Author's Stalking Story Finds Her at Home Alone With a Man and a Gun

Helen DeWitt, the author of the wonderful novels The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods (seriously! wonderful!), has an essay in the London Review of Books this week about her experience with a stalker. It's a sobering but necessary read.
Woman Gets Six Months in Prison for Stalking Alec Baldwin
Genevieve Sabourin, a 41-year-old actress, has been sentenced to six months in prison for stalking and harassing Alec Baldwin, plus 30 days for contempt of court. Sabourin claims that she and Baldwin had a "brief romance," and she was simply trying to find out why he chose to hit it and then subsequently quit…
Magazine Calls Terrifying Mentally Ill Stalker a 'Lovesick' Victim
A recent magazine feature on a man with Asperger syndrome who's currently in jail for pining after the girl of his dreams — who, in his mother's words, "became a nightmare" since he met her 20 years ago — implies that he's the real victim. The woman he's stalked since middle school feels differently.
Women Are Natural-Born Stalkers, and That Can Be a Good Thing
When you become romantically interested in a guy you just met what's the first thing you do? Google him. Find him on Facebook. You gather intel (a series of photos in which he's seemingly very familiar with a pretty young woman?) which you then analyze (oh, OK, she's just his sister) to create a composite of his life…
How to Avoid Being Defriended on Facebook: Science Unlocks the Secret
Facebook is useful for so many things, and yet mostly what it is good for is providing you with new and technologically advanced ways to feel miserable. One of the most effective weapons Facebook offers in the quest to destroy your self-esteem is the ability of people to defriend each other. Nothing cuts deeper than…
‘Girls Around Me’ Developer Defends Its App’s Freedom to Be Super Creepy
After Foursquare cut off access on Saturday to the charming "Girls Around Me" app that made it possible to view the location of women on a map and their publicly available Facebook data and pictures, app's Russian developer, i-Free Innovations, issued a statement defending its right to streamline predatory stalking.…
Wolf-Whistles and Cat-Calls Still Legal in Europe, Despite What You Might Have Heard
If you're a woman and you've been outside, chances are, someone has whistled, hollered, or muttered "daaaaaaaaaamn" — unsolicited — at you. Street harassment is so prevalent that Hollaback factions have sprung up around the world. Unwanted sexual attention is offensive, irritating, intimidating, depressing and…
Did My Rapist Find Me on Spokeo?
When I was in high school, I was raped. Last year my rapist found where I was, possibly thanks to the detailed information on the directory website Spokeo. The point of this article isn't to scare people, but to share my experience and help other people who have been found through these sites understand that they…
My Scary Encounter With a Stalking Heckler
Part of me thinks it's too soon to be writing about this because I don't think I've completely processed how I feel, but I also think maybe this has happened to other women and I should talk about it in as raw a way as possible. I'm still really embarrassed and ashamed and garbled up inside, but maybe this can start a…
Creepy Cops Use DMV Database to Stalk Ladies
A Minnesota investigation has found that police in the Land of 10,000 lakes are using the state's DMV database like non-cop internet perverts use Facebook — as their own stalking wonderland, a veritable cornucopia of pictures of unsuspecting hotties ripe for the gawking. One woman was horrified to discover that…
Government Shocked By Depressing Rape Statistics We All Learned About in College
Government officials are agog at the results of a survey that found that 1 in 5 women have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and that the number of rapes reported to authorities are dwarfed by the actual number of rapes that occur. Did none of the shocked attend a freshman anti-rape seminar in college?
Hate-Blogging, Window Breaking, Incessant Calls Fail To Win Back Ex-Boyfriend
A woman in Houston is being charged with felony stalking after calling her ex boyfriend over 1,000 times in three months, breaking his kitchen window with a five-foot sword, and documenting her heartbreak on a rambling blog dedicated how she couldn't understand why that goddamn bastard didn't love her anymore.
Dead Weirdo Was Stalking Queen of England This Whole Time
Robert James Moore was simple American with a simple dream — to love and cherish Queen Elizabeth as providence intended. And when Queen Elizabeth wasn't receptive to his amorous overtures, hundreds of "strange and offensive" packages containing tokens of his affection in the form of 600-page letters and obscene…
Woman Calls Ex-Boyfriend 65,000 Times
A 42-year-old Dutch woman was charged with stalking for allegedly calling her ex-boyfriend 65,000 times in the past year. At a hearing, she insisted that they were in a relationship, so the number of calls "wasn't excessive." Aside from the alleged victim, we feel bad for the best friend who had to come up with a…
