me. Aro Park, the very same location Greg first declared his love for me almost nine years ago, is now the site of his continued, carefully planned harassment, this time via anonymous litter; just skirting the edge of plausible deniability, as he did with the emails.
What do you do when you have exhausted every legal avenue for protecting yourself and your family? When you have spent your entire young adulthood being tormented by someone who won’t leave you alone?
Greg continues to harass my family and me to this day.