Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (15 page)

The culminating act in this particular line of attack came in April 2008. I had taken a teaching job at a college near where I live, to supplement my regular fall job at Morgan College. My boss—I’ll call him Frank—was a man in his sixties, an enthusiastic supporter of contemporary writing. There were four other writers in the department and three administrative assistants. Our offices were on the top floor of the campus library. The atmosphere was relaxed, though “relaxed,” by this time, wasn’t really a condition I was able to partake in personally.

One morning, shortly after I arrived for work, there was a knock on my door. It was Frank, looking uncharacteristically ill at ease. He had a piece of paper in his hand.

“We’ve been sent a very weird email,” he said. “Maybe you should read it.”

I knew immediately what it was. The subject heading ran:

James Lasdun, important information about your “writer-in-residence”

The email itself is rather long, but it seems necessary to reproduce it here in its entirety. I omit only some phrases that might identify other people. X, Y, and Z refer, as earlier, to the Iranian writers I was supposed to have helped. I should also mention that the poem I had begun writing on my cross-country train trip the year before had been published by now, under the title “Bittersweet.” It is fairly obviously about my father (you can Google it), but Nasreen had apparently decided it was in fact about her: “Lasdun,” she had written earlier to someone else, “[…] has his ‘lovers’ books reworked. He then writes Bittersweet claiming that I didn’t want fame, money etcetera.” Finally, I should stress that, in order for the full impact of this new email to be felt, it must be read as if by my boss himself, who at this point had no inkling of the psychodrama going on in the background of his new hire:

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a former female student of James Lasdun and find it truly disturbing that he is allowed to teach on any level. During my time as his student he did no work on my writing nor on any other female writer’s work. He did sleep with the well-connected [Elaine Baker] […] and had an on-going affair, which ended in her harassing and stalking me and sending me disgustingly explicit stories about their relationship when she found out he’d taken me to his agent Janice Schwartz.

It turned out that James Lasdun was not interested in my work but was trying to sleep with me. This, after I’d been raped while trying to finish my work, a novel about pre-revolutionary Iran with an emphasis on the atrocities committed against muslims. His agent sent me to Paula Kurwen, who told me she’d edit my work and to continue working on it while keeping silent and not speaking with any agents or editors (though Schwartz said she would not take on my work). In the meantime, Schwartz, with the aid of her neo-con friends X and Y set out to find two Jewish writers and one Zoroastrian to essentially duplicate my work. And then James Lasdun, after a long email relationship and warnings about him from Ms. Baker, cut me off completely. I never had an affair with him but had developed a psychological bond akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

James Lasdun’s poetry is mediocre. His fiction is often racist (I find nothing refreshing about Besieged, a story about an English composer who manipulates a dark woman into fucking him in order to get his help). This is the psychology of your writer-in-residence, at an era when misogyny is no longer romantic.

James Lasdun is probably hard at work writing yet another sadistic tale about me, just like his previous awful, crass poem Bittersweet, knowing that I had dwindled down to 98 pounds after he and his evil witches (Kurwen and banker Schwartz) deceived and stole from me—and after I’d been raped by a colleague at a magazine while writing my book in a 3 month period after finding out that somehow Ms Z was writing the same book (James Lasdun was my advisor on it and apparently he knew, I later found out).

If this is the business side of publishing I would like to vomit on all of you who contribute to such a shallow culture by promoting these people within who are nothing but destructive to beauty, truth and peace.

Please read Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. It seems many people are aware of Mr. Lasdun’s penchant for daytrading fiction for lack of money and talent. And now you are funding him to exploit me yet again because in my state of trauma and naive trust in him I told him many things, and this is precisely his plan, as he’s told me in the last email he sent.

I hope all the people involved in this rot in hell. And I wish these institutions of higher learning would stop being the banks they are. And I wish you’d keep Mr. Lasdun away from young women over which he has power. It is the only way this twisted, sadistic man can get his kicks.

Best,

Nasreen

For some time after I had finished reading I was unable to speak.

Frank seemed as embarrassed as I was. He had stood up and was pacing up and down my small office.

“Listen,” he said, “I just want you to know that I don’t regard it as any of my business who you’ve had affairs with in the past. It’s this other stuff that—”

“But I haven’t had an affair,” I said, my voice thick and constricted.

“I don’t mean with her, I mean with—” He peered at the email. “With the other girl—Elaine.”

“I haven’t had an affair with
anyone
!” I was agitated, eager to get the point over.

“All right. Fine. And like I say it’s not my concern. But it’s this other stuff that bothers me. These accusations of—I mean what does this even mean, ‘daytrading fiction’?”

Of Nasreen’s many smears, I had always imagined the sexual ones would be the most likely to harm me, particularly in the context of my teaching jobs. Hackneyed as it has become, the combination of elements—male professor, distraught female student, allegation of impropriety—is still potent. Nasreen was accusing me of sleeping with another student, not her, but clearly she was presenting this as a form of sexual harassment, and in fact at many colleges it would be considered precisely that (the reasoning is apparently that if you are sleeping with one student, this might cause you to give lower grades to others). But while it was a relief to find Frank unconcerned about these particular accusations, it was disconcerting to find him stalled by the other ones, which had seemed to me so self-evidently absurd. Not that he was saying he actually believed them, but he clearly felt that some explanation was called for before he could simply dismiss them. No doubt I would have reacted the same way in his position, but even so, the fact that a person of obvious sophistication would feel professionally obliged to give even passing consideration to this fantasy of a gang of neo-con word pirates filled me with a crushing sense of the difficulties that lay ahead of me.

But before I describe the rest of this conversation and its aftermath, I must backtrack a little, to a development of my own that I haven’t yet mentioned—one that had been progressing for some time.

*   *   *

I imagine that by now anyone reading this document will have at least one fairly pressing question: If I was innocent of everything Nasreen accused me of in her emails to me and other people, then why hadn’t I tried to stop them?

The answer is that I had: several times, and in several different ways.

Two or three months into the campaign, I had called the FBI. It had occurred to me that I was the victim of a hate crime, and this, as I understood it, was a federal offense. I can’t say I actually felt “victimized” by Nasreen’s anti-Semitism at that point; more just bewildered. But I definitely wanted the emails to stop, and the thought of being in a position to unleash the FBI on Nasreen had filled me with a brief surge of hope.

I spoke to several people, first at the FBI headquarters in New York and then at my local office in Albany. I was listened to patiently. Polite noises of sympathy were made. Off-the-cuff advice was offered (I was told on no account to block the emails or stop reading them, in case I missed some overt threat of violence, and not to write back either). But it became obvious, pretty quickly, that nobody was taking the matter as seriously as I was. And I realized, in fact, as I heard myself telling my bizarre story for the third or fourth time, that I probably sounded like a minor sort of lunatic and was just being humored, no doubt according to strict procedures laid down for dealing with crazy-sounding members of the public. The emails themselves, when I read them over the phone, elicited some grudging interest, but it seemed they weren’t threatening enough to warrant intervention from the FBI. For that, I would need direct, repeated death threats and even these would have to be explicitly related to my being Jewish. Nasreen’s description of herself as a “verbal terrorist,” which I had looked on as my trump card, produced little more than mildly puzzled indifference. An agent at the Albany office told me to keep him posted if things got worse, but I had the distinct sense (and this may have been an early symptom of my burgeoning paranoia) that he found me ridiculous, possibly even rather contemptible, for trying to turn the big guns of law enforcement against these harmless, if nasty, squibs. A part of me couldn’t help agreeing with him. The figure that comes to me—grandiose, but somehow irresistible—is Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross-border rocket attacks: laser strikes and phosphorous bombs in retaliation for some rusty old Qassams … How could that not look awful? And by the same token, how does a middle-aged man, a member of the “axis of virtue,” with all the advantages of his more or less comfortable position in life, fight a young, struggling Iranian woman filled with the sense of her own marginality, without feeling (and looking) like a jerk, a pussy, a chickenhawk imperialist, a “fucking faggot coward”?

For several weeks I reverted to stoical silence. But then this too started to feel like impotence (the logic of the situation seemed to be that
everything
, on my side, would sooner or later feel like impotence).

As other people were dragged into the affair, efforts at mounting some kind of collective defense began again, and this time they were more concerted. Phone calls were exchanged, strategies discussed, lawyers consulted. Still, it was surprisingly hard to come up with a plan. None of the lawyers seemed sure how to handle the matter, and anyway even the most basic legal action would have been unaffordable. Someone was given the name of a private security company that specialized in stalkers. I called them up and spoke to a man who seemed to be hinting, through careful euphemism, that the key to his company’s success lay in threatening to break the stalkers’ legs. This didn’t seem a very sensible way to go. At one point Paula, who for a period had been getting almost as many emails as I was, took a chance on going against the universal advice not to respond in any way to Nasreen, and wrote her an email (I should mention that I still hadn’t met Paula, conspiracies notwithstanding, and that it was through Janice that I heard about this). I saw the email after a document was compiled for the police out of all our correspondence. It was a very compassionate email, gently refuting the accusations, empathizing with the various kinds of pain involved in writing a book, and suggesting, among other things, that Nasreen might want to get some counseling. In reply she received a torrent of outstandingly vicious (even by Nasreen’s standards) abuse.

When the net of targets spread to include other writers at Morgan College, someone suggested we ask the school itself to help us. This had crossed my mind already, but I’d held back, basically out of embarrassment. Being the focus of a former student’s meltdown in which words like “rape,” “racist,” and “theft” are being tossed around isn’t a subject you’d want to raise with your employers at an American writing program if you didn’t absolutely have to. But as other faculty began receiving emails from Nasreen, so my reticence became pointless, and I began to talk.

The response was surprisingly warm and sympathetic (so much so that I had to wonder whether the repressive forces I had begun to see everywhere in American society might possibly be more a creation of my own anxieties than objective phenomena). Urgent, concerned phone calls and emails were sent out from various offices. I wrote, on request from the dean’s office, an account of everything that had happened between me and Nasreen. I distributed copies of Nasreen’s emails with annotations explaining the more puzzling references in them. I described my attempts to get the FBI involved in the matter and suggested the administration approach the FBI themselves. They responded that they didn’t have legal standing to do so, since the school itself wasn’t a target, but instead they proposed sending Nasreen an official “cease and desist” letter. This sounded promising to me. Being easily intimidated by the law, I tend to assume others will be just as docile. I didn’t see the letter itself, but Nasreen copied me on her reply. “
Sue me
,” runs the subject heading of her forwarding email, “
go ahead, call your little lawyers…”

The text contained a threat, of sorts—“I would probably harm him if I saw him on the street”—which, by the perverse logic of the situation, counted as a nugget of good news (it raised the possibility of criminal prosecution), but otherwise it was just the usual splatter of accusation and invective.

So much for “ceasing and desisting.” But meanwhile I had had a meeting with the school’s head of security, a former cop, who gave me the number of a police detective in the NYPD, I’ll call him Detective Bauer, who had experience dealing with this kind of problem.

I phoned the detective at once. He was brisk but courteous, and seemed willing to get involved. We arranged to meet the following week at his precinct building.