Girlfriend Being Harassed by Ex-Boyfriend

mightyspacepope

Hey all,

My girlfriend is being harassed by her ex-boyfriend. They broke up a bit over 2 months ago. She and I began dating a few weeks after that. For the first few weeks afterward, he would occasionally call her or text her multiple times in a night (sometimes about 20 texts). They were never threatening toward her, but he would call her derogatory names (ie. slut) and continued after she made it clear she didn't want him to contact her. During this timeframe, he also told her he was going to message me on Facebook and tell her they'd been hooking up the whole time and she was a liar, etc. At first I thought he may have messaged the wrong person, but I recently found the message in my Facebook spam message folder.

He also made threats against me (in texts to her, never in a message to me) saying he'd beat me up and would take a baseball bat to me. I considered this to be macho blustering. I do not believe at all that he would actually do something like that.

I told her at the time that she should probably go file a report with the police, as a means of dissuading him from continuing this behavior. She chose not to, thinking that he'd cool down and it would stop. She blocked him from all forms of social media. It seemed like things did stop, for a while.

She noticed this week that he left a comment on one of her Instagram photos of the two of us (apparently she thought defriending him would block him) calling her a slut. Against my recommendations, she commented back saying how it was pathetic that he was still continuing with this childish behavior and told him to leave her alone. At this point, he mentioned that he just wanted to remind her that she was a slut. I urged her once again to file a police report, but she again chose not to and deleted the picture to get rid of the comments (her friends and family follow her on Instagram, so she didn't want them to see it). I urged her not to do this, since it would be a recent example of harassment that she could show when she made her report.

Last night, someone sent me an anonymous message on Facebook (I think someone made a new anonymous profile, then deleted it after sending the message). Again, it was saying she's a cheater, etc. We have no way of proving it was him, but it seems plausible.

Now she wants to make a police report. I went down to the station today (she had to work). None of the office staff were there and it said you could use the white phone in case of an emergency, but I didn't think this really fit the bill. We're going to head down Monday to take care of it.

Mostly, I'm just trying to find out how the process here is going to work. She doesn't necessarily want to press any sort of charges or get a restraining order, but she wants to have some sort of documentation if he continues his behavior. Is this what happens when you file a police report? Will the police then contact him? She has all of his text messages saved from his tirades in the past couple of months.

ceres

She did end up blocking him on facebook, right?

She will probably need to block his number, if she hasn't, because otherwise there's nothing to stop him texting her (as far as I'm aware) without a restraining order.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong on that.

mightyspacepope

He is blocked on Facebook, yes. He's also now blocked on instagram.

ceres

My story:

I was friends with a guy for a while who harassed me quite a bit, mostly on messenger programs (thankfully I was never close enough to him that he actually had my phone number). We'd been friends for years IRL, and then I moved away for a while. It started out just seeing each other online. He was married and unhappy, I was in a terrible, terrible relationship and unhappy, and we would talk. I think maybe he got the impression that something would happen? I don't know. I made it pretty clear a few times that he was married to my friend and I didn't want to do anything that might hurt her, not to mention the fact that I was in a relationship no matter how awful, and it just wasn't going to happen. We lost contact for a little while, and by the time we started talking again I was out of the old relationship and into a happy one, and he was still married and unhappy (and increasingly alcoholic). I would talk about how I was getting married, he would talk about how he'd always liked me. If he was drunk he'd start telling me how pretty I was, how he'd wanted a relationship with me, etc. I would tell him I didn't want to hear it, and he shouldn't say anything he wouldn't want his wife to see him say. The next day he would apologize and tell me he was just drunk EVERY TIME. It was about once a week or so, and I was tired of it, and I didn't know if I should tell his wife or what, but I really didn't want to get involved.

After a while, he started to get belligerent and so those night he got really drunk (an increasing number of nights per week) he would hurl insults, the next day apologizing and telling me he was drunk, and he's not usually like that, and to give him another chance. Then one day he told me that his wife thought he was cheating on her with someone, and he said that actually I was coming onto him and trying to get him to cheat, so if she didn't talk to me anymore that's why. He said this as though it were the most obvious, natural response in the world. I told him never to talk to me again, and should have blocked him then.

One day, a month or two later, he contacted me again and just started with the insults. I fought with him for a while, told him to get help or get bent, and finally did block him. The next day he messaged me with a different account to do the apology thing and I blocked it. He messaged me a few more times over the next couple years, always like "HEY IT'S [name] LET'S TALK." I blocked them all without response. He tried to friend me on facebook and I blocked it. One day about two years ago he messaged me on yet another account saying "This is [name], I don't drink anymore, I've changed." I told him to prove it by never contacting me again, blocked him, and I haven't heard from him since. I have, however, heard from a close friend who happened to meet him around that time, and he was still married and actually did have an affair with her. One day they were texting and she told him she was tired and going to take a nap, so he called the police and told them she said she was committing suicide. She had a 7-year-old who was home when the police banged on the door, and that's when she realized he was completely insane and she didn't even want him around her daughter. He took it poorly, told his wife pretty much what he told her about me, and it cost her a giant group of friends.

Sometimes I still think about contacting his wife (who used to be a close friend of mine) and telling her he's a skeeze, but last time I tried to talk to her about him it was about his painfully obvious alcoholism, and she gave me a response that amounted to "how dare you, he always speaks so nicely of you" so I gave up talking to her about things at that point.

It was kind of an upsetting experience as a whole. He never physically threatened me, so I don't think that going to the police would have gotten me anywhere with him anyway, and it turned out that in the end persistent blocking was enough to get rid of him, as upsetting as it was. Because there are physical threats here (against you rather than her, so you should definitely go with her and ask what you would need to do if you chose to do something down the line), I think going to the police is appropriate. Does he have any kind of drinking problem where these messages and threats and things could be happening while he's drinking, or is he just a jerk?

mightyspacepope

I think it's a little bit of both. She has said that she's heard from mutual friends that he's been drinking a lot more since the break-up.

Karrmer

What state are you in? In California this would be generally handled as "annoying/harassing phone calls" which basically means they document what occurred and then she uses this report to have his phone number blocked. In most states what he is doing is not criminal until he makes a direct violent threat.

Inquisitor77

Either way, blocking him from everything, cutting him out of your lives, and not responding to any of his communications is probably the best approach. On the side, I would recommend keeping track of everything he has been sending you guys and building a police report, just to be safe. But those two things are not mutually incompatible, and both should probably be done.

To answer your question, the ex isn't going to be contacted just because a police report is filed. However, as with everything legal, the details will vary by jurisdiction. Your best bet is to just go in and ask questions there.

mightyspacepope

This is in New Jersey.

ceres

She MIGHT, depending on how she feels about the whole thing at this point, respond to his next communication with "If I hear from you again I will go to the police." That may or may not be a good idea depending on a whole lot of things that I don't know about the two of them, but I figured I would mention it just in case.

mightyspacepope

I actually considered calling him and saying something along those lines, that if he continues to contact her, we will be going to the police and that we have a record of all his communications thus far. I'm not sure if it's the best idea to have her communicate with him, as it seems like he's really trying to get her attention, albeit in a negative way.

ceres

Yeah definitely don't you do it, because you're a third party and really not so involved. Most everything has gone through her, so she would really need to be the one to do that, I think.

Dr. Frenchenstein

i would think you calling him and telling him that might set him off. He is just mad and bitter it sounds like. cutting off all the ways he can cry for attention is probably the best policy, but there is no harm in getting this behavior on paper with the police.

Namrok

I had a psycho ex girlfriend that wouldn't stop harassing me, and my new girlfriend. The best thing really is to block everything, respond to nothing, and don't feed the troll. I had to block this women on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Gmail. I had to block her cell phone number. All my friends had to block her. My girlfriend at the time was getting harassed so she had to block the ex.

But really all you could do was block her. Because people like that need the conflict. They need someone to stand up to them for them to vent all their misdirected rage at. If nobody lets themselves be a target, eventually they run out of steam.

But oh is it ever hard. I think it's harder for the people around the target than the target themself. At least the target knows this person is crazy, and has learned from experience to just ignore it. Everyone else who gets pissed off on their behalf still believes something pro-active can be done about it.

Pure Din

Karrmer wrote: »

What state are you in? In California this would be generally handled as "annoying/harassing phone calls" which basically means they document what occurred and then she uses this report to have his phone number blocked. In most states what he is doing is not criminal until he makes a direct violent threat.

If her cell phone is Verizon she can block up to five phone numbers from the Verizon website, without any explanation or police report needed (though she might still want them anyway). I don't know if this is the same for other carriers though.

Melinoe

Other carriers might let you block numbers if you call them. One of my friends had an ex girlfriend who was following him around and calling him and texting him all of the time, and he just called customer support, explained the situation, and the person on the phone blocked her number no problem. I think the person sympathized with him so it may depend who you get but it's worth trying if it comes down to it.