My cyberstalker

In the Internet era, said James Lasdun, a stalker can nearly ruin you and not even commit a crime.

SOME YEARS AGO, I found myself, to my surprise, the victim of a campaign of malicious email stalking and online defamation by a former M.F.A. student. Nasreen (all names here have been changed) was a talented writer, and she had an interesting story to tell about her family’s experiences in Iran at the time of the revolution. During the term I taught her, I’d made it clear I thought highly of her work.

Two years after she graduated, she contacted me, asking me to help edit her novel. I was too busy at the time, but I put her in touch with my agent, who in turn introduced her to a freelance editor. Nasreen seemed grateful for the help, and an amicable correspondence began between us.

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At a certain point her emails took an amorous turn. I told her I was happily married and not interested in having an affair. She seemed to take it well, and our friendly correspondence soon resumed. But gradually the volume of her emails increased to several a day, and after a while I realized I was becoming the object of an obsession. As tactfully as I could, I asked her to ease up, but to no avail. Eventually I stopped writing back, but that, too, had no effect.

A deluge of emails poured into my inbox over the next few months. I deleted most without reading them. Those that I did read seemed innocuous, though the sheer quantity was disturbing. And then, on a July evening in 2007, they turned abruptly from banter and gossip to venomous hate mail (much of it violently anti-Semitic), along with accusations that I had plagiarized her work and had affairs with her classmates (though not with her).

Soon after that, Janice (my agent) called, sounding upset. She had received strange emails about me from Nasreen, and she was concerned for her safety. The emails contained the same baseless accusations of plagiarism, accompanied by threats of “hell to pay” if Janice and I connived to “steal” any more of Nasreen’s work. Later that day, Nasreen began threatening Paula, the editor to whom Janice had introduced Nasreen.

“You all play a part in unleashing the fury,” Nasreen wrote. Soon after, Nasreen brought on one of those words that scorch everything they come near. The word was “rape,” and even though she used it figuratively rather than literally, I felt immediately as if I’d been splashed with acid: “I say if I can’t write my book and get emotionally and verbally raped by James Lasdun, a Jew disguising himself as an English-American, well then, the Holocaust Industry Books should all be banned as should the films.”

Along with the accusations of theft, Janice had also received details of my supposed (but equally fictitious) affairs with Nasreen’s former classmates, complete with descriptions of various kinky sexual practices that Nasreen claimed to have heard I went in for.

Regardless of whether Janice believed a word of these emails (and she assured me she didn’t), my impulse was to deny them indignantly. But even as I was forming the words, I felt the futility of doing so. Intrinsic to the very nature of Nasreen’s denunciations and insinuations was, as I began to understand, an iron law whereby the more I denied them, the more substance they would acquire and the more plausible they would begin to seem.

I think this is called verbal terrorism,” Nasreen wrote at one point. I hadn’t heard the phrase before. But as I came to appreciate Nasreen’s grasp of the dynamics of asymmetric conflict, where she had apparently nothing to lose and I had everything, I realized that it was peculiarly apposite.

I, as an Anglo-American Jew, a family man, a published author, a middle-aged male in a position of power (at least from her perspective), was the axis of, shall we say, “virtue,” while she, in her own mind at least, was the lone jihadi. It took a while for her to figure out the exact nature of her mission, but when it did finally clarify itself in her mind, she laid it out in her characteristically succinct way: “I will ruin him.”

Over the previous year or so, several novels and memoirs had been published by youngish women of Iranian origin. Many of these books, I gathered (I hadn’t read any of them), dealt with the period of the Shah’s downfall and the rise of the fundamentalists, which was the period Nasreen had been attempting to cover in her own novel.

Even the most well-balanced writers are prone to anxiety about their work’s being pre-empted. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to learn that Nasreen was unhappy about these rival publications. What was surprising was to find out how she intended to deal with her unhappiness.

“You and Paula pandered my work” was the first clear indication. Over the next few weeks, Nasreen began to elaborate a theory in which various Jewish cohorts and I were guilty of deliberately preventing her from finishing her book so that we could steal her ideas and sell them to these other writers, most of whom happened to be Jewish as well as Iranian.

“James’s Amazon Reviews, read em!” runs the heading of an email from this period. The review, under the byline “a former student of lasdun,” was posted on the page for my novel Seven Lies. Words seemed to undulate as I looked at the screen: “my work was stolen...,” “after I told him I was raped while trying to finish my novel...,” “he used my writing (emails to him) in that story.”

As if conscious of her new audience, Nasreen adopts a more measured voice here. Laying aside the mask of naked rage, she poses instead as the scholar-victim who has taken it upon herself to deconstruct my work and expose the sociopathic attitudes encoded within it: “Having read Horned Man, think he may have a penchant for sadism. His short story ‘the Siege’ is disturbing in romanticisingsurveillance.... It’s also racist in sexualizing a black woman from a ‘revolutionary’ country, who loves her husband but is demeaned and made to have sex with ‘the english composer’ to save her true love’s life.”

YOU DON'T HAVE to be a writer to imagine how it feels to find yourself the object of a malicious attack on the Internet. An ordinary negative review is depressing, but it doesn’t flood you with this sense of personal emergency, as if not only your book but your life, or at least that large aura of meaning that accumulates around your life and gives it value, is in imminent and dire peril.

Call that aura your “character,” call it your “good name,” your “reputation,” your “honor.” Whatever it was, as I read the review, I seemed to be seeing the first stages of some irreversible damage spreading into this nebulous yet indispensable entity. Needless to say, her description of “The Siege,” like all her other accounts of my work, bears little resemblance to the story itself, but who was going to check?

Along with these Web attacks, Nasreen had now started emailing organizations that I was professionally associated with. My literary agency in London received an email accusing me of the familiar crimes. The Personals department of the London Review of Books, bizarrely, was sent an enraged email heaping curses on me (Nasreen had copied me on this). She seemed to be carrying out her threat to “ruin” me.

Very rapidly my relations with all of the publications and colleges I’ve worked with became tinged with anxiety. Had she contacted them? If so, were they concerned? I could have asked them, of course, but doing so seemed fraught with difficulties. If they hadn’t heard from her, what would they make of my strange tale of a former student’s denouncing me as a plagiarizing sexual predator? Somehow it seemed a mistake to introduce such a concept of myself into the minds of other people, even friends. And if they had heard from her, well, what good would it do for me to ask them to please take no notice of what she said?

She had been sending me hate mail now for almost a year. On the advice of the police, lawyers, and friends, I’d refrained from blocking it—not that this would have been easy to do, since she continually set up new email addresses. But I managed to get a detective from the New York Police Department to take an official interest in the case. If nothing else, that gave me standing as a bona fide victim.

One morning in 2008, I received an email purporting to be from the program director at the college where I had taught Nasreen. He appeared to be forwarding me an article about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he had accompanied the article with a personal message, though it wasn’t written in his usual style: It suggested, in much cruder terms, that we perform oral sex on each other and ended with “eat your ugly bittersweet and die!”(“Bittersweet” was the title of a poem I’d written.)

When you forward an article from a newspaper or magazine website, you generally fill out a form that asks for your own email address as well as that of the recipient and offers you a space to write a message. It turns out that on many websites, in the space for your own email address, you can type in the address of anyone you want, and the article and message will be sent as if from that person. Basically, as Nasreen had discovered, you can pretend to be anyone you want when you forward an article.

It didn’t take me long to surmise that if Nasreen was masquerading as other people to me, then she was probably masquerading as me to other people. Nasreen had in fact begun doing just that.

THE ONE CONSOLING thought arising from this development was that it constituted some kind of identity theft, which I hoped might be a serious enough crime to trigger extradition. (Nasreen had moved to California, and would have had to be extradited to New York, where I live, to face trial. That was unlikely to occur unless her actions crossed the line from misdemeanor to felony.)

I faxed the emails to my contact at the NYPD, Detective Bauer. He agreed that they amounted to identity theft but warned me that the district attorney’s office had recently lost a large case of electronic-identity theft and so wasn’t currently prosecuting the crime very enthusiastically. Still, he seemed to think these emails put him in a stronger position for dealing with Nasreen (he hadn’t yet managed to contact her).

Early in the summer, I arrived home one afternoon to find a message from Detective Bauer. He had finally spoken to Nasreen. “I warned her if she contacted you or any of your colleagues ever again, we’d have her arrested for aggravated harassment.”

I thanked him and hung up. There was silence for a few days. I allowed myself to feel fractionally optimistic.

And then she began again.

Originally adapted for The Chronicle Review from Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. ©2013 by James Lasdun. All rights reserved. CAUTION: Users are warned that the Work appearing herein is protected under copyright laws and reproduction of the text, in any form for distribution is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the Work via any medium must be secured with the copyright owner.