My Stalker Was Female — And My Former Best Friend
I was 18, and three weeks into my first semester of college. After talking on the phone with my mom, she convinced me to talk to campus police. My roommate offered to come with me. I had only been down to the office twice so far — the basement of the academic center held the tiny station where I took my ID picture and bought a laundry card. But now I had to go there again, and not for something normal.
I printed all of the messages and evidence on my roommate’s printer. We took the walk over to the station, my heart pounding in my ears, my throat, and my hands shaky. This was not what I thought would happen during my freshman year.
When I walked in, there was someone at the front desk behind the glass. He looked at me, smiled, and asked how he could help me.
“Yeah, I’m actually here because I think my former best friend is stalking me, and she’s claiming to be enrolled here next semester and I don’t know what to do,” I said, my voice shaking.
Believe it or not, we actually used to be best friends.
I met Madison (name changed, obviously) through the internet when I was in eighth grade. She was two years older than me and lived in a different state, but we shared the same passion for music and loved going to small concerts for up-and-coming bands. We became friends on Twitter, and she was someone I could fall back on when I started high school and lost all my middle school friends. We Skyped all the time and obsessed over our favorite bands. It was a great friendship, even though we didn’t actually meet in person until almost two years later.
Madison and I worked on a website together, going to concerts, interviewing the bands, and posting them online. I was a loner in high school, so going to concerts where I could meet these musicians and hang out with them made me feel special. Like I had a place in this world. Interviewing was how I got into journalism. When we went to concerts together (our moms driving us), the musicians would recognize us and knew we were friends. We convinced our parents to let her come up to my house for a weekend in the summer, and had a blast.
But when I started my junior year of high school, something felt different. I could tell she was lying about some things. Madison would tell me she was hanging out with a band or exchanged texts with a band guy, but never had any proof. I started to doubt everything she had done, wondering if she made it up to sound cooler and make me like her. We had a fight once because she pretended she had a boyfriend, so was this happening again?
Then we had an unrelated argument, where I called her immature and told her to grow up. We didn’t speak for a few days.
And one day, I got an email from a band guy.
In the email, it said he had read the letter I sent him and wanted to reach out to tell me things would be okay. I had been through some rough patches in high school, and this specific band and musician had helped me through it. He felt like a big brother to me and I was incredibly thankful for everything he had done. So naturally, I emailed him back and we had a conversation.
Until the conversation flipped to Madison. He discussed our fight and mentioned how we should talk again. I started getting suspicious. I read over the emails again, noting how there were some spelling errors, and realized the email was different due to him being “locked out” of his account. The numbers at the end of his email were my birthday.
I immediately messaged him on Twitter, and was surprised to get a quick response. He said no, that he wasn’t emailing me, and wanted to know who was impersonating him.
I burst into tears, knowing it was Madison. She tricked me. It was all fake, a ploy to get me back. I declared our friendship was over and immediately blocked her on all platforms. I washed my hands of the experience and tried to start over.
Two years later, I started college. Madison and I never spoke again, sometimes seeing each other at concerts but always staying away. The bands we saw knew we were no longer friends, but it was all good. The interview website had fizzled out, as I let her have it and she did nothing with it after.
A week after starting school, my roommate and I made some friends with the other freshmen in our dorm. After not having any friends in high school, it was refreshing to have other people to talk to.
When I got a text from one of the guys living upstairs, I thought nothing of it and exchanged texts. But then it started to get weird. He asked me some odd questions and made it seem like he was flirting with me, but when we saw each other he never acknowledged me. It was confusing. I tried to avoid him.
Two weeks after starting school, something even stranger happened. An Instagram account began following me, called “Hot or Not”, and had some pictures of the other students to rate them. I had a picture on there that said I was “kinda hot”. What struck me was that the students featured were all freshmen, who lived in my dorm. Word spread around campus, and enough people reported it that the page was taken down. Nobody knew who created it. I confronted the guy, who said he had nothing to do with it.
And then he mentioned Madison.
He said she had contacted him and wanted to be friends with him. In the past year or so, I noticed she had been slowly trying to get in contact with me. She used multiple social media accounts to follow me on Twitter, and every time I blocked her, another one would pop up. She had even tried to hack into my Twitter, my Facebook, and my Gmail account before. When I checked Madison’s Twitter and Instagram, she was following many people who I went to high school with and some college students as well. I was incredibly confused, and wondered what the hell was going on.
I told the guy not to talk to her because she was crazy, and then unblocked her on Facebook so I could message her. Madison claimed she wanted to be friends again, and then told me she would be headed to my college in the spring, studying the same major.
This seemed super suspicious, so I promptly texted another friend and asked for the guy’s number. It was different.
I knew it. Madison was the one texting me this whole time.
She had created the “Hot or Not” page, pretended to be this guy (who was totally innocent and I felt terrible for making an assumption), and was now claiming to be coming to my school while also following my real-life friends on social media.
This is when I talked to my mom and decided to report her to campus police. I wrote a statement, handed over my evidence, and told them I was scared. I knew Madison was unlikely to do anything physical, such as attacking me, but I did not want to see her on campus. They assured me they would check the registrar to see if she was enrolled, and if not, she would not be allowed on campus. She would be considered trespassing if spotted.
Thankfully, she wasn’t enrolled. But I was constantly on edge.
When you have a stalker, you can never just relax. You doubt everything, and wonder if you’re just being crazy. You think you might be overreacting, but you genuinely have no idea what could happen or when.
For the rest of my freshman year, I stayed alert. I monitored my friends’ social media followers, advising them to block her if she came up. Any new follower I had was checked for any proof it was her. By now, I was fully aware of her social media diction. I knew which words she always misspelled and which words wouldn’t be capitalized. If any social media account popped up that had a similar style, I blocked it. I didn’t want her to know what I was doing. She just kept making new accounts to try and follow me.
After my first roommate moved out and a new roommate moved in, I warned her about Madison. I made a mistake one night and tagged my roommate in a tweet. An hour later, Madison followed her. She was promptly blocked, but we were worried. So worried that when in the middle of the night, we heard loud knocking on our door and called campus police. It turned out to be our suite mate asking us to unlock the bathroom door, but after already experiencing a Madison situation earlier that night we were paranoid. We spent the rest of the night sleeping in a “safe room” on campus — for anyone who needed a place to stay temporarily so nobody knew where you were.
At one time, I got strange texts from another number, but I knew it was Madison and told her to stay away. It was frustrating that she wouldn’t stop, and that nothing could be done because it was all online. I just had to keep blocking her.
Eventually, she stopped trying to get in contact. She moved to a different part of the country and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I still keep an eye out for anything strange, but I know that I’m okay. For now.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky that I never worried I would be attacked by Madison or physically stalked. My stalker was entirely online. Besides the one time I thought she would be on campus, I knew in the back of my mind she was too much of a coward to show her face. Unfortunately, not everyone has that experience.
My stalker was my best friend. Most stalkers are a partner, and the stalking is usually physical. 16 percent of women have experienced stalking in their lifetime, and only 14 percent of those women experienced unwanted online contact from their stalker through email, messaging and social media. A victim is much more likely to be stalked through threatening physical harm, damaging personal property, or simply being approached in public when not wanted.
And usually, a stalker is male. 85 percent of women who said they were stalked said it was by a man. Only seven percent of women were stalked by a female.
Do I wish this had never happened, and that I had never been friends with her? Absolutely. But at the same time, I know that I would have never made other friends or had great concert experiences without her. When I reminisce, I love the good memories but wish they weren’t tainted by the bad.
But I’m also glad that this experience has helped me grow up. I would absolutely never wish something like this on someone. It has helped me realize that I was lucky for it to only be from a friend and online, rather than in person.
The best advice I can give to anyone who has experienced stalking is this: always trust your instinct. Of the times that she had Catfished me, I doubted everything. I wasn’t sure if this was the right person or I remembered the other stupid shit she had pulled when we were friends. I trusted my gut and followed up with people to see if this person was real. Madison had done many questionable things when we were still friends, and afterwards. She repeated her wrongdoings, thinking I wouldn’t notice.
But here’s the thing: I trusted my instinct, and I paid attention. And I got through it. You can too.
