Peter
Stalking is having a cultural moment, prompting a desperately-needed conversation. Misogyny is a never-ending cultural moment. This post carries a strong content warning. Please be careful.
With something like this, it’s hard to know where to begin.
I generally don’t use people’s real names when I write, or give other identifying details. No matter how I feel about someone, it doesn’t sit well with me - a little like a violation, or even a denial of a person’s right to move past their mistakes. So I chose an alias for my subject: Philip. I swear I only thought of him days ago, amongst all the online talk of stalking, after years of kind of forgetting. I decided I would tell you a story about him, and I began to craft it in my head.
I don’t remember the specifics of meeting Philip, except that it was at work. I ran the student association’s small welfare office at Otago University, sitting at a reception desk, visible through a glass door to anyone who passed. That made me accessible. And I was a young woman, about 30, prone to feel over-responsible and tie herself in knots about the right thing to do. That made me accessible too.
Perhaps I don’t remember the first time we met because Philip was lacklustre. That’s a shitty thing to say - a societal judgement on forms of masculinity that don’t make the cut - and maybe it’s why we’re here today, me writing this, you reading. He knew he was lacklustre. Today, we’d call him an incel: one who wants women and hates women, hating particularly the women who don’t want him back. He wasn’t tall, had a slight figure, and wore his long hair with a slightly comical vanity given the state of his clothes. I tried to keep an open mind to his thin-skinned grievances, directed as they were at almost everything. I can’t remember the initial grievances he brought to me.
I struggle to trust my gut because my brain likes to override it. Intuition tells me something’s off, but my logic challenges it right back, asking me if I’m just being lazy. After all, jumping to conclusions - withholding the emotional labour to understand someone’s backstory - is the easiest thing in the world. Both my gut and my brain have been right and wrong. The emails started, kept coming. I felt sickly.
I didn’t really know what to do. I believed that Philip needed help. I had compassion for him, although it was the type of compassion that you reason without feeling. I spoke to the student health service for advice. I guessed that they knew of him already, and they were sympathetic - but there’s a type who cannot or will not accept their need for help, and the threshold to intervene without someone’s consent is very high. I approached the proctor, who was responsible for safety and order on campus, and who worked closely with the police. He knew of Philip, and he took me very seriously; but he too had limited power to act.
Philip had guns. He told me this obliquely in another email - although I wonder now if it was not meant to be oblique, but calculated. This time, his grievance was with the power company. They’d cut off his supply, and his freezer had defrosted. The animals he’d shot and kept for taxidermy had rotted. I felt ill. I replied using words I can’t recall that he needed to stop emailing me.
He emailed again, refuting me, telling me he was the victim. When he was a kid, he told me, he shit his pants at school. He described how his teacher lined up the kids, and she made Philip show the inside of his undies. Everyone laughed at him, humiliated him. I felt nauseous. I could no longer judge whether I was safe. I decided to shut the office for a day, my colleagues and I working from home.
For whatever reason, in a fairly short time, Philip moved on from me. Like I said, I kind of forgot him, but the forgetting did not happen immediately. He did not allow it to. It was the proctor, I think, who told me a few months later about the police call-out to Philip’s house. The cops had discovered guns, unsecured guns; and not a couple, but a cache. All types of guns. I didn’t understand the terminology for all of them, but then, I didn’t really need to.
A story like this, when you tell it years later, has a sense of something coming that you didn’t foresee at the time. Here is the last I heard of Philip.
Back in those days, people still read print newspapers, left them by the kitchen at work. In February of 2009, Philip appeared in the Otago Daily Times. The story was headlined ‘Horror house tourist warns of danger’.
The tourist was a German woman in her thirties. She’d met a man online. He lived in the South Island of New Zealand, was 33 years old and a doctoral student; and it seemed he’d appeared in ads to promote New Zealand as a destination. They emailed back and forth, and they clicked. She had always wanted to see this part of the world, and so she booked her flights.
The man who greeted the tourist at Dunedin airport was over twenty years older than he’d claimed, unemployed and smelly, looking only a little like the photoshopped images he’d sent her. He took her to a house without electricity, chickens and cats ranging freely inside, a reek of dead animals. He offered her a bed with filthy sheets.
The woman was in the house for a week. Philip kept her passport to stop her from leaving. He listened to her phone calls so she couldn’t ask for help. She tried to keep him calm. At nighttime, he took off his clothes and lay on the filthy sheets beside her. Eventually, she managed to contact the one person she knew in Dunedin: a man she’d met on the plane. The man rang the police, and the Armed Offenders Squad were called out to the house, ending the woman’s ordeal.
In 2009, when I sat down to write to the Otago Daily Times, I was angry.
I was angry at the tabloid flippancy of the article, its upbeat account of a ‘relationship that turned out to be anything but romantic’. Above all, I was angry at the failure of ethics by the editor. This was an issue that required careful handling by police and other experts. Instead, the newspaper had somehow found out Philip’ identity, emblazoning his name in black and white. It was the public disgrace of a man whose feelings of humiliation, I believed, had the potential to flare into violence. Women were now a little less safe, and all for the sake of some gutter sensationalism.
I hit send on the email to the newspaper. I never heard back.
That was the story I intended to tell you, the one I was crafting in my head.
Last night, my kids’ dad dropped something off and said from the front door, Did you hear Peter R*** died? I paused a moment: I’d forgotten the last name. It fell into place, this strange and ugly coincidence, with a heavy fall, so it sat cold in my stomach like a stone. I took a moment to reflect.
His full name now remembered, I searched for him online. He was found a few days ago in his house. It still had no power, and the section was so overgrown and strewn with refuse that it was impassible, except for a path cut along the side. Probably he’d died months before, but because he was a recluse he wasn’t missed, or people simply thought his house was abandoned.
I had been only the prologue to his career. There was the German tourist, of course. He had been banned multiple times from Otago University, Otago Polytechnic and Aoraki Polytechnic. In 2009, he’d also been charged with harassing an overseas student.
Hearing of his death, the German tourist spoke to the media. In this new article, she called him ‘a poor and very lost spirit with psychopathic tendencies’. And she was angry, still angry, at the media’s treatment of her - coverage that had started with the Otago Daily Times and gone international. This terrible moment in her life had been misrepresented as a love story, she said; and since he had been ‘working precisely to portray me as his lover and did everything he could to do so, it played into the hands of the public’, just as it had also ‘played into the hands of this simply psychopathic person’.
And without a moment of self-reflection, that same article, published on Tuesday, described what had happened to the woman those years ago as ‘misguided pursuits at love’.
I want you to read this with both your gut and your brain, even if I’m no longer sure that I can trust my own. There’s a part of me that still believes in compassion for the man, even when it can only be reasoned, not felt. Because there’s always a backstory to the way people turn out. But sometimes all of that doesn’t help: in trying uncover his reasons you find you only offer him excuses, stirring his grievances. Your emotional labour makes you a kind of target, seems to him an invitation to some kind of game you never wanted to play. I think that’s why he chose me for a time, although of course, I’ll never know.
For me, the story has a final chapter.
That 2009 article I’d reacted to, that I wrote to the Otago Daily Times about, I found it and read it again when I heard the news. Details I’d kind of forgotten came back to me, along with the same old sickly feeling. But there was something else. I’d missed it, God knows how, in my anger, jumping instead to conclusions. A single sentence looked back at me, now online but still black and white.
His identity had not, somehow, been found out by the newspaper. He’d rung in, identifying himself to the Otago Daily Times as the man whose house had been raided by the Armed Offenders Squad. He’d volunteered his name and his version of events. Clearly, he was feeling victimised, nursing a sense of grievance - said he’d been abused and harassed by the police and others for years. In a later interview with a website, he’d doubled down, claiming he’d put the tourist up for a holiday, but she’d humiliated him and he would not be entertaining again.
I had given him an alias, Philip, as I’d begun to craft my story. I wanted to safeguard his dignity, offer him a second chance, some kind of protection. I needn’t have bothered. With no use for anonymity, he’d already taken credit for his work.
Every person needs compassion, but you need to know when the job of giving that compassion cannot, should not, be your own.
This man’s name wasn’t Philip, but Peter. He tormented women. And we women owe him nothing at all.
Wow. Incredible story, thank you for sharing. I often wonder about the thinking vs intuition thing and (I think!) as girls we are taught to override our intuition in order to be nice, to be the good girl, to do other people’s emotional labour. And then it sticks, until you can try to unlearn it (although I don’t know if we ever fully do).
The way that Peter considered himself a victim does point to him being an abuser. I feel awful for the German tourist and for your experience, too.
Thanks for this Anna. Yes I too was alarmed at the language of the article. I'm sorry you had to endure his attentions and glad you were able to get 'away' If that's the right terminology. By the sounds of it there could have been many more women affected by him.