Since then, I have been fending off angry emails from this man, raging at me for seemingly most innocuous comments made by me on a variety of public online forums. all of which he perceived to be about him. I have been driven off one skiers forum by him. His attacks are exclusively by email or forum message. Lately he'd resorted to threats, the "change that or I'll do this to you" sort of stuff. The threats had no effect on me, for example, I really don't care if he tells everybody that I'm rubbish at skiing.
All of this had left me a bit bewildered, as I'd no idea what I'd done to upset him in the 1st place, or why he was still really angry with me. I'd been concerned about the use of some photos of me on his website, which I'd downloaded a long time ago, and used on my Blog. They were used by me in accordance with the non commercial use copyright terms quoted on his Blog. The photos and links were on my main email address, until they disappeared, along with my ability to see his website to see what was wrong. I kept seeing "Not Found" messages.
My Blog now had holes in it and looked awful.
I thought it was maintenance, but then found my IP address had been blocked, a divert appeared to a BBC recipe for Fruitcake. Not good, even if it was a really nice recipe, which I tweeted. It got worse when a page of threats appeared, police, legal action, some data act or other, they were changing each day while I was still trying to find the images to repair my Blog.
I've archived the threats online using a Web Archiving service. Seems he was cross about me using proxy services to recover the photos of me that appear on his pages, which are now part of his commercial venture.
He's not asked my permission to use the images of me, but having seen where they are on his site, I did what I needed to and I'm not bothered about them. What else could I do, he'd blocked my IP address, and the last time I phoned him, he called me back and told me he wasn't going to talk to me.
I'd had enough of being silent about the continuing email abuse I've received so went public, as the page of threats had now accused me of being a stalker and downloading his photo a zillion times. It was this that tipped me over. It would appear that he has been stalking me online as I travelled around Europe this spring, well, whatever floats his boat I suppose. Personally I have better things to do with my time, but we are all different.
In case you are wondering no, it's not my style, and neither is he. It's possibly (so I've been advised) a Firefox Accelerator thing affecting his website every time I log on to my email. I've also been advised that there may be a Google Mail issue with the way their package treats his links as well. Maybe he's placed tracking cookies in mails to me, he's certainly been closely following my online activity, which must be a bit time consuming.
I now have a new email address, so hopefully he won't be foaming at the mouth every time I answer mails from friends and family. In the meantime I've been busy removing all evidence of his mails, and all contact details from all my online places. There are many years worth to be gone through and destroyed.
One of his friends has now told me via my Facebook Profile that he'd wanted nothing to do with me, no friendship, no contact, nada, and this had been the case for a number of years.
The man who gave me the news was one of the folks I'd trusted when I'd asked for help to clear up the problem 2 years ago. He said he'd not known then. He did know how upset I was though, so just how long has he known, and allowed this to continue?
I'm left wondering just how far back this hatred of me went. Was it there when he gave me a Christmas card for my household 6 months before he did the FB thing. When he led me skiing off piste? Did I mistakenly place my trust in a man who did, and still does hate me?
It would certainly explain the tone of the emails. My last comment in reply to one of his nasty mails in November 2010 asked the question "I really don't know why you hate me so much?"
Now I know at last, I can look forward to opening my email package without trepidation.
Finding this out is actually really good news for me. It's his problem not mine, and now I know that it's nothing I did in the first instance to start the sequence of events. If he ever sends me any more hate mail, I now feel liberated to respond in the way I feel to be appropriate for the time and situation.
