Editor’s Note:
The names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of the people involved.
It’s April 22, 2000. Adam Wright is sitting behind his desk in an elite law firm. His view of the city is staggering and sweeping; it’s a perfect spring day, and the city is warming and blooming with the earliest signs of the season. He recently found out that he passed the Tennessee bar exam, and life seems pretty good. His phone rings, and he answers it.
Adam Wright.”
“Hi Adam, this is Mike Jones at the Lincoln Mercury dealership. We just need to get your approval and signature and we can send your wife home in this new Navigator.”
“Excuse me?” Adam gulps, his face contorted into a look of disbelief.
“Your wife came here to buy a new car. She test-drove a Lincoln Navigator this morning, and now we just need your signature and approval so that we can go ahead with the financing.”
“But I’m not married.”
“Excuse me?”
And so it goes. For several months Adam has been dealing with situations like this, but never so extreme. The woman had tried to buy furniture at a local retailer using his name; she tried to open an account at a top-end clothing store in his name. Once she even told a real estate agent that she and her husband wanted to purchase the $1.5 million home that the agent had just shown her in a historic neighborhood, but even then she hadn’t made it as far as discussing financing.
Adam explained to the car dealer that the woman was not his wife, that she was not even his friend, that she was a delusional woman who seemed truly to believe that they had a relationship, even though they had never so much as dated. He explained that she was his stalker.
“She and the dealer had gone for a test drive,” Adam recalls. “She said she wanted the car and that they should finance it in my name. At the dealership she told them that her husband was a lawyer and that they had two kids and that she wanted to take the car home and her husband would come in on Monday to pay for it.”
Adam stops telling the story and looks down. “Do I sound stupid?” he asks. “I’m not scared of her or anything, but...you know, do I sound stupid?”
According to Seema Zeya, senior program director of the Stalking Resource Center at the National Center for Victims of Crime, men are often too ashamed to report their stalkers. “We haven’t gotten a lot of calls from male stalking victims,” she says. “They’re usually not really comfortable because they feel embarrassed and they’re afraid that they won’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, they often are not taken seriously when they do report the crimes. Also, men have complained to us that there are not any support groups in their area for male victims of stalking crimes.”
Professional men are not supposed to be the victims of stalkers. Women get stalked. Men who pick up strange women in bars get stalked. Men who cheat on their wives with irate bunny-boilers get stalked. But the truth of the matter is that anyone can fall victim to a stalker—all it takes is an innocent, or not-so-innocent, encounter with the wrong person, and a person’s life is suddenly transformed into a living hell for weeks, months, years.
Adam is hesitant to talk about it at first. He laughs off some of the woman’s crazier stunts, trying to find humor in her behavior, trying to downplay the severity of her actions. He says that in retrospect he can see where he misstepped, where she may have gotten the wrong idea; he understands there are things he could have said and done differently. Now, with the benefit of a restraining order, articles and books written for stalking victims, and advice from law-enforcement professionals, Adam can see his mistakes.
“I had known Karina for several years,” he says, breathing in deeply. He picks up a magazine off the coffee table in his home, flips through it absently, puts it down, then continues the story. “I hadn’t seen her for a while, and then I ran into her one day downtown in 1998 and had a conversation with her. Then I didn’t see her again for several months. One night I was meeting another friend of mine for drinks and she brought Karina with her. After that Karina started doing several friends of mine’s hair and one of them gave me a gift certificate for a haircut with Karina as a birthday present. So Karina did my hair that first time, and occasionally I’d go back for her to cut it again.
“One time when I saw her she showed me a piece of paper that said she was being sued. She didn’t know what to do about it, so I told her to let me take care of it. We took the case pro bono; we had all the interest and attorneys fees knocked off.”
That was Adam’s first mistake—although there’s no way he could have known just how much trouble would result from this simple act of kindness.
Zeya says that three categories of stalkers have been identified by psychologists: simple obsessional, erotomanic, and love obsessional. Simple obsessional stalkers make up 60 to 65 percent of the reported cases, and usually these stalkers have had close or intimate relationships with their victims. Love-obsessional stalkers fantasize about having romantic relationships with their victims, and when they realize that they cannot, they try harder to get noticed. Whether the attention is negative or positive may not matter. John Hinckley Jr., who stalked Jodie Foster and eventually shot President Reagan, was a love-obsessional stalker.
Erotomanic stalkers, as Karina most likely is, constitute about 2 to 5 percent of all reported stalking cases. These people, Zeya says, “have the delusional belief that a relationship exists between themselves and their victims. They often target people with a higher socioeconomic position, and they may resort to threats and intimidation when they are rejected.”
Zeya says that the highly publicized stalking of David Letterman involved an erotomanic. Margaret Ray was so convinced that she was the late-night television show host’s wife that she broke into his house and when the police came to arrest her, she insisted that she had a right to be there. Ray was arrested numerous times for trespassing on Letterman’s property, and one time police caught her driving Letterman’s Porsche around New York. She served time in both a state prison and a mental institution during the 10 years she stalked the celebrity. A sad end to a sad story, Ray committed suicide in 1998.
It didn’t take long for Adam’s own situation to get stranger and messier. In a matter of weeks, Karina went from being a casual acquaintance to being an inescapable presence. After taking on her case, Adam and a few other attorneys in his firm began going to her for haircuts. Sometimes she would come by their office to discuss the case with another attorney who was handling it. On these occasions, she would typically stop in Adam’s office to chat, but he did not think anything was unusual.
“You know, a hairstylist is kind of like a bartender—you talk to them,” Adam says. “One time while she was doing my hair, she was saying that she didn’t know how she would be able to put her young son through college. I told her not to worry, that my grandfather had put several kids that weren’t his through college and that he might be able to help her out. I told her that she was lucky to have me as a friend, that I could help her. In hindsight, I think this is where I went wrong. I think she started to take comments like this as proof that I was her knight in shining armor. She began to say things like, 'You’re going to take care of me, my mother, and my son.’ ”
An easygoing guy, Adam dismissed her words as the sort of thing that single mothers in dire straits say. She made other remarks too that Adam now realizes were warning signs.
“When I first met her, she told me that she had a brother that was killed in a car accident and his name was Adam,” he says, his face and speech becoming excited with the memory. “She said that she thought that I had been sent to be her guardian angel. For a long time I forgot that she had said that, but now I see that she thinks I was destined to be in her life.”
During this time he began to socialize with Karina and another friend of hers, Samantha. The three of them would go out for drinks, or just hang out in each other’s homes from time to time. But it wasn’t until Samantha warned him that Adam realized Karina’s statements were serious.
“I had been hanging out with Karina and Samantha for about three months before I realized that Karina was crazy,” says Adam, exhaling deeply and settling back into his couch. “Samantha pulled me aside and said, 'This girl is really crazy. She’s really into you and she’s thinking that you two are going to get married. She told me about you when I first met her and she said that you were planning on proposing to her.’ So that’s when I began to pull away. That’s when the separation began.”
At this point Adam acts like he’s bored with the story, like he thinks it’s no big deal. He rushes through the details, speeds over important parts as though he’s embarrassed by it. He constantly mentions where he went wrong, what he should and should not have said. He downplays her actions and tries to rationalize her behavior. Even though at 6 feet, 4 inches, and 200 pounds he far outsizes her approximately 5-foot, 5-inch, 120-pound frame, even though he has a piece of paper issued by the police department that says she must stay away from him, he knows it’s not over. He knows she’s sick, that she can’t be reasoned with, that no one can convince her of the truth.
“Then I just stopped talking to her, stopped hanging around her,” he says, slowing down as he tells this part of the story. “Samantha and I both stopped calling her when we realized that she was crazy. [Karina] started calling me and telling me that Samantha was a backstabber and that she was evil. At that time she was focusing on Samantha.”
In time, Karina’s fixation shifted from Samantha to Adam. She began to call him with greater frequency, and her messages became angrier with each call that he did not return. Listening to the messages, you can hear Karina losing control. One message might have her professing her love for him and discussing his love for her. The next might feature her pained voice agonizing over why he hasn’t called her back. Another would have her lecturing him about how couples should treat each other, building up to messages like these: “Motherfucker, you punk bitch, why won’t you talk to me?” and “Bitch, you better leave town because I know where you live and I’m going to have you fucked up!”
Such threats are fairly typical, according to Zeya. “Twenty-five to 35 percent of stalking cases do escalate into violence. In a survey published by the FBI in 1998, 80 percent of those stalked by an intimate acquaintance were physically assaulted by their stalker while 30 percent became victims of sexual assault.”
“So that’s when it really began,” Adam continues, the muscles in his face tensing as he once again speeds through the story, discussing the minor details at length and only glancing over the particularly frightening facts.
“She showed up at my parents’ house a couple of times unannounced. At this point she didn’t know where I was living but she knew where my parents lived. One time she told them that she didn’t understand why I wasn’t there because we had made plans to meet there.”
Karina’s actions grew more bizarre after that. She insisted to Adam’s mother that Adam spoke to her through the radio and had told her to meet him there.
“She would always listen to the slow-song stations, and she thought that I was communicating with her through the music,” he explains, now so accustomed to this fact that he no longer sees the absurdity of it. “She thought that I was controlling what songs were being played to send messages to her.”
It was during this time that Karina attempted to buy the car in Adam’s name, as well as the furniture and clothes. This was also when she told the real estate agent that she and her husband wanted to buy the $1.5 million house. One day she called Adam and left him a message saying that she had quit her job because she knew she would not need to work once they were married. Curious, Adam called the salon and discovered that she had, in fact, quit her job.
“Around this time I really began to see that she was crazy. One weekend I got a series of calls from her that started on Thursday and ended on Sunday. About 30 calls in all. They ranged from, 'Hi, hubby. This is your wifey,’ to 'I know I’m going to see you tomorrow and I’ll be waiting, so give me a call,’ to 'Why do you talk to me through the radio? Why do you keep doing this to me? I told you to leave me alone.’ ”
Adam stops, takes a drink of the beer in front of him, stares at the sitcom characters acting out their scenes on TV, laughs at some forgotten joke, takes another drink, and leans even farther back into the corner of the couch.
“When she made all those calls that weekend, I just thought she was acting crazy. So I erased her messages, and the next 30 messages she left tended to get a little more violent. She would say things like, 'Motherfucker, you better call me back. I’m going to have you fucked up!’ She used to try to make me think she had friends that she could get to beat me up.”
Zeya says threats such as these often do escalate. The jilted stalker may act on the threat in an attempt to be taken seriously, sometimes taking violent threats to the ultimate end. The FBI estimates that 90 percent of domestic-violence homicides were preceded with stalking and that about 2 percent of all stalking cases result in homicide.
After these calls, Adam decided to take out a restraining order.
“I called her to yell at her for going to my parents’ house and to let her know that I had taken out a restraining order against her. When I told her about the restraining order, she just said, 'That turns me on because it shows that you care.’ ”
While some stalking victims’ groups recommend against taking out protective orders, Zeya says that such measures are not without value. “Restraining orders can be effective if the victim reports a violation of the restraining order to the police,” she explains. “Once it is reported, the police have to vigorously enforce the order. Restraining orders are particularly effective in some jurisdictions because they carry enhanced penalties for violating an order.”
Additionally, in 1994, Congress passed a “full faith and credit” provision that says a protective order issued in one state must be enforced in all states.
Zeya says that while having a protective order can help a victim document the stalker’s conduct, the order alone will not usually cause the stalker to stop. “If a person is obsessed and has violated the restraining order in the past, the order will not necessarily make the victim safe.”
This is a fact Adam has become all too familiar with. Karina still calls him, though not as frequently as she has in the past. Occasionally he thinks he sees her following him, and one night, when his sister was driving his car, Karina followed his sister for about six miles. Adam says that his heart races and he gets tense every time he sees a car like hers.
Taking another sip of his now warm beer, Adam tells of one particularly harrowing encounter with Karina. “I was meeting with a friend in my office—luckily, she was a friend and not a client. We had the office door closed, and Karina just walked in. She walked in and started yelling at me and shoving a photograph in my face. She said, 'Motherfucker, this is what you did to me. Look at what you did to me,’ and she made me look at the picture she was holding. It just showed her sitting on her couch. I have no idea what she meant by that.”
Karina continued yelling at Adam until he picked up the phone and threatened to call the police if she didn’t leave. This did not seem to phase her in the slightest.
“I said, 'If you don’t leave, I’m gonna call the police,’ ” Adam says. “And when I said that, she said, 'Fine, I’ll wait.’ So I told her again that I was really going to call them, and when she didn’t move, I made the call. A couple of attorneys in the firm that knew about her came out and tried to pacify her so she wouldn’t cause too much of a scene, and they also called the building’s security, who came up to escort her to the lobby, where the police picked her up.”
Shaken by the encounter, Adam waited a few minutes and then took the elevator down to watch Karina being placed in the backseat of a police cruiser.
Adam has reported Karina’s recent actions to the police department, where a detective is investigating them under fraud charges because of her attempted purchases. As for her stalking, all that Adam can do is wait for Karina to violate the protective order again, call the police, and file charges.
Zeya says that it is difficult but not impossible for the state to convict someone of stalking. “Every state has laws that criminalize stalking,” she says. “But it’s not an easy case to prove. The victims have to keep all notes and messages. They have to keep a log of all encounters, answering machine tapes; some even install video cameras outside their homes to record the stalker. They have to save any unwanted gifts from the stalker. Basically, the victims have to stalk their stalker to get enough proof.”
Unfortunately for Adam and for other stalking victims, relief will come only after the stalker has harassed them enough—and enough times that can be proven—to the point where the stalker is truly controlling their lives. Until then, Adam can do nothing but wait for Karina’s next move and hope that it’s drastic enough to cause the state to act—but not so drastic as to ruin, or end, his life.
This story originally appeared in the Memphis Flyer, where Rebekah Gleaves is a staff writer.
