The Worst Year of My Life is Online for the Entire Internet

And here's what I learned...

Some of you might be here with what you think is context, some of you might be coming in fresh.

Tl;dr I got publicly doxxed by my 40-something-year old abuser in a 246 page document followed by an additional 60 Instagram stories.

Almost a year ago exactly, a series of anonymous stories were posted about John Romaniello. They ranged from creepy and disturbing to horrific. The internet’s response generally was positive in that the survivors were believed. But, it is a lot easier to make a defense against a bunch of anonymous posts.

Months later, I decided to make a statement and become a public face behind one of these stories. There were a few reasons.

(1) It was a reclamation process for me.

A month or so after I parted ways with my abuser, I had come to terms with the hell and abuse I experienced. It’s not uncommon for victims to not realize their situation until after they leave.

I remember looking in the mirror and I promised myself that someday, I would share my story. In many ways, ending things with me was a way of silencing me. He made it known to people in his circle that he did not appreciate his “friends” maintaining communication with his ex-partners. I was dismissed as another one of John’s crazy ex’s.

I knew that ultimately it was not the place nor time for me to share my story. I was acutely aware of the amount of therapy I would need to be able to handle not only publicly talking about my story, but any of the backlash that would inevitably happen.

(2) I wanted other women and people to know they weren’t alone.

1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men will be a victim of intimate partner violence.

That’s not a negligible amount. So, why is it talked about so little?

There are a lot of reasons, but I think the most obvious being shame.

Shame is the warrior for abuser, protecting them from exposure.

Abusers depend on your shame to silence you.

They orchestrate and manipulate situations with really one goal: to get their desires met while keeping you controlled. I’ll spend more time exploring shame later, but for now we can acknowledge that it’s a central reason as to why we don’t hear more about intimate partner violence.

Perhaps a second reason lies with the definition of intimate partner violence.

While I was lucky enough to have wonderful and safe parents, the generation before me (like many other Egyptian women in that time period) weren’t as fortunate.

Physical violence was more the norm than the exception. Growing up, I was warned of these men and taught to be vigilant for the obvious red flags like hitting or yelling. And that was as far as my definition of abuse went.

Nobody every talked to me about emotional abuse or coercion or anything in that vein. It was as simple as that.

It’s hard to catch something you’re not looking for.

For clarity’s sake, emotional abuse is any nonphysical behavior that is designed to control, subdue, punish, or isolate another person through the use of humiliation or fear (Engel, 2002).

After things had ended, I had felt so alone and so isolated in my experience… but over time, I talked to other women who had been through the same thing with the same man.

Several women with the same exact injury and same exact STI contracted.

Even the same text messages in response to it.

I also talked to other individuals in different support spaces who went through similar situations and felt the same sort of emptiness I did.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to describe what that year did to my nervous system or wellbeing. The best description of my state was that I felt like a shell of a person.

Prior to everything that had transpired, my business was at its peak, I felt confident in myself, proud of my life, and felt like a vibrant young woman excited for the world. At the end of everything, it truly felt like I was simply a shadow of that person.

A year of constant confusion, extreme emotions, walking on eggshells, perpetually wondering why things weren’t working, attempting to rationalize with a reality that was designed to not make sense, while trying to appease someone who was incapable of seeing beyond themselves - was exhausting. The constant communication, tens of thousands of text messages, started as mutual, but eventually devolved into me grasping for connection with someone who claimed to care, yet kept slipping further away. It became a fixation, something that quietly consumed my days, blurred my sense of self, and thoroughly drained me.

When it all finally ended, my system crashed.

I got into therapy, I saw a psychiatrist, and committed to pouring all the energy that was once sucked up by a black hole, back into myself.

I knew that I was going to make it out on the other side.

And when I did finally get there - I wasn’t going to shut the fuck up about it.

I never wanted any other woman to feel like I did.

And I never wanted any woman who experienced what I did, to feel alone.

These are two of my reasons for deciding to put a face to what had previously been anonymous. And while I had others, these two reasons alone were strong enough for me to ultimately open myself up to what I knew would come - the smear campaign.

According to Google’s AI: A smear campaign is a deliberate effort to damage someone's reputation and credibility through disinformation, rumors, or other negative tactics. This tactic is often used as a way to control the narrative, rewrite history, and make the victim appear to be the "crazy" one.

Key aspects of a narcissistic smear campaign include:

• Intentionality: It's a conscious act by the narcissist, not a spontaneous outburst.

• Vengeful nature: It's often motivated by a perceived injury or threat to the narcissist's ego, such as the victim setting boundaries or ending the relationship.

• Persistent and Overt: Smear campaigns go beyond simple gossip and involve persistent efforts to harm the victim's reputation.

• Use of Flying Monkeys: Narcissists often recruit others to spread rumors and participate in the manipulation, creating an entourage of "flying monkeys".

• Narcissistic Projection: Narcissists may accuse the victim of their own negative traits and behaviors.

Additionally, one of the most notable things about a smear campaign is that the primary tactic used is discrediting the victim, rather than engaging in any substantive debate or discussion. It doesn’t rebut, it discredits.

After my public statements, I braced for a flood of 20-30 stories explaining why I was a liar, sharing cherry picked screenshots that made him seem the victim, and made me the crazy ex-girlfriend.

This is what John had done to previous anonymous victims.

He somehow was able to match these anonymous stories of lies against him with specific people (weird that if you didn’t do these things, you know who said them?), publicly shared their names, and then proceeded to do what I’m sure he thought was a good job of defending himself.

I’m very lucky to have the privilege to work with an incredible therapist who not only was well versed in kink and power exchanges, but also in intimate partner violence.

And I have spent a lot of time in therapy. Like a lot. 2 hours of EMDR per week for 2 years.

That processing not only gave me the mental fortitude and inner resourcing to handle a public discussion, but also enough insight into my abuser to predict what he’d say.

He would triangulate me against my ex-girlfriend (Triangulation is a tactic in which abusers create a third party to manipulate, create jealousy, diminish self-esteem, and ultimately encourages the victim to engage with whatever desired behavior.)

He’d frame my need for reassurance in a relationship devoid of safety as evidence of instability.

He’d portray my pain and frustration as some sort of drug-induced madness.

I already knew the stories of other women and saw how he cherry picked his “evidence” and manipulated a narrative that served him, so I was bracing for the worst.

But weeks went on and nothing came. I found it strange, but moved on with my life since I have one.

So, yes, while I was expecting the sort of narrative John spun…

I did not expect a 246 page document followed by 60+ Instagram stories documenting the worst year of my life.

And it was the worst year of my life.

Not just emotionally and psychologically - but physically as well.

It was a full month of unbearable pain. My ex-girlfriend who lived with me at the time, would leave for work and return to find me in the exact same fetal position in the tub doing everything to keep myself from screaming.

Despite the tumultuous ending to our relationship, her and I have since made amends and she told me how dark that time was, not just for me, but for her too, watching me unreachable and unraveling before her.

It was relentless pain and I really haven’t experienced anything else like it. Imagine if the most sensitive area of your body had glass shards somehow permanently embedded and then open wounds on top of it. This is what an anal tear with a christening HSV outbreak feels like.

Imagine my surprise to find out months later, I was not the only woman who experienced this exact series of events with this man. An anal tear followed by a christening of an HSV outbreak.

If I’m being completely transparent, that period of time is very blurry. I’m sure in part because this was the apex of the relational abuse, but also physical pain intensifies every emotion by a hundred fold. I was also self-medicating.

And yes, John recounted it all in an effort to shame me.

He documented every moment of consent, every moment of drug use - things I have owned months before and explained.

But in this recount, he reframed them with his lens selectively choosing excerpts out of the thousands of messages sent and also purposely exposing the parts of our dynamic that I felt intense shame and insecurity around.

People like him bank on shame silencing you.

In order to make sure other victims know that he’s serious about keeping his abusive enterprise around, he would have to expose anyone that spoke out against him. Set an example.

There was a moment I’ll never forget. I was sitting through one of his many four-hour monologues—numb, futilely interjecting just to hear the sound of my own voice and remember I was a real person. At some point, he said something along the lines of “the only unforgivable thing in this community is posting something to the internet. Everything else we can fix, but the internet is forever.” The gist being, it was a warning to not air out dirty laundry online.

The thing with abusive relationships is once you’ve reached a certain level of dissociation whether that’s through your brain’s own safety mechanisms or drug use or whatever other escape, abusers can get away with saying some really egregious shit.

But, my brain was just awake enough to flag that as being fucking weird.

Wouldn’t killing someone be worse? Raping someone? Cheating on someone’s wife? Lying?

I mean there’s a whole plethora of morally abhorrent things that I think would come before public exposure.

There were other moments where the mask dropped in that final stage. Moments that I flagged internally as wrong, but didn’t feel safe enough to address or even fully comprehend what it meant at the time. I would mention them quietly to a friend, but I mostly tucked those instances away in my brain to be revisited.

I needed to reorient myself to what normal even was, before I could examine any of these things further.

There’s this saying:

You can’t diagnose sick fish in toxic waters.

Meaning, it’s often hard to discern things that are bad when the environment itself is bad. Sometimes the problem isn’t the fish - it’s the environment they are swimming in. In toxic waters, sickness becomes the norm. Long term abuse or toxic environments slowly erode your sense of what’s normal, what’s safe, and what’s true.

Beyond this, multiple instances were recounted to me where John threatened legal action to some of his ex-partners for defamation, claimed he was the victim, and paraded the Heard Depp case as some sort of validation of his suffering, etc. Of course, this was disclosed early on in our dynamic, where I believed this man.

So yes, I was warned. In more ways than one.

And the consequences came. Tenfold.

So, what did I learn from having the worst year of my life published like shitty fan fiction for the entire world to see?

(1) That it’s incredibly validating to know that something you said made so much sense to so many people, that I could haunt John into writing probably the longest literary work he’s published since like 1998 or whatever.

(2) Shame and silence feed off of each other.

You stay silent cause of your shame, but your shame also needs your silence.

Shame is an emotion that festers in the darkest corners of your being and peeks through at the most inopportune times. Without the right resourcing, we shove it back down into the silence where it seems to multiply.

Am I still embarrassed around some of the stuff that got published?

Kind of?
But not really.

Mostly, I just feel heartbreak for the 25-year-old girl who was doing her best in an impossible situation that wore her down in every capacity.

In a weird way, I’m almost glad all that shit got published.

Sure, there are people who might doubt me now and think I’m a murderous witch who brings people back from the dead.

Or a mentally unstable woman with “daddy” issues who is a pathological liar.

Or that for some reason, subjecting myself to the scrutiny of thousands of strangers on the internet was worth fulfilling a vendetta of a man who is entirely irrelevant to this new and beautiful life I’ve built for myself.

Some people might think that.

But that’s far and few in between the messages support I’ve gotten and the plethora of stories from other people who had unfortunately experienced similar things.

It was a solidarity I was not expecting, but gladly welcomed.

Don’t get me wrong, if in an imaginary world I had full control and could click a button that decided the fate of my novella, I wouldn’t push that button.

Contrary to what it might seem, I don’t particularly enjoy revisiting memories from this time period and find no reason to make my life harder. But, being able to find the bright side in all of this - that’s on some post-traumatic growth, as my therapist says.

So, where’s the tea? 🫖

I have already shared in other writings a lot about tactics used in emotionally abusive situations and how manipulative people can leverage emotional needs to get their desires met, sexual or otherwise.

I know people will have questions about what was said in that 246 page document.
And I hate to break it to you, many of those questions will go unanswered.
This isn’t just my story to tell.

If you are reading this hoping for whatever “proof” you deemed necessary, you’re in the wrong place.

I’m not here to prove anything and I never was.

I’ve already stated my reasons for sharing and none of those included satiating internet sleuths who feel entitled to analyze every detail of some of my most deeply harming experiences. If I wanted that experience, I would take it to a courtroom and have the great pleasure of reliving the year of my hell on earth. Whether or not people heed my warning or believe me, is solely on them.

And frankly, further engagement only feeds his narcissism.

My story was always and is still intended to not only to be my own reclamation, but also an opportunity to help illuminate the things that often get shrouded in darkness.

To talk about the things I wish I knew.

So while I won’t be discussing or debating the details of anything that was accounted for online, what I will say is this:

While some things in life may not be our fault, it is our responsibility.

Knowing that has allowed me to make amends with people I’ve hurt and those who have hurt me. It took me months of therapy to even begin to forgive others and more importantly forgive myself for everything that transpired.

Reconnecting with people whose relationships had been strained or severed because of John’s influence has been one of the most meaningful parts of my healing.

One of my friends has this saying about how with trauma, there’s a period of time where we need to be a victim.

You need to feel the complete despair. The unfairness. The wounds.

But the goal is never to stay there. It’s to process and move through it all so you can come out on the other side a survivor.

I’m not a perfect person.

I’m certainly not a perfect victim.

But, at least to me, I’m a perfect survivor.

I made it out.

And if you’ve been in a similar situation or resonate with any of this, I hope you know that there is no such thing as a perfect victim.

If you pulled out of the bullshit - you did the one thing you need to which is survive and you did it perfectly.

References

Engel B. The emotionally abusive relationship: How to stop being abused and how to stop abusing. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons; 2002.