'I Will Ruin Him'; How it feels to be stalked

• Published in: The Chronicle of Higher Education 2013-01, Vol.59 (20)
• Main Author: Lasdun, James
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: College teachers; Cyberstalking; Electronic mail systems; Jews; Libel and slander; Novels; Plagiarism; Rape; Writers; Writing
• ISSN: 0009-5982; 1931-1362

First the private attacks had been extended to form that little intimate theater of mortification comprising my colleagues and acquaintances, and now a window had been opened up to the wider world. An ordinary negative review is depressing, but it doesn't flood you with this sense of personal emergency, as if not only your book but your life, or at least that large aura of meaning that accumulates around your life and gives it value, is in imminent and dire peril. [...]if that person has already demonstrably reported those terrible things to your agent, your boss, your colleagues, then why might they not also be in the process of reporting them to your neighbors, your friends, or indeed (as in due course she did) your local police station? I fell prey to the worst imaginings--suspecting increasingly that everyone I spoke to on the phone or ran into in town had heard Nasreen's allegations about me, either directly from her or in the form of rumors set off by some Web posting of hers, and that they were secretly harboring the thought that the soft-spoken Englishman in their midst might be some kind of monster. The fact that I had written a novel several years earlier, The Horned Man, in which a college instructor believes he is being framed for a series of sex crimes, gave the situation a piquancy that didn't escape me, although I was in no condition to enjoy it. [...]he concluded, "I warned her if she contacted you or any of your colleagues ever again, we'd have her arrested for aggravated harassment."