[Editor's Note: To protect the victim's identity, we've agreed to omit her name.]

It feels important to note that he broke up with me. The only thing more surprising than the breakup was what he did next: For five months, he encouraged strangers to send me dick pics. Then he put my naked selfies on different online dating services, followed by porn sites. He sent videos of me masturbating to my classmates, to my parents, to the world.

At the worst of it, he sent me a text: “It will take an act of God for you to make it through school without killing yourself.”

In the fall of 2012, I moved back home to California to go to graduate school. I’m a West Coast native but had gone east for undergrad. I was excited to dive into life again there, including meeting new people and dating, so I created a profile on OKCupid.

That November, I connected with David.

I was a little nervous. But before I went out with him IRL, I learned he had grown up with somebody I went to college with. That gave me a sense of comfort—we had mutual friends.

I got even more comfortable when we actually went out. He had grown up on the East Coast and reminded me of guys I knew from school. I was enamored with him pretty quickly. Grad school was really competitive, and I liked having him as a refuge from the pressures of studying. Before long we started talking every day. And it got more serious from there.

After about a month of dating, David went home to Virginia for the holidays. He called to catch up and then dropped the news: Things weren’t great there and he had decided to move back to help his family with their business. “I’m not coming back,” he said, and I was shocked. We never officially discussed entering a long-distance relationship, but we just kept right on talking at our normal pace. It wasn’t ideal, but school was so strenuous that I thought the lesser time commitment might actually be preferable.



We ended up talking all the time. We’d text throughout the day, and when I got home, from classes we’d Skype. Then, my first narrow glimpse into the future: I started to feel that sometimes David was disrespectful of me and my time. He would call every morning around 8 a.m. on the East Coast because he wanted to wish me good morning or just to talk—he always wanted to know everything I would be doing that day—but it was 5 a.m. in California and I needed my sleep. When I brought it up or playfully complained about the wake-up call, he didn’t take the criticism well. He’d deny it was a weird thing to do or shut down entirely.



The daily ring of my phone at dawn did start to feel overwhelming, but I told myself he was just being supportive. In some ways, knowing everything about each other’s days made it feel like he was right there beside me.

But then I got a new request: He began pressing me to send him sexy photos. We were long distance and wanted to keep the spark going, so I understood the reason for the ask. But I was really uncomfortable at the idea of taking nude pics of myself. It’s one thing to undress in front of somebody—that’s in the moment and I’m giving permission—but a pic allows access to my nakedness whenever someone wants it and gives that person control. It all made me feel really vulnerable.

But I did trust David. So I sent a photo: fully clothed where you could sort of see the shape of my butt. It was my way of complying. But he goaded me on. We couldn’t have sex physically, so he’d say, “Don’t you trust me? Why don’t you want to make me happy?”



I did, so I took more photos of more body parts. Eventually, those photos also included my face. I filmed a video while masterbating, even though I felt really uncomfortable. But David made it all seem so natural. He’d said, “I want to see you doing this.” And he sent me photos, too.

As my spring semester wound down, we started talking about me going to visit him in Virginia during the summer. He was acting a little weird, though, sort of noncommittal as to when would be good. I felt like he was holding back. I was frustrated, but didn’t give it a ton of thought—finals were coming up.



I really didn’t see it coming when David dumped me over text message at the end of April. I shot back a text: “I can’t believe you’re doing this. I just want you to know that this is your choice, not mine.”

A few days later, he texted but I didn’t respond. I didn't want to get caught up in breakup drama. He called me that night, and this time, I answered. He wasn’t speaking clearly and sounded a little buzzed. He started calling me a bunch of names, telling me what a shitty person I was. No one had ever talked to me that way. He accused me of cheating on him (I was not). He was rambling. I told him I had to go.

That’s when he made the threat: “Fuck you, fuck this—it will take an act of God for you to make it through school without killing yourself.”

When I went to bed at midnight, I had no idea of the hell I would wake up to. I got up around 7 a.m. to learn that an OKCupid profile with my name and photos had been created—almost like a parody version of my original profile, except with more sexual innuendo in the bio. I found out because I had received a text message from a stranger, continuing a conversation I didn’t understand.

“By the way, that’s just my sister in the picture!” the stranger said as an opener. I wrote back, “Excuse me? Who is this?” He explained that we’d been talking on OKCupid. He was seemingly nice about it when I explained there had been a misunderstanding.

Within the hour, I started getting more and more texts from strange numbers. Around five or six new numbers texted me every hour.

I asked each one for more info, and eventually one guy sent me screen shots of “our” online messages. I knew right away it was David. The exchanges had a certain syntax and grammar that sounded like him.

The screen shots showed the profile was getting worse: My default photo was now a pic of a dildo. Then there were photos added of me in lingerie. I started getting tons of dick pics, still from numbers I didn’t know. Maybe 20 different penises appeared in my phone. That night, one of the messages was from a guy who claimed to live close by and to be on his way to my home. I was terrified. Thankfully, he didn't show up.

And this was only the first day, a Wednesday. David’s campaign lasted for months.

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I thought, I can fix this. I contacted OKCupid, and they were actually great—they removed the profile and blocked David’s IP address. But it took them 24 hours to respond to my first email and by then he’d moved on to other sites.

I felt pure panic. I sat on the floor near my front door with a can of pepper spray in my hand. I fell asleep that way, crying.

On Friday morning, I got a text message from some random person saying they’d seen me on XHamster. I looked it up and realized it’s similar to a porn site where users can interact with each other. There I found two videos of me masturbating. The descriptions listed my real name, my grad school, and phone number, and also included links to my Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The irony was that had I not heard my phone “ping” when I received that random message, I might not have woken up for my exam that morning. I peeled myself off the floor and tried to carry on.

I took the exam, but when I was finished, the administrator of the test told me a professor needed to see me. The building was deserted—it was the end of the semester, and everyone was off for the summer. I went to his office, and he stumbled over his words as he tried to explain that there was something bad going on.

He informed me that David had emailed the two videos of me masturbating to some of my classmates. They had been forwarded around and wound up with this professor. I later learned that David had used some technology to impersonate the grad school dean’s email and distributed the videos to students that way.

I thought I couldn’t be more mortified than I already was, and yet every hour it got worse. It was like Whack-a-Mole dealing with every crisis and each hit represented another layer of my dignity being stripped away. I was indescribably paranoid. I sat in my apartment toggling between the websites and the profiles and the dick pics and the text messages.

One of my professors told me that he knew someone in law enforcement in Virginia. That detective got in touch with David and basically told him to knock it off. I know this happened because David left me a voicemail saying, “Hey, I spoke to the detective. If you have something to say to me, grow up and say it to me directly.”

That night, Friday night, I decided to tell my mom and dad what was going on—I had also told a few friends. They were obviously in shock, but supportive. It was also very apparent that my mom was worried more people, including my grandparents, would find out. Within twelve hours of our conversation, David had emailed the videos to my parents. He called my mom, too, and said, “Do you know what your daughter’s been doing?”

Sunday was Mother’s Day—I couldn't bring myself to go home.



That Monday, I filed the restraining order paperwork. I knew it was an uphill battle since David wasn’t overtly threatening physical violence and he lived 3,000 miles away. I couldn’t stop him from finding new websites to post to, new fake bios to write about me on dating sites, new ways to torture me.



My restraining order was ultimately granted. I had won a small battle, which momentarily renewed my hope for my future.

I started an internship that May. The challenge to function in the face of everything happening left me unable to perform to the best of my ability. My very first day, I had to miss a few hours to go to a hearing where a judge considered whether my temporary restraining order could become a permanent one. I wasn’t in a position to tell my boss what was going on. I’m sure they all thought I was flaky.

My parents pressed me to file a lawsuit, but I knew that if I did that, my name would be public. For the rest of my life, anyone could google me and associate me with the photos. I felt so helpless. There was no California law about revenge porn yet. There’s still no federal law.

Through all of this, I never reached out to David. I completely cut him off. He was acting so psychotically, I was afraid to even engage. I thought that was his goal—to get me to react, to freak out—and I do think it bothered him that he couldn’t observe how I responded.

But late one night, I got a call from David.

“Please just remove the photos,” I begged him. “Stop doing this to me.” He was very apologetic and said that he’d done such bad things to me that now he wanted to die. I had this internal struggle, because we had only been broken up for a little over a month. I couldn’t untangle my feelings for him. I said, “This isn’t you. Don’t ruin your life over this.” It was the last time we ever spoke.

One warm night in late summer, I was out with friends and remember thinking, Wow, I’m actually feeling good right now. As if on cue, I got an email from Google Alerts—I had set one up for my name—and this showed that my photos had been added to yet another website. I started sobbing. The constant fluctuation of emotion was almost too much to bear. I was consumed by his crushing and repeated retaliation.

I wound up cutting my internship short. Trying to track down all the photos and get them removed was already a full-time job. My mom also helped and between the two of us, we still couldn’t keep up.

I connected with another lawyer who suggested something different: file a copyright.



Sites comprised of user-generated content, like YouTube or Reddit, have policies where they’re not responsible for what is uploaded. But if you have a copyright, like on a film, and a user uploads your film, you as the creator can ask the site to take it down. They have a set amount of time to comply or they’re subject to a liability. All the photos that David was distributing were selfies—I took them myself on my phone. So I owned them. I registered my images with the U.S. Copyright Office and subsequently filed a lawsuit. I feel sick just thinking about it but somewhere my naked photos are in the library of Congress.



At least I had something to do, a step to take when the photos or videos popped up. David’s campaign lasted for four months. Then the FBI got involved. I gave the agents all my evidence—the screen grabs, emails, everything—and they raided his home in September 2013. That’s when the messages and photos and Google Alerts finally stopped.



The next year, in 2014, California finally passed revenge porn legislation, and I was able to file a suit in federal court as a Jane Doe. A special law firm, the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project, offered to represent me pro bono. We filed in December 2014. David didn’t show up to any of the court dates, but his attorneys did, and the process extended on for years.

In April 2018, a federal judge awarded me $6.45 million for copyright infringement and emotional distress. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The amount of money was attention-grabbing, but it wasn’t the most important part for me—I was just so grateful to have a final document in my hands stating that what David did was wrong.

It’s been five years of dealing with this, and the years, admittedly, have been long. My career has progressed a little more slowly than I would have hoped. I didn’t form any lasting relationships from grad school, my internships, or my early career. I had significant trouble interviewing because of the information that he had disseminated online. I have my guard up constantly, and I second-guess my judgments when I meet new people. Dating is especially difficult, obviously.

I do wonder if this experience has colored the way people who know about it think of me. Do they think I lack judgment? What do my parents really think? Will these pics ever pop up again in the future? While I have often joked to myself that there goes my career in politics, after everything I went through, part of me wonders: what’s the worst that could happen? When you’ve been that far down, it’s all uphill from there.

I know some people blame me, but I blame him. These days, I am admittedly far more guarded about my own identity and my sexual privacy. I still struggle, but as time passes, it gets easier. I am strong. I am resilient. And while it may not always feel like it, deep down I know I am stronger than what happened to me.

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Kaitlin Menza Kaitlin Menza is a freelance features writer.

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