EX BOSS

Sorry in advance because this story is long and can get a bit confusing at times. Last summer I was in a really bad place. I had just moved back to my hometown only to have my original plans for everything including living arrangements fall through. I had no job and with an art degree an impossibly hard time finding one. I was struggling and often didn't have enough money to eat or take the bus. I have a chronic stomach issue that leaves me bedridden sometimes and I was having a flare-up and stuck at a friend's house. (I missed my bus the night before and slept at her house; she left for work at 4am so I stayed at her place until the morning but didn't realize the buses don't run in that neighborhood on weekends). I had already locked myself out of her apartment so I had about a 7 mile walk home, but it was over 100 degrees and I was sick to my stomach. In a moment of desperation I made a public post on a blog I had at the time linking my venmo and asking for a few bucks to get an Uber home.

Not even an hour after I made the post I got $100 out of nowhere on venmo from a photographer that was actually texting me the day before about a possible shoot. I am very short so I'll never have a very successful modeling career but I have worked with a few smaller clothing companies. Whenever I'm strapped for cash often times I can get $100 here or there taking on small modeling gigs. (Nothing ever weird lol, just etsy shops and independent clothing companies & stuff). I hadn't answered his messages because there was already something weird; he emailed me responding to me posting on Craigslist asking for general day work, like helping to set up for an event or handing out flyers. He said he recognized my email from the modeling website ModelMayhem. I have not been active on there since 2015 when I was 20. He remembered my email from a modeling profile on an account I haven't touched for 5 years. I am by no means a famous or well known face. Along with the money there was a message about just wanting to help me and he can stay a "kind stranger" if I'm still not interested in working with him. I immediately felt guilty and like I'd misjudged him, so I responded thanking him and told him I would be willing to model for his store. (He owned an online vintage clothing line that was successful on etsy). He asked me to come to the studio for a shoot the next day in the evening which worried me but he said he knew I had a long bus trip ahead of me. The shoot was super weird, he had me pick what I was going to model and it was all unsorted bulk vintage stuff in a huge bin...most of it was unwearable. When he photographed me in each outfit he was not concerned with getting good product shots and just trying to make me smile to "boost" my confidence. By the end of it was he was saying weird shit, like telling me what a perfect "pure" human being I was. He ordered me an Uber home and later venmo'd me for the shoot. He totally overpaid me. The photos were NEVER used and the clothes were never listed, but he sent me tons of the photos with captions about how nice he thought my smile was.

He texted me again the next day saying that he was sad to hear about what a hard time I'd been having and told me if I ever was short on money to come by the warehouse where all the clothes and everything were and he'd pay me to do some typing. (He would take the measurements on clothes that were going to be listed and I was entering them into Excel as he read them out loud). We'd do this for a couple hours and then I'd go home. But every single time he would say weirder things, always just over-complimenting me and projecting this weird pure virgin persona onto me. He started obsessing over my laugh and smile specifically. One time he asked me to come in to type and it was actually a trick to go on a surprise outing for my birthday. I had told him before I showed up that I was really sick and weak that day. When I realized there was actually no work for me to do and that he was taking me to an expensive dinner I felt horrible. I tried to go and smile through it but I was in a LOT of pain and just wanted to go home. After the restaurant I started to walk towards the train station but then he told me there was one more thing we had to do. We walked into an arcade bar and he got about $20 worth of quarters and dragged me around insisting that we had to use all the quarters. He kept saying stuff like "I'm sorry you're in such horrible pain; I can tell you feel awful, I feel so selfish for making you do this"....but then making me stay longer. I finally got to go home but I really needed the money for typing that day and instead I got home in a ton of pain and out a few dollars in bus money.

I know at this point it seems like there's no way I couldn't see his creepy feelings for me, but I'm 25 and this guy was almost 40 and constantly insisting that he was just here to help as a friend and not expecting anything in return. I was in such a bad position that I had to ignore a lot of the weirdness and didn't see any danger yet.

The next time he had me type stuff out he offered me an official job in the warehouse. I jumped on this because I'd been applying to jobs for months with no luck and was even more desperate. He immediately was hurt by me accepting the offer, saying if I worked for him he'd have to be less friendly with me because we'd be working with other employees in the room. (this of course made me very happy). He decided that meant I cared more about making money than "our friendship". It turned into about an hour of me sitting there while he said (unfortunately exact phrasing) that I was his "personal Jesus" and he was looking to me to restore his faith in humanity.

When I started working he would constantly separate me from the two other girls that I worked in the warehouse with. When we were away from them he told me horribly personal things about them that I knew they wouldn't want shared and he made stuff up about them to try and get me to not like them and not want to spend time with them. He was constantly comparing me to them, always referring to them as "jackals" and that I'm good and they're bad. He had some really concerning feelings about all of the women in his life. He also specifically had a thing for small brown girls. Me and the two other girls I worked with had very similar looks and all his exes looked creepily similar to us. All the models on the site as well. He would tell me wildly inappropriate stories all day and every time we worked together it was just him inching closer to me and me squirming away to the point where we'd wind up across the room because he kept moving closer and I kept backing up. He'd complain that it seemed like he disgusted me. I started hating and dreading coming in to deal with him so much that I could no longer fake a good mood. He would interrogate me about why I wasn't smiling or giggling or "bubbly". Like literally interrogate me to the point where no work would get done because he'd be trying to force me to act happy and then trying to do things to make me happier like buying me a coffee that I didn't want.

The final straw came after working for him for maybe 3 weeks. We often had to move clothes on racks between the studio and the warehouse for shoots. While we were walking down the street with the clothes he started asking me if I'd ever heard of incels. I tried to avoid any topic that can be led back to sex with him so I just said that I didn't want to think about that at the moment. He started to get upset. I elaborated that I knew someone killed in the UC Santa Barbara shooting and that it wasn't an easy topic for me. That wasn't enough for him either. He started to get worked up. After we got to the warehouse he tried to pull me away from my work to take me out for a coffee, just me and him even though the other coworkers were there. I told him no thanks and he tried to quietly say it was so "we could talk". I knew this meant he wanted to pull me away from them to privately interrogate me about why I wasn't smiling and why I wouldn't talk about incels with him. I played dumb and said in my cheeriest voice "Can't we talk here?". I think in that moment he realized I was onto his shit. He just said "Okay" while nodding his head in the most dejected way and walking out to get coffee on his own. Later on I was supposed to be sorting clothes onto a rack by myself for a shoot the next day while he worked on a shoot in the studio with the two other employees. I decided I was going to quit in that moment. I waited for them to all be gone, did the job quickly (he venmo'd me at the end of every day for my hours instead of actually having me on payroll...he lied and said he was enrolling me but had no intention of ever doing it) and texted him that I was leaving 5 minutes early for my bus. He usually paid me as I was walking to the train. This time it took hours for him to send and it was only half of what he usually paid me. He literally punished me by paying me less.

As soon as he paid me I texted him explaining that his behavior was getting more and more frightening and that I didn't feel safe working with him. I told him I quit and to not attempt to contact me. He began calling immediately. I blocked him and I got calls from different phone numbers over and over throughout the next day that wouldn't stop no matter how many of them I blocked. A couple weeks later I got a bunch of comments from a throwaway account on my instagram pictures calling me evil and saying a bunch of weird personal things. I could tell it was him. I also never noticed he'd left voicemails because the way my old phone was set up was stupid, but when I switched phones I realized he'd completely filled my box up. I listened to a few and they were so scary. One of them was him singing "just a nice guy just a normal guy" for about 4 minutes straight. Another was him singing about how I'm evil. Some were just incoherent rambling and ranting and crying.

Now I have a new number and all of my social media is on complete lockdown. This guy boasts about holding grudges for years so I expect him to obsess and attempt to mess with me for a very long time.