On the Internet, No One Has to Know You’re Insane

While the details of the deception are in many ways quite different, the mental disturbance and the emotional rape described in this LA Weekly article are far, far, far too painfully familiar to me.

A bit of background, so that the following excerpts make sense: The author’s friend Audrey became friends over the ‘net with a woman named Janna, who introduced Audrey to a man named Jesse. Over the next two years, Audrey and Jesse fell in love, helping each other through tragedy after tragedy — all over the ‘net, without ever meeting. Before they got a chance to meet, Jesse suddenly dies from liver cancer. Some time afterwards, Janna comes out to visit Audrey…

This past February, I got a phone call from Tania. She told me two things, one I didn’t know, one I realized I’d known for a very long time. The first was that Janna was in Los Angeles. She had arrived the previous Saturday and was in town for a week.

Then Tania tells me that she and her boyfriend Will had been doing some digging. And man, they were intensive. They spent two whole days on the Internet, doing stuff with Google that I didn’t know was possible. They got piles of backup, but the instant she said it, I knew down to my toes that it was true.

There is no Jesse.

There never was a Jesse.

Jesse never existed.

Ever.

Jesse was supposed to be a volunteer fireman in Colorado. It’s not hard to get a list of every voluntary fireman working in the state of Colorado. His name never appears.

He’d supposedly had surgery at a teaching hospital in Colorado. A quick check confirmed that this hospital had never performed any kind of operation on anyone. Ever.

They checked the death records in Colorado for the day he died. Nothing. So, they checked that week. Nothing. That month. Nothing. That year. Guess what?

Nothing. And they had more. Piles of stuff. This guy should show up in about a dozen places, and he doesn’t. Neither does his supposed son or his purported ex-wife.

Which means that Janna, the woman who was Jesse’s friend, who met him years ago when she hired him to do some work for her, who visited him in the mental home, who filled Audrey in on the details of his funeral, who’s staying in the house with Audrey as we speak . . . It means that Janna is

completely

absolutely

one hundred percent

out of her goddamn mind.

Not just a liar, but bugfuck crazy. Because this has been going on for close to two years, and it’s clearly not about money. This sounds like some sort of weird variant on Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental illness in which a parent induces an illness in a child so he or she can be the beneficiary of sympathy.

Audrey’s friends get together to discuss the situation.

I suggested a fairly direct plan of action, and people hemmed and hawed and went back and forth. It was drastic, and it was decisive, but there was some notion that Audrey should be allowed to decide what to do, as though she could possibly process the information we had and make a calm, rational decision in the moment. I pointed out that when someone’s being raped — and this was, indeed, emotional rape — you don’t ask them if they’d like you to pull the rapist off. You make that decision for them and face the consequences later.

The strange thing about something like this, about an encounter with a genuine monster, is that our minds tend to default to what’s normal, to what we know. We found ourselves talking about the situation as though Audrey had simply made friends with an eccentric person we didn’t like. Surely, it’s Audrey’s business whether or not she wants to be friends with Janna, isn’t it? Then someone would remember that a potentially dangerous lunatic was in the house with our friend.

An intervention is staged, Audrey is called away and informed of the situation by one group of friends while another confront Janna, who leaves.

As horrible as this article is to read for most people, imagine actually being in Audrey’s place — that’s essentially the situation I’m in. In our case, however, we didn’t have friends who could see what was going on and intervene on our behalf. We had to discover the deception for ourselves, and we’re learning how to deal with it on our own.

Of course, some days, the thought that makes it most bearable is simply that the people who live their lives like this, taking advantage of other people’s trust, are putting themselves at risk.

There’s also this — someday, Janna will prey on someone who is not capable, and strong, and possessed of smart, strong friends who care about her. And that person will snap, and Janna will end up in a ditch somewhere. Call it karma, or call it the natural progression of things, but Janna will end up her own victim. It would be immensely satisfying to witness it, or at least read about it in the paper, but we never will. You just have to learn to accept that these things happen, and that you rarely get to be there for the big payback. Just trust that it’s coming, and take what solace you can from that.

At the end of the article, a photo is posted of Janna, as a warning to others she might prey upon. We thought we were doing the right thing when we took the opposite tack — removing our predator’s name from my weblog, changing her name on any entry that mentioned her, and hiding any photos with her in them. Some days we wonder, though. Are we doing the right thing by trying to avoid damaging the life of someone who used to be a friend, and who is apparently suffering some form of mental illness? Or are we merely endangering those who still know her and who she may be spinning a whole new web for?

Neither possibility really makes me comfortable.

At the insistence of her friends, Audrey hasn’t contacted Janna to confront her, and she’s not pursuing legal action (if it’s even possible). The drama has to end. She has to leave it behind and move forward. I hope she can. I think she can. But she has the impulse to try to make sense of it, to try to make it better. She told me she wanted to stop Janna not for her own wounded feelings, but so she doesn’t prey on anyone else. I suggested that if she really wanted to be selfless, she should help Bosnian refugees, or orphans in Darfur. She needs to let go.

This is a struggle we’re still dealing with. We’ve cut off all contact, mainly because we know that no matter how many times we ask, we’re never going to get the most important question — for God’s sake, why?!? — answered. At times, we just want to do our best to forget the whole thing. At other times, we want to shout her name from the rooftops, take out ads in papers detailing what happened, warning people to look out for her. We don’t know what the right answer is. She hurt us, and she could very easily hurt others later on. But how can we warn others without opening ourselves up to more drama, more trauma, and more stress?

I’m tired of the stress. It’s time for it to stop.

And I hate her for what she did to us.

We’re working on moving past what happened, on letting it slide away into the past and continue on with our lives, and it’s better every day. Eventually, it will be a distant, unpleasant memory. I just wish that day was here already.