When the Predator is in Your Own Family

When most people think of stalkers who shadow women intent on sexual assault, what they think of is a stranger in black following the innocent woman to her car in some late-night parking lot, chloroform and duct tape in hand. They think of names like Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Zodiac killer, and others.

They certainly don’t think of their own chubby, rosy-cheeked relative with the big jolly laugh and an exaggerated Southern accent, who is a rabid sports fan and drinks oceans of cheap beer at family reunions.

I met “Steve” (all names and identifying details changed) a member of my husband’s extended family, when I was visiting my husband’s hometown for the first time. I came forward to greet Steve when my husband introduced us, and the first thing I noticed was that this guy was big — really big, probably about six feet and three hundred pounds or more.

Steve waited a second until I got closer, then stepped back and slammed the kitchen door in my face, followed by a loud “HAR HAR HAR, GOTCHA!” When I recoiled in disgust at this rudeness, he started yelling about “You’re too sensitive, too sensitive!” Steve was always calling me too sensitive, or too nice, or too quiet — before long, to me that was his code phrase for “I am an abusive asshole, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Meanwhile, everyone else stood around looking annoyed for a moment, and then conversation resumed like nothing had happened.

All right. Apparently they were used to this kind of thing from him.

On the day of our wedding, Steve was telling everyone that he had started drinking Bloody Marys right after he got up, and by the time our reception was half over, he was slurring, staggering drunk. I noticed that when the DJ invited the guests to join me and my new husband on the dance floor, that Steve was trying to get my friend “Anne” to dance with him, and he wasn’t giving up when she declined, either, following her around, at one point even trying to put his arms around her and bodily haul her onto the dance floor. Anne simply used the cut direct and scooted away from him through the crowd, faster than Steve could follow, and I breathed a sigh of relief. After we returned from our honeymoon, I called her and apologized to her on his behalf.

Towards the end of the reception, Steve staggered up to me, another bottle of beer in his hand. “You know if you hurt him, you’ll have the whole damn family wanting to kill ya, right?” he sneered, a warning glint in his eye.

“We haven’t even been married a full day yet, calm down.” With that, I turned my back on him too.

He only got worse from there.

Basic etiquette dictates that politics and religion are verboten topics at family gatherings, lest violent disagreements ruin the occasion. Steve seemed to have missed the memo on that particular custom — if he wasn’t yammering on about his Rush Limbaugh-esque political views and how much he hated liberals, he was bashing my home city. Nonetheless, for someone who clearly despised me so much, he always seemed to be hovering around me, and finding elaborately casual ways to touch me. If he hugged me good-bye, it went on for far too long, and there was always something that felt salacious about it.

We visited my mother-in-law in their hometown for her seventy-fifth birthday party a few years later, staying over in her guest room. Once we were on the plane heading back home, my husband asked:

“Did Steve wake you up last night?”



“No, what do you mean?”

“After a whole lot of beer, Steve told me he was going to go jump on you while you were asleep. He got as far as the hallway before I tackled him and made him leave you alone.”

“What the hell?”

“I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but I had to drag him away from the bedroom door.”

“What is he, five? I can’t believe a grown man would be so juvenile.”

That was the last time I spent the night at my mother-in-law’s house. From then on, I only went to family gatherings where we would be staying at a hotel, so I could sleep behind a safely locked door.

My husband and his male relatives have a tradition of going on a camping trip together every summer, and my husband came home with some disturbing stories about their talks beside the campfire: “Steve drank a whole six-pack of beer and kept being an ass like usual. He said some weird thing about how ‘I have to have a vicarious relationship with your wife because I don’t have a girlfriend.’ ”

“Wait — what?”

“He’s always bitching and moaning about how women don’t like him and he can’t get a girlfriend.”

“Gee, I wonder why. He has a ‘vicarious relationship’ with me? As in, he told you he wishes I was with him instead of you?”

“That’s what it sounded like, but he’s always getting drunk and saying stupid things like that. He always gets pissed off when someone in the family brings home a girlfriend, especially if she’s pretty.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Well, honey, his entire life consists of work, Republican party meetings, and taking his Mom to church on Sunday. I think he might even be a virgin.”

“That’s no excuse for perving on someone else’s wife. He straight-up told you that he was perving on your wife. That guy just makes me more and more nervous all the time.”

“He was just drunk and trying to get a rise out of me. You won’t see him until Thanksgiving, and hopefully he’ll have met someone by then.”

“Hopefully,” I said, although I pitied any woman who dated Steve more than I could say.

A large number of my husband’s family assembled at a resort hotel that Thanksgiving, as his mother prefers to eat out on that holiday. My husband and I flew in late the day before, and everyone ended up in my mother-in-law’s large suite for drinks. On Thanksgiving Day, my husband got up early and went down to the restaurant for a light breakfast, bringing back some coffee and a croissant for me. He then went to his mother’s room to visit with everyone, while I showered and dressed for our early dinner.

While I was finishing putting on my makeup, there was a knock at our hotel room door. It was Steve, in a business suit and immense expanse of white dress shirt.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He walked past me into our room and took a seat on the bed. “Your man sent me to get you.”

“Then you can go tell him that I need another few minutes to get ready. Why didn’t he just call?”

“I’ve heard him say you’re not very good about answering the phone.”

But Steve didn’t leave as prompted; no, he sat there watching me standing at the vanity as I put on my lipstick and brushed my hair, then put on my jewelry.

I could see his face over my shoulder in the mirror, and was taken aback by the way he was staring at me. Like he was starving, and I was dinner.

Then, thankfully, my husband returned a moment later, and Steve talked to him for a bit, then left to go down to the bar.

“Honey, why did you send Steve up to get me?” I asked my husband as we made our way down to the restaurant. “You know how rude he always is to me.”



My husband looked mystified. “What?”

I pulled him aside. “Steve told me that he went to our hotel room because you had sent him to get me.”



“I didn’t do that,” my husband protested. “I never said anything like that. When I ran into him in Mother’s suite we talked about football, I didn’t even mention you.”



“But he told me you sent him to get me. When I opened the door, he just walked into our room and sat down.”



“Then he’s mistaken. If I wanted you to come down, I would have called you or texted you.”

“He told me that you sent him because you thought I wouldn’t answer the phone.”



“That’s not true. I wouldn’t have sent him up there to get you — I know you can’t stand the guy. It was a complete surprise to see him there.”

“Okay… okay, honey, from what you’re telling me, he just decided to go up to our room when he knew I would be alone, and he lied to me about why he was there.”

My husband considered that. “Yeah… that’s kind of creepy.”

“More than kind of creepy — really creepy. I’m getting to where I wouldn’t put anything past that guy. He claims to be such a perfect Christian and then he’s always grabbing at me. And I don’t want to hear anyone say ‘He was just drunk!’ ever again.”

At the dinner, Steve got very, very drunk like usual, and then proceeded to park himself next to me at the table to regale me with insulting “jokes” like always. I picked up my glass of wine and started to walk away — and then I felt a hand reach up under my skirt, and fingers running down my inner thigh. I hurried away in a fury, found my husband, and told him what had just happened, and that I would be in our hotel room for the remainder of our stay and wouldn’t open the door for anyone.

We flew home from Thanksgiving the next day. I had my breakfast delivered by room service so I wouldn’t run into Steve at the restaurant. Once we arrived home, there was an email waiting for me, from Steve:

___________________________________________________

(no subject)

I am reminded that a coin has two sides and I try to look at life from both sides of the coin.  As such, I understand you are upset with me and my side of the coin is tarnished.  For whatever it was that I said or did, I apologize.    _______________________________________________

Far from placating me, that fake apology just added insult to injury.

So I wrote a letter describing Steve’s constant antagonism, and documenting all the instances of his impropriety and wandering hands: the door slammed in my face, the aggressive unwanted advances to my friend at the wedding, his “protective” death threat, the incident when he had to be stopped from jumping on me while I was asleep in bed, the drunken comments about his imaginary “relationship” with me, the too-familiar hugs, the instance in which he lied to be alone with me in the hotel room, the up-the-skirt thigh fondle, and a print-out of his last email to me. In conclusion, I wrote that I refused to ever see him again, and that my decision was permanent and completely non-negotiable.

Then I mailed the letter to Steve’s mother and sister, and to my husband’s mother. Within days, my phone was blowing up with tearful pleas: “Can’t you just find it in your heart to forgive him, he didn’t mean anything by it!” No one made the obvious observation that Steve should have just found it in his brain to keep his hands to himself. I let all the calls go to voicemail and made no reply. To speak to any of them would be allowing them to believe they had a chance of changing my mind.

“This is for his good as well as mine,” I told my husband. “Because if he lays one finger on me ever again, it will come to blows — I’ll slap the shit out of him. I will NOT deal with that grabby three-hundred-pound drunken bully, ever again. I’m afraid to even think what could have happened if you didn’t come back to our hotel room when you did.”

He supported me completely, and promised I would never see the man again.

Steve’s sister, “Martha”, then wrote me a four-page letter in which she pleaded with me not to boycott family events accompanied by a little sermon about forgiveness, What Would Jesus Do, and the power of prayer. Not once, however, did she even acknowledge what Steve had done to me or that he was the transgressor in the matter. It was as though she thought I wouldn’t remember what had prompted her to write to me in the first place.

I then proceeded to stay away from every family event where he would be in attendance for the next seven years, although my husband sometimes attended alone. Steve apparently was abrasive as ever, but he was keeping his hands to himself. He wouldn’t speak to my husband or look him in the eyes.

But then, in February, we got a phone call from my husband’s mother saying that Steve had died of a massive heart attack in his sleep, at the age of 52. The funeral was being held over a thousand miles away and the relationship between my husband and Steve’s family was now semi-estranged, so we used the pandemic as an excuse not to attend. I felt no sorrow when I heard that the man had died, only relief.

I have since read that sexual predators who prey on strangers are actually the rarity; it is far more common for them to go after people they know. A recent study at Glasgow University in Scotland found that 90% of rape and sexual assault survivors knew their attacker, and in 24% of the cases, the assault was committed by a family member. I was shocked to discover that relatives are actually more likely to rape than ex-boyfriends.

The criminologist’s general criteria for a predator’s potential victims are: first, someone the predator finds sexually attractive, and second, who does not have a strong support network looking out for them. The combination of my “outsider” status in their family and my husband’s gentle personality and blind faith in the essential decency of his own relatives must have looked like an opportunity to Steve’s predatory instincts. As I had married into the family and was no blood relation, there was no incest taboo protecting me either.

Steve’s constant antagonism, baiting, and grabbing fits the pattern of “grooming” a victim, in which the predator constantly pushes past the potential target’s boundaries and attempts to de-sensitize him or her to criminal behavior. At the same time, the predator subjects his target to a constant barrage of antagonism to undermine his or her self-confidence, and credibility to authority figures. This is no doubt why Steve constantly harped on my political and religious differences to the rest of the family. I was also alarmed by his pattern of constant escalation; if he did something outrageous and was reprimanded, he would try to get away with something worse at a later date, as though to say that no one could tell him what to do.

My advice to any other person going through a similar situation is:


First: Cut the potential predator out of your life entirely, and be ruthless about it. Don’t worry about who you might offend or who cries — it’s better that they should take offense and cry than you be attacked. Your personal safety is more important than a complete family photo at Grandma’s birthday party. It’s better that people wonder where you are than to be attacked and have to call the police to a family gathering.

Second: Tell people why you’re absenting yourself, by a means that the predator cannot intercept. You are under no obligation to keep his dirty little secrets for him. Tell his parents, tell his wife, tell his brothers and sisters. Certified mail letters with a detailed description of his threatening behavior against you are a good idea. Don’t worry about hurting them with the truth — you aren’t the one hurting them by reporting his assault, HE is. And if he never runs into any consequences for his predatory behavior, there is no reason for him to stop, and he’ll just move on to a new victim.

Last: Believe yourself and don’t blame yourself. Be on your own side. There is nothing more normal and natural than protecting yourself from dangerous people. Don’t let anyone downplay the incidents of frightening behavior just to “keep the peace.” You won’t start to find peace until you are safely, and permanently, away from the predator.