As I have (soon to be famously) previously written, predatory people do not show up in the ways it’s always depicted. Yes, I have a friend who was almost straight snatched at the bus stop in the ‘80s when she was a child—someone had been watching her and waiting for the opportunity, but the real way predators operate is usually by pretending to be helpful or nice.
I’ve always written about how my former partner more or less threw me under the bus with a smear campaign starting in—if I had to guess based on when certain persons who showed up later when I was being stalked—in 2023 after I pissed him all the way off by going to Los Angeles to meet Tara Schuster (aka—T$) whose book Buy Yourself the F—king Lilies was my saving grace after Sean died nearly seven years ago.
I remember meeting my oldest daughter’s first therapist. She asked how I “relaxed”. I looked at her like she asked how I did a round-off back handspring. I’m sorry, what is this relaxing you speak of, ma’am? I told her I ran. I thought it was best to not tell her that my technique for relaxing was to mainline wine until everything got soft and fuzzy. I did run. I ran in the most toxic way possible—every day for miles and without stretching properly before or after, and if I didn’t get to run, I had panic attacks. I was doing fine. (Narrator: but she was not fine.)
In October of 2019, two months after I lost Sean, by the grace of Instagram, the book popped up on my feed, and I liked lilies, and Sean had liked for me to buy flowers for him, and she’d worked for Comedy Central, so whatever influenced me, I got that book (such a pretty cover), and it was exactly what I needed. In a life of average if not above average privilege, I didn’t think I was allowed to complain about the things that hurt or to even acknowledge them to myself because other people had always had it worse. That’s the conservative maxim, and with all do respect, that maxim can go fuck itself because it was the reason I didn’t ask for help and nearly blew my goddamn brains out.
T$ helped me realize that just because it could have been worse in terms of both big-T and little-t (ongoing adolescent and unresolved) traumas that I was still allowed to let the hurt things hurt. Oh thank God. And yes—it was that bad. I wasn’t being dramatic…if anything, I wasn’t being dramatic enough…but I’m glad that I have always had a disposition for not over-inflating a situation (looking at you, stalker predators, but I have sought help from a detective, so have the consequences you absolutely deserve) but that goes back to the power of our minds. I digress.
Tara’s second book, Glow in the F—ing Dark, had come out, and because I was a fan on Intsta and I’m on her email list, I saw she was having a signing event in LA. There’s a woman out there who hosts authors at her LA residence for women’s only gatherings, and Tara was going to have one. I had the resources at the time, and I wanted to go. I wanted to personally say thank you to the woman who I credited with saving my life. (Respectfully, this probably bruised the ego of the sociopath who had assaulted me in February of 2023, but meh.) I did something I’d never do to a healthy partner because a healthy partner would encourage, not inhibit my healing—I booked the flight and the event before I told him what I was doing.
I did this—as I have also said, because in the winter of 2020, shortly after we started dating (ugh), I decided to do a project for my nascent Widows Wake Instagram platform. I was going out of my mind. I couldn’t stand to be around people, and I couldn’t stand to be alone. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It was insane. I created a separate Instagram profile, so I wouldn’t saturate my regular platform with grief. People are massively uncomfortable with grief—they want you to “get better” way sooner than you’re ready to—it is a process. Since I lost Jude, I was aware of this. I wanted to go to one of the historic cemeteries in New Orleans and do some photography work and then create stories around that. It was a project to both help me work through my grief and to get me out of just sitting in abject misery.
Because I was just an object to the person I’d (ugh) started dating and because he couldn’t have cared less about me—only how I made him feel, he didn’t bother asking me what my new project was, and I wasn’t inclined to tell him (this was before he almost completely disabled me with ongoing emotional and psychological abuse). I was on the way to New Orleans when he called, and when I answered, he lost his shit that I was traveling without him. He cursed at me, insulted me, and told me I was going to be raped and murdered (FYI—only people who think about doing those things believe they will happen…like what makes you say that bro? It’s called projection for a reason.), and I—dammit—turned around and came home. (This is also why after we broke up, I promptly booked an international trip to Honduras and drove myself to New Orleans for a solo day to enjoy the Creole tomato festival—watch me rewrite history…in permanent ink.)
So, I knew that if I told him before I booked for LA that he’d talk me out of it or find a way to glom onto my travel, and I absolutely did not want to have to fight my way into a harmless choice for my benefit, so I booked the trip. He was pissed. He acted like he was fine, but he was livid, and God knows what he did or destroyed in my house while I was gone because I let him pet-sit. My kids stayed with my parents because he was never any help there, which I’m honestly grateful for because he had no parenting skills whatsoever (he was one who believed that “it’s always been done this way” and “this is who I am—I’ll never evolve”, both of which are massive red flags on the field—kick the ball and run out of the stadium, sis….alas.). I digress (yet again).
But it was around that time that the Andy Sather profile, the fake profile that alerted me to the fact that I was being stalked in the late summer of 2024, attempted to solicit “women only” to attend Hangout Fest and that an eponymous friend of my former SO started following my Traveling with Stories Instagram profile in 2023—a name that would pop up when I Google searched the predator who sexually assaulted me on February 15, 2025 when they showed up at my door on September 26, 2024 when I started freaking out in earnest on the phone to one of my besties because I realized that the “plot” of my stalking was to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl because I’d written a piece on Substack about how Flynn uses characters to show narcissism, not tell. You can read that piece here.
Anyway, so let’s set the scene because I want to get into how predators arrive in your life and how they try to integrate into it—I am in my kitchen on September 26, and it’s just after 9. I’m on the phone with one of my best friends because five days earlier, I had my final conversation with “Andy Sather” on the DMs on FB (screenshots of all of that, for the record, of course). He was solicitous enough to be creepy but not so creepy that if I reported it, I would be taken seriously even though his initial discourse suggested he’d seen me around town and that I was pretty. He’d occasionally ask for inappropriate pics, which I always say “no” to. If I won’t publish it myself, I am not DMing it. (Side bar—ladies, don’t send nudies to dudes—they sell that stuff on the dark web, and respectfully, if anyone is going to make money off of my body, it’s going to be me.) He allegedly was getting a divorce, which is why he couldn’t tell me who he really was.
I’d asked a couple of friends if they thought it was weird, and they agreed that it was very stalkerish, but when I started to piece together the timeline—he started messaging me five weeks after I was ghosted on August 23, the date of the Halfway to Joe Cain block party at Callaghans where he allegedly saw me. He knew nuanced specifics about me—that I always wore toe rings, for example, as well as a very specific thing I said about “all bodies being art”, something that at that time I’d only said to three people at the time and have no track record of having put into writing (I looked, and I found nothing). Exactly four weeks after that, he messaged again on September 20. I started to look at the calendar, and this “countdown” ended up finishing on 11/1, which felt ominous.
Then I put together that his name was an anagram—I asked that—Andy Sather is Andy Hearts. In Gone Girl, the woman Nick has an affair with when he cheats on Amy is Andy Hardy. My name is Amy—we even have the same last name, and I knew, too, that my former SO had been reading my Substack despite bitching any time I asked him to read my writing—Substack saved the receipts for me (screenshot that, too). (You’d think I’d have put two and two together at this point, but I really didn’t think my former partner had the inclination or the resources or the intellectual capacity to pull this off because “they”, whoever “they” were was listening in on my Google Nest devices, which is how they knew exactly when to deploy the predator who would eventually sexually assault me when I was roofied…also, I have children, and I didn’t think anyone who had ever cared (the audacity of me to think such a thing) would put my children in danger.) I was being Gone G-IRLed, and I was having a panic attack.
I was—in the back of my mind—aware that this was my repeating the pattern. I was supposed to be on my own after Sean died and pull myself back together on my own, and I was on my own, and just as I was in 2019 after Sean died, I was once again in hyper-vigilance, and I was paranoid.
So, I’m in the kitchen on the phone freaking the entire fuck out, when there was a knock on the door. I pulled a 10” chef’s knife from the butcher block and glanced out of the door where a ratty little man was standing. I opened the door knife in hand, and he jumped back. “Woah! Why are you holding a knife?”
“I have a stalker. How can I help you?” I deadpanned.
“I need to borrow your phone. Mine’s dead, and I have a friend who’s trying to find my house.”
He pointed up the road to a house across the street that’s five houses down, which has a flat roof on it. I know the house. It’s ugly as homemade sin, and I also know that it’s where the people who destroyed the clubhouse when the person who was trying to reopen the old Linksman Golf Course lived. According to someone who lived across the street—an artist and former teacher of mine with whom I worked on her memoir a few years prior to that time, they also terrorized her, which is part of how I know that there’s a group of people who target single women. She said they’d send red laser lights into her house and would practice dark magic on her. They drove her so insane that she eventually moved out of her home to get away from them, so I knew the house, and I knew it had bad juju.
He alleged he was doing construction on it to fix it up for his ex-wife and her husband, which I thought was weird, but um, okay? (Side bar—the county’s golf course renovation concluded before he ever left that house—if he ever left that house. Like it’s been two years—before this time, I never saw a vehicle at that house—just a trailer of junk in the driveway, which is still there.)
Anyway, I got my phone. He asked me to dial the number, which is a very lawyerly thing to do. I did, and I handed him the phone, and as soon as it rang, a man answered, and a car drove by. That was the guy. How…convenient…he “found the house”.
Afterward, the guy didn’t leave. He started asking me about the stalker, which again—at this point, I was mistakenly concluding that it was the wrong person—it was actually someone I genuinely had liked, but I digress. Then he started calling me sexy—and then—wait for it—he asked if I wouldn’t want to get with the person who was stalking me, like it was romantic.
Guys, fuck to the no. I said, “I just want to help them get the help they need.” And I also said that, “I don’t really see it working out. I’m not sure how those wedding vows would go.” Because yes, even in crisis, I am sarcastic and funny as hell.
Anyway, the predator gave me his number in case I needed construction work, and he thankfully left. He called while I was cooking for my kids, which led to me burning my hand. I contacted another friend who is a doctor, and he advised me to soak my burned hand in an ice bath. But suffice to say—I was terrified. I’d later Google the number I was made to call, and it would come up with the same name as the person who started following my TWS Insta in 2023. Weird but documented. To the files with it.
This person kept trying to “get close” to my family. He’d bring candy over for my kids, and he’d call, trying to solicit dates to Top Golf, which I was like, ugh, no. I wasn’t as good at saying “no” at that point and deflected by telling the cretin that he’d have to pay for childcare for a date. He was predatory and creepy, but I was still too “nice” to say how I really felt—that he was being a predator and to go fuck himself. He had no sense of boundaries whatsoever, and he’d try to be “handsy” if he ever got close. I told him to stop, and he said, “This is just how I am with all of my friends,” and I said, “I don’t care. I am telling you what my boundaries are.”
Obviously, I would go on to block him. He assaulted me in February of 2025 when I’d gotten roofied at the Piano Bar on Dauphin Street, and by the grace—made it home. However, I more or less passed out in the footwell of my Jeep, and the next thing I remember was being carried to his truck, then I remembered waking up the next morning. My shirt was off, and he was behind me dry-humping me.
In my recounting it the detective, I said that I didn’t believe I’d been raped because everything else was intact, and I didn’t feel any different. But who knows—like I said, he’d been dry-humping me, and I know a micro penis when I feel one. Ewe. It took tremendous effort to fully wake up and shake off the effects of the drug, the entire time he was constantly trying to touch me and kiss at my shoulders. I put my shirt back on, all while he was still non-consensually touching me. I remember now that this went on longer than I initially recalled to the detective. I asked why my shirt was off, and he said that I’d asked for a massage, which I said that I was in no state to consent to anything, and I didn’t remember asking for it. I finally got the hell out of there. I wouldn’t report it for another year and only did so because this shit has yet to in terms of creeps showing up and showing me what I needed to see to report back about predators.
Here’s what real predators look like if you’re a single woman with children.
1. They pretend to be helpful. They try to offer you help in some capacity—let me do some work around your house—whatever. They’re trying to get an “in”.
2. They all think that complimenting you is going to disarm you. Ladies, don’t let flattery be your downfall. And also, pay attention to sexualizing comments about you—no respectful man is going to sexualize you when he compliments you especially if he hardly knows you. If it feels creepy, it is creepy. I can’t tell you how many people I blocked in my DMs who’d just jump out of the gate with that crap.
3. They are overly-interested in your kids, and they do things to ingratiate and familiarize themselves with them if you let them. I do not and have not let them. I briefly dated one person after I escaped my abuser, and my kids were immediately fond of him. He never did anything remotely creepy, but that concerned me for their benefit. I am glad I had that experience because I determined at that point to not let anyone close to them because I didn’t want them to get attached and hurt. In so many ways the role that person played was a godsend because it made me more aware and it made me get over attachments and codependency, two things that have saved my children and me a bajillion times over as I recovered from being a lover girl and one who centralized romance and love and connection.
4. They will eventually offer to be child minders if you let them get close to your kids.
It’s all about proximity. This is why getting over the conditioning to centralize relationships and romance has to be disabled. I know all of this harassment has been to weaken my resolve and to disarm me, so that I felt like I needed a man. Later, a woman of the same last name of the creepy predator would try to get to be my friend. She tried to project on me that I just wanted someone to save me. Um, hell to the no. I almost let her move in because she lost her lease on her place, but I ultimately decided “no” because I recognized the way she was being toward me—violating my boundaries and telling me about myself to me.
When I recognized that behavior as well as the fact that my mental and emotional health were tanking faster than the Titanic in her company, I pivoted on a dime and said, “Sorry, but I can’t let you move in here.” I have a friend who is dealing with evicting a squatter, and I know in my bones that I’d have been dealing with that had I allowed that. I am thankful that I have done as much work as I have and that I understood this reality—life is a simulation.
Everything is a test. You soul cycle upward by confronting the challenges that are in your life. If you’re in alignment, everything is going right. If you’re out of alignment, shit falls apart. You struggle financially (I was back then). You can keep your space clean and organized. Stuff breaks (such as when I was almost raped, robbed, and trafficked on my burgesses in Italy last year when my anklet snapped as I was going up the stairs to find the bathroom with the “helpful” man who offered to walk with me—I knew I was in danger, and I pivoted immediately). Her presence in my life was a test, and while it was hard to rescind my offer, I knew that the longer I belabored it, the worse it would get.
If it’s for you and there is an obstacle, the challenge will be to confront the obstacle. In that situation, the obstacle was to piss someone off who I genuinely cared about and know that would likely end the friendship (it did). But the only way out is through, and I wanted to soul-cycle upward. I was reading the signs. Anyone who reminds me of my abuser is an immediate red flag on the field, and I’m booking it out of the stadium the first chance I get.
If it’s not for you, it will be tempting and difficult to walk away, which is many ways is the same thing. She was a fun friend, and we bonded quickly (friend bombing is as real as love bombing—the real solution is never let anyone in too quickly and be wary of people who want to leap into your life and consume you and your time too quickly). I genuinely loved her and her children (the reason I’d offered to let her stay at my place), but I had many reasons not to, one of which is that she created her own adverse circumstances relative to her living situation, and she did in fact have options on where to stay otherwise.
I’m not saying that most definitely these people would have ultimately trafficked or hurt my kids, but I do know that their behaviors were consistent with predators. I have seen this pattern repeat with multiple individuals, and with all due respect—hard pass. We have far too many people like this in our society. As I saw on an Instagram video today, which is what prompted this writing—they are everywhere.
People—they look for people who aren’t paying attention.
They look for people with vulnerabilities or who seem like they “need” help from elsewhere.
They are often people who are oddly neglectful of their own kids but who are overly interested in yours.
They also are often people who are in positions that are considered reputable by society.
In fact, I find people who seem “too clean”—too put together, too perfect, too reputable to be questionable. Like…you don’t have to be a shitshow like I’ve been while being driven out of my freaking mind by these creeps, but you definitely own your experiences. You own your life. You own what’s happened to you.
But above all—pay attention. I’m grateful that I have put the 86 on dating and raised my standards. I’m thankful to the chef who told me what my value was and for the universe to show me where I wasn’t in alignment with my highest value. I am thankful, too, that I have always had my sights set on raising high and doing better in this life. It’s helped me make decisions that are in alignment with my goals and my purpose.
As I wrote yesterday—predators can play the long game. Look at Woody Allen who married his wife’s stepchild when she turned 21 (if I’m not mistaken on that age). That’s grooming. Grooming is proximity, intimacy, and trust weaponized for personal gain.
Another pro-tip is to discern when a person is using you for their unmet emotional needs. Look to people who are trying to put their problems and drama on you—that’s a red flag. You have enough to deal with. You’re not being “nice” by helping people with their problems, and it’s not an exchange. Many of these people have tried to come in with tit-for-tat exchanges of effort. “If I do this for you, you can do this for me.” Nope. You do what you want for me out of the kindness of your heart. I don’t owe you shit. The minute someone tries to say, “Well, why won’t you do this for me when I did all of this for you?” I’m out.
If I do something for you it’s because I have the time and resources, and I neither want nor expect anything in return. People who want to play like you owe them are being manipulative, and those are games I don’t play.
I am who I am regardless of who you are and what you do. I trained on that for almost half a decade with my abuser because I could play his game. Hell, I studied the entire playbook on narcissistic behaviors, on manipulators, on controlling people, on hurtful people, and I could easily choose that path—I could have easily flipped it all around and done ten times worse to him if I was that kind of person, but I choose not to be because I want to live with myself. I want to sleep comfortably at night. I want to be joyful and happy authentically. I want to do the right thing because I want to be integrated—I want for my interior landscape to match my exterior landscape, so I choose to live the way I live, and I choose to write about this because I know how much work I put into figuring it out, and as I read story after story about children who are harmed by predators, about women who are harmed by predators, I want to be someone who helps facilitate change in a positive direction for my community and anyone else who wants that for themselves.
And here’s the thing—you can still be a trusting person. You can still treat everyone with courtesy and respect while still being discerning. You can even still date if you want to, but take your time. Be wary of overly-helpful people or people who are overly-available. Don’t play tit-for-tat. Oh, and don’t open the door. I should have never opened the door for a stranger. Never. Again. They can go to the houses next door, but not mine. Never. Again. I am so thankful that I was always paying attention. This woman’s mama didn’t raise no fool. Gotcha.
To do: buy myself some f—king lilies.