Who Are You?: Part 3 of 3: With one click she found her perfect man. And he found his perfect victim. A true story of the ultimate deception.
A dramatic and terrifying memoir of a ‘catfish’ scenario - when a woman meets a man online but nothing is what it seems.25-year-old Megan Henley put her five-year-old daughter to bed one evening and switched on her laptop. A Facebook ‘friend request’ seemed to be genuine. There were a few common friends and very similar interests, so Megan accepted.With that one simple act, she changed her life forever. In her words: ‘looking back on it, it was as if I had opened my front door to a stranger, as if I had thrown away every precaution I’d ever put in place, as if I had freely given access to my whole world – all because of some naïve belief that it was ‘just’ a friend request on a social media site.’ Megan is tricked into a relationship, paranoia, and ultimately betrayal by the man she loved and trusted but nothing is as it seems.
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Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2016
FIRST EDITION
© Megan Henley 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Front cover photograph © Rekha Garton/Arcangel Images (posed by model)
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Megan Henley and Linda Watson Brown assert the
moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008144333
Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008171087
Version: 2015-11-26
Contents
Chapter 12
February 2012
Although I had spoken online to Valerie or Leah or Clare pretty much every day over the course of the last two and a half years, I had never met them – there had been plans, but they had always fallen through. They were touring, or had their own troubles, or were DJing themselves. There was always an excuse. I suppose it was odd that there had only been online messages, even after I’d had Lily, but I was swept along in thinking that they all had these glamorous lives while I was the dullest of the dull.
I had become so close to Val, I thought I knew her really well. She had become such a good friend and confidante in all the troubles I’d had with Vic and his family, right from the beginning. It was because of her vouching for Vic’s good character that I was ever prepared to give him a chance in the first place. She had such a distinctive character, and Vic had pointed her out to me in music videos of other artists, so I even knew what she looked like – or thought I did. He had shown her to me in a promo for Spiral Tribe performing a song called ‘Forward the Revolution’. Spiral Tribe was a large collaboration of musicians involved with dance music, and Vic had claimed they were all friends.
I felt so stupid. She was just a random woman in the crowd – and I was just an idiot who had been taken in. As the days and weeks went by, I looked back on everything and saw what Vic had done.
He had set up hundreds of fake FB profiles.
They all looked like fans and friends who had been to gigs, but they were all Vic.
Good liars need to be excellent organisers and he was certainly that – God knows how long it had all taken him – he’d created another world.
There was no Kat, no Dina, no gypsy family.
There had been no initial birthday party – he had just chosen me when I had asked after him and shown that I was a caring person. For him, that made me a gullible fool.
He had sabotaged my car that first time he showed up at the cottage.
He had sent the abusive emails to himself – he was the ‘friend’ who said I was a liar, a whore and a porn star. He kept sending messages to himself, ramping up the insults, making me more and more vulnerable.
He was lying when he said he knew nothing of computers. He was Martin, the expert who found the viruses and spyware – viruses and spyware which never existed in the first place.
Christopher had never done those things – Vic had beaten him up for nothing and framed him for possession of child pornography.
When I had thought he looked like someone from a film when I first saw him listening to the ‘voices’, that’s exactly what it was. He was acting.
When he said at that point that the voices might tell him to hurt me, that was just another part of the grooming, making me terrified, making me dependent on him for my safety when, in reality, he was the only threat in my life.
When he said that he had a false identity as Steven Cook, he was cleverly blurring the picture in advance, in case I ever discovered his real name was Cook and not Morana.
The fact that Valerie didn’t exist, and I had in fact been talking to Vic all along, was downright creepy. I had told her everything that was going on in our relationship – and the one hearing my confidences was him all the time. Everything I told her in secret was ammunition for him. I thought of all the times Val and the others had listened as I revealed details of how badly Vic was behaving, only for them to remind me what a great guy he was, what terrible mental health problems he had to cope with, how he had saved us from his family threats, how highly regarded he was in the music business, how much he raised for charity – lies, lies, lies, all coming from him about him.
