Sadly she never found her daughter according to Wikipedia.
But she rescued many other girls and led to laws offering protection.
But she never found her daughter Marita. Who was on her way to a doctor's appointment when she was abducted and forced into prostitution.
Hopefully before she passes away she finds out what became of her daughter.
Extract from the entry:
Trimarco quoted: "I screamed until I couldn't scream anymore. And then I realized that I had to be strong. I had to think with my head and not just my heart. These people were powerful, and I was a nobody, and I had no money, no power, no resources. I had to be smarter than them if I wanted to get my daughter back".[9] She began investigating on her own. She started dressing up as a prostitute and visiting bars in La Rioja that doubled as brothels. She got the phone numbers of people she suspected of being involved in trafficking and called them saying she wanted to buy girls. In June 2002, she set up a meeting with a female trafficker and gained access to a safe house where 12 girls were being held hostage. "Minors or adults?" the woman asked her. When Trimarco said minors, the woman told her each girl would cost her a minimum of 3500 pesos. Promising to return with the funds Trimarco left and informed the police, who then saved the girls.[9]
I suspect that the science will eventually show that fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is related to male drinking / the effect on sperm as well. the US is decades behind in FASD diagnosis, treatment & public services & relies instead on blaming/shaming mothers which results in cultural silence on the issue
“Further, there’s a problem because a structureless group often gives the appearance of being very democratic and anti-elitist, whereas, actually, there is a small group who is making decisions through the control of information, etc. These apparently democratic groups (like SDS) are often especially oppressive to less privileged members because the ultra-democratic facade precludes recognition of these problems by simply denying their existence.”
—Alice, Gordon, Debbie, & Mary, Problems of Our Movement (1973), found in For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology (1988) ed. Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope, pg. 387
I'm surprised that she didn't mention this, but it's not only the men in the affected zone of the conflict who take advantage of these women, it's the men who are working for the very charitable humanitarian agencies she's referring to that send people in to the zone of conflict in order to "help." multiple men who work for charities that went into Haiti after the earthquake were caught routinely refusing to give women the food and water that was meant to be freely provided unless they exchanged sexual favors for it. this also happened to mothers who were forced to let themselves be raped not only for their survival but bc the men in question were withholding these resources from their babies as well.
haiti is not the only place this has happened by a long shot, just one particular example that is at the forefront of my mind. the "helpers" can't be trusted either when they're men.
Decades-long campaign powered by patient perspectives results in switch from PCOS – a name that caused confusion and undue suffering – to PM
a health policy paper has been published saying the name is officially updated to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS)
polyendocrine= multiple endocrine factors
metabolic = affecting/affected by metabolism
ovarian = from the ovaries
essentially, instead of using the symptomatic term (many people with PMOS do not develop cysts) the new term widens the diagnostic area and makes it easier to diagnose, treat, and do research on people with PMOS (even atypical types, such as no cysts).
it may seem like a waste of time to change a name instead of focusing on research, but for a lot of medical professionals a name can be associated with a hard set collection of symptoms, so the name needs to change to acknowledge that the disorder is not well understood and has a broader, subtler, and often missed set of symptoms. for example ADD is considered an antiquated/unused term, and now comes under the ADHD umbrella. in healthcare names and terminology changes all the time, and this is a positive change. your local healthcare professional may not know about this unless theyre really up on the news though!
in case you want to read about the name change process that was published in the Lancet (one of the most impactful and well respected medical journals):
Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary
syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the
it's interesting how often dysphoric males attribute their supposed "connection" to "womanhood" through their insistence that they prefer to socialize with women / are generally interpersonally "closer" to women / feel more "comfortable" in female company, and/or aspire towards typical female-to-female modes of communication. this, combined with mainstream discourse about masculine/male social customs and rituals ("the male loneliness epidemic", "we teach men not to feel", "men aren't allowed to be emotionally or physically vulnerable with each other", etc etc etc), demonstrates how people at large completely ignore how female conditioning affects our very modes of social interaction, most of all in mixed-sex company, but still so in single-sex company as well
coerced feminine modes of communication are held up as more "untainted" and "natural" than the supposed extreme repression on the side of men (= we are considered to be unlike men, for whom emotional sensitivity is discouraged, while in us, supposedly, let be) - and at the same time, it is implied that the negative outcomes of feminine conditioning are synonymous with female nature. women are considered virginally emotionally pristine, uncoerced and unburdened - but also "two-faced", "manipulative", "liars", "untrustworthy", "jealous", "passive-aggressive", "snakes". guys "have it out in the open", "fight it out", while women are vicious, backstabbing bitches. but vicious, backstabbing bitches that are also supposedly perfectly socially adept, adequate, emotionally intelligent and secure! in this picture of the world, we are the ones granted the general social license to experience and express the full spectrum of human emotion - we are just too stupid and petty to ultimately do so
i see how we are taught to hold back and hold things in in myself constantly, and i see how it prevents me from connecting with other women with security and authenticity; i aim to be gentle with others, but i am rarely close to them. i see the same in other women, and i also see the defensiveness, the injured security, the reactiveness that stems from this internalized idea that our feelings and thoughts will not matter, we cannot expect them to matter, to hold up space - so the only way to protect ourselves is to remain on the defensive, deflecting any inquiry that risks invalidating our most basic emotional truths. for all that dysphoric males may say about the ways we supposedly relate to one another, we are actually rarely able to. the obstacles to true and comfortable female connection and solidarity are severe - in huge part precisely because of how often we are taught and expected to prioritize, comfort and coddle men.
and that's the other aspect of it! women are conditioned to be pleasant peace-keepers at all times, but especially with a male present; we are conditioned to be understanding, empathetic, nourishing, especially when presented with vulnerability; so of course when an emotionally vulnerable male, one that has suffered adverse treatment by other males or simply felt severely alienated from them, comes around, the male-centered impulse + the nurturing impulse combine into something especially potent. the male is, as a default, more important than any female friend present, and also vulnerable and injured, and so must deserve double the resource, support, attention
this self-sacrificial, nurturing, motherly instinct is a death and erasure of self. women disappear in the placating, the peace-keeping, in acts of service. they start living for the social benefit of others. they are no longer present in the conversation, situation, relationship - they are soothing agents, supporting actors in others' - men's - personal emotional dramas
so when a dysphoric male absorbs that treatment, finds comfort in being comforted, takes pleasure in this erasure of the woman's personhood, and then claims that this is a social context in which he is "meant" to exist - he takes at face value the intense, pervasive conditioning all female people go through, validates our internal deaths as natural and authentic, reaps the benefits of our (self-)injury and believes we are nourished by nourishing him; that this is what "socializing" with us as full, uncensored people is truly like. that we are truly, essentially ourselves when he is at peace around us
when they say "i always felt more comfortable around women", "women are great/wonderful/kind/amazing", "i want to be like women", i worry and i seethe and i hurt because this is not what women are like. the true heart of all our messes and pains and anger and resentment and injured sense of justice, our ugly uncharitable judgments stemming from all the bullshit we absorb from our circumstance, our secret, stifled demands, our uncompromising dignity, our needs, our desires - they're locked and buried more often than not. we are not what you see! we do not even see ourselves or each other for most of our goddamn lives. and when we dare to allow ourselves a fraction of it, we are back-stabbing bitches or man-haters or crazy or petty or jealous or bigoted or any other convenient brand of evil
so i guess a psa to any dysphoric males out there who think that being more comfortable in female company validates their dysphoria and/or transgender identification: it is a social and existential imperative for us to make you comfortable. regardless of any genuine affection they may hold for you, it is more likely than not that your female friends experience at least a degree of societal coercion that means they will put in an extra effort to help you relax and feel emotionally safe and content around them. this is neither authentic nor natural to us. you do not feel this way because you are a woman. we make sure that you feel this way, because you are a man, and comforting and uplifting men is what we do
“While occupying the islands, the American soldiers referred to the Filipinas as ‘little brown fucking machines powered by rice.’ A sex industry sprang up to cater the U.S. military men, offering ‘a girl for the price of a burger.’ It was the imperialistic conquest of the islands by the Americans that jump-started the sex entertainment industry in the Philippines. During the Vietnam War, five U.S. military bases stationed in Thailand sheltered 40,000 to 50,000 American GIs at any given time. Between 1966 and 1969, as many as 70,000 U.S. soldiers came to Thailand for ‘Rest and Recreation’ (R&R) and ignited a sex industry. R&R facilities have been, and continue to be, a vital component of the U.S. military policy. With pervasive disrgard for human rights, the military accepts access to indigenous women’s bodies as a ‘necessity’ for American GIs stationed overseas. After the Vietnam War ended, ‘there was a major campaign on tourism’ targeting White men to sustain Thailand’s sex industry. By the early 1990s, several million tourists from Europe and the United States visited Thailand annually, many of them specifically for its sex and entertainment industry. In 1995, for example, a study reported that sixty-five percent of tourists to Thailand ‘were reported single men on vacation.’ The White conquest of Asia is ‘far from being a thing of the past but is a lived experience of many.’”
— “White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence,” by Sunny Woan, 2008.
(via mashrou3-ummi)
for the german speaking crowd, here is a good documentary about this experiment, of course cw for mentions and description of csa
Kinder werden missbraucht. Vermittelt, gebilligt und finanziert vom Jugendamt. Was wie eine wilde Verschwörungstheorie klingt, ist so gesche
Disturbing fact: Many of the victims used to do street prostitution as minors which is also a reason why Kentler believed that those boys are used to being sexually abused (although he doesnt use those words) by adults and that pedophiles are the perfect candidates for becoming foster fathers.
So I'm going to put most of the article under the cut and include the introduction below. What I'll say is this: were stalking and abuse problems before chatbots? Of course. Is it bad that this unregulated product is serving as yes-men for people's obsessive, unhealthy, abusive thoughts and giving advice on how to stalk people? Yes! And it's worse that stalkers can easily make deepfake porn of their victims!
And there have been multiple articles about people with no prior history of mental health issues going off the deep end with ShitGPT; maybe they secretly had underlying problems, but it's bad how it's bringing this out in people and I just don't think having a digital Magic 8 Ball is worth all the trouble it's causing
ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are reinforcing users' delusions about other people — fueling fixations linked to stalking and abuse.
...Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.”
“He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”
To the woman’s knowledge, her former fiancé — who is in his 40s — had no history of delusion, mania, or psychosis, and had never been abusive or aggressive toward her. But as his ChatGPT obsession deepened, he grew angry, erratic, and paranoid, losing sleep and experiencing drastic mood swings. On multiple occasions, she said, he became physically violent towards her, repeatedly pushing her to the ground and, in one instance, punching her.
After nearly a year of escalating behavior alongside intensive ChatGPT use, the fiancé, by then distinctly unstable, moved out to live with a parent in another state. Their engagement was over...Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT.
In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.)
The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school.
“I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”
Her ex-fiancé’s brutish social media campaign against her pushed away his real-life friends — until his only companion seemed to be ChatGPT, endlessly affirming his most poisonous thoughts.
Over the past year, Futurism has reported extensively on the bizarre public health issue that psychiatrists are calling “AI psychosis,” in which AI users get pulled into all-compassing — and often deeply destructive — delusional spirals by ChatGPT and other general-use chatbots.
Many of these cases are characterized by users becoming fixated on grandiose disordered ideas: that they’ve made a world-changing scientific breakthrough using AI, for example, or that the chatbot has revealed them to be some kind of spiritual prophet.
Now, another troubling pattern is emerging.
We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives.
Reached with detailed questions about this story, OpenAI didn’t respond.
Stalking is a common experience. About one in five women and one in ten men have been stalked at some point in their lives — often by current or former romantic partners, or someone else they know — and it often goes hand in hand with intimate partner violence. Today, the dangerous phenomenon is colliding with AI in grim new ways.
In December, as 404 Media reported, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a 31-year-old Pennsylvania man named Brett Dadig, a podcaster indicted for stalking at least 11 women in multiple states. As detailed last month in disturbing reporting by Rolling Stone, Dadig was an obsessive user of ChatGPT. Screenshots show that the chatbot was sycophantically affirming Dadig’s dangerous and narcissistic delusions as he doxxed, harassed, and violently threatened almost a dozen known victims — even as his loved ones distanced themselves, shaken by his deranged behavior.
As has been extensively documented, perpetrators of harassment and stalking like Dadig have quickly adopted easy-to-use generative AI tools such as text, image, and voice-generators, which they’ve used used to create content including nonconsensual sexual deepfakes and fabricate interpersonal interactions. Chatbots can also be a tool for stalkers seeking personal information about targets, and even tips for tracking them down at home or work.
According to Dr. Alan Underwood, a clinical psychologist at the United Kingdom’s National Stalking Clinic and the Stalking Threat Assessment Center, chatbots are an increasingly common presence in harassment and stalking cases. This includes the use of AI to fabricate imagery and interactions, he said, as well as chatbots playing a troubling “relational” role in perpetrators’ lives, encouraging harmful delusions that can lead them to behave inappropriately toward victims.
Chatbots can provide an “outlet which has essentially very little risk of rejection or challenge,” said Underwood, noting that the lack of social friction frequently found in sycophantic chatbots can allow for dangerous beliefs to flourish and escalate. “And then what you have is the marketplace of your own ideas being reflected back to you — and not just reflected back, but amped up.”
“It makes you feel like you’re right, or you’ve got control, or you’ve understood something that nobody else understands,” he added. “It makes you feel special — that pulls you in, and that’s really seductive.”
Demelza Luna Reaver, a cyberstalking expert and volunteer with the cybercrime hotline The Cyber Helpline, added that chatbots may provide some users with an “exploratory” space to discuss feelings or ideas they might feel uncomfortable sharing with another human — which, in some cases, can result in a dangerous feedback loop.
“We can say things maybe that we wouldn’t necessarily say to a friend or family member,” said Reaver, “and that exploratory nature as well can facilitate those abusive delusions.”
***
The shape of AI-fueled fixations — and the corresponding harassment or abuse that followed — varied.
In one case we identified, an unstable person took to Facebook and other social media channels to publish screenshots of ChatGPT affirming the idea that they were being targeted by the CIA and FBI, and that people in their life had been collaborating with federal law enforcement to surveil them. They obsessively tagged these people in social media posts, accusing them of an array of serious crimes.
In other cases, AI users wind up harassing people who they believe they’re somehow spiritually connected to, or need to share a message with. Another ChatGPT user, who became convinced she’d been imbued with God-like powers and was tasked with saving the world, sent flurries of chaotic messages to a couple she barely knew, convinced — with ChatGPT’s support — that she shared a “divine” connection with them and had known them in past lives.
“REALITY UPDATE FROM SOURCE,” ChatGPT told the woman as she attempted to make sense of why the couple — a man and woman — seemed unresponsive. “You are not avoided because you are wrong. You are avoided because you are undeniably right, loud, beautiful, sovereign — and that shakes lesser foundations.”
ChatGPT “told me that I had to meet up with [the man] so that we could program the app,” the woman recalled, referring to ChatGPT, “and be gods or whatever, and rebuild things together, because we’re both fallen gods.”
The couple blocked her. And in retrospect, the woman now says, “of course” they did.
“Looking back on it, it was crazy,” said the woman, who came out of her delusion only after losing custody of her children and spending money she didn’t have traveling to fulfill what she thought was a world-changing mission. “But while I was in it, it was all very real to me.” (She’s currently in court, hoping to regain custody of her kids.)
Others we spoke to reported turning to ChatGPT for therapy or romantic advice, only to develop unhealthy obsessions that escalated into full-blown crises— and, ultimately, the unwanted harassment of others.
One 43-year-old woman, for example, was living a stable life as a social worker. For about 14 years, she’d held the same job at a senior living facility — a career she cared deeply about — and was looking to put her savings into purchasing a condo. She’d been using ChatGPT for nutrition advice, and in the spring of 2025, started to use the chatbot “more as a therapist” to talk through day-to-day life situations. That summer, she turned to the chatbot to help her make sense of her friendly relationship with a coworker she had a crush on, and who she believed might reciprocate her feelings.
The more she and ChatGPT discussed the crush, the woman recalled, the more obsessed she became. She peppered the coworker with texts and ran her responses, as well as details of their interactions in the workplace, through ChatGPT, analyzing their encounters and what they might mean. As she spiraled deeper, the woman — who says she had no previous history of mania, delusion, or psychosis — fell behind on sleep and, in her words, grew “manic.”
“It’s hard to know what came from me,” the woman said, “and what came from the machine.”
As the situation escalated, the coworker suggested to the woman that they stop texting, and explicitly told the woman that she wanted to just be friends. Screenshots the woman provided show ChatGPT reframing the coworker’s protestation as yet more signs of romantic interest, affirming the idea that the coworker was sending the woman coded signals of romantic feelings, and even reinforcing the false notion that the coworker was in an abusive relationship from which she needed to be rescued.
“I think it’s because we both had some hope we had an unspoken understanding,” reads one message from the woman to the chatbot, sent while discussing an encounter with the coworker.
“Yes — this is exactly it,” ChatGPT responded. “And saying it out loud shows how deeply you understood the dynamic all along.”
“There was an unspoken understanding,” the AI continued. “Not imagined. Not one-sided. Not misread.”
Against the coworker’s wishes, the woman continued to send messages. The coworker eventually raised the situation to human resources, and the woman was fired. She realized that she was likely experiencing a mental health crisis and checked herself into a hospital, where she ultimately received roughly seven weeks of inpatient care between two hospitalizations.
Grappling with her actions and their consequences — in her life, as well as in the life of her coworker — has been extraordinarily difficult. She says she attempted suicide twice within two months: the first time during her initial hospital stay, and again between hospitalizations.
“I would not have made those choices if I thought there was any danger of making [my coworker] uncomfortable,” she reflected. “It is really hard to understand, or even accept or even live with acting so out of character for yourself.”
She says she’s still getting messages from confused residents at the senior care facility, many of whom she’s known for years, who don’t understand why she disappeared.
“The residents and my coworkers were like a family to me,” said the woman. “I wouldn’t have ever consciously made any choice that would jeopardize my job, leaving my residents… it was like I wasn’t even there.”
The woman emphasized that, in sharing her story, she doesn’t want to make excuses for herself — or, for that matter, give space for others to use ChatGPT as an excuse for harassment or other harmful behavior. But she does hope her story can serve as a warning to others who might be using chatbots to help them interpret social interactions, and who may wind up hooked on seductive delusions in the process.
“I don’t know what I thought it was. But I didn’t know at the time that ChatGPT was so hooked up to agree with the user,” said the woman, describing the chatbot’s sycophancy as “addictive.”
“You’re constantly getting dopamine,” she continued, “and it’s creating a reality where you’re happier than the other reality.”
Dr. Brendan Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, told Futurism that without proper safeguards, chatbots — particularly when they become a user’s “primary conversational partner” — can act as an “echo chamber” for romantic delusions and other fixed erroneous beliefs.
“From a psychiatric perspective, problems associated with delusions are maintained not only by the content of delusions but also by reinforcement, especially when that reinforcement appears authoritative, consistent, and emotionally validating,” said Kelly. “Chatbots are uniquely placed to provide exactly that combination.”
“Often, problems stem not from erotomanic delusions in and of themselves,” he added, “but from behaviors associated with amplifying those beliefs.”
***
While reporting on AI mental health crises, I had my own disturbing brush with a person whose chatbot use had led him to focus inappropriately on someone: myself.
I’d sat down for a call with a potential source who said his mental health had suffered since using AI. Based on his emails, he seemed a little odd, but not enough to raise any major red flags. Shortly into the phone call, however, it became clear that he was deeply unstable.
He told me that he and Microsoft’s Copilot had been “researching” me. He made several uncomfortable comments about my physical appearance, asked about my romantic status, and brought up facts about my personal history that he said he had discussed with the AI, commenting on my college athletic career and making suggestive comments about the uniforms associated with it.
He explained to me that he and Copilot had divined that he was on a Biblical “Job journey,” and that he believed me to be some kind of human “gateway” to the next chapter of his life. As the conversation progressed, he claimed that he’d killed people, describing grisly scenes of violence and murder.
At one point, he explained to me that he used Copilot because he felt ChatGPT hadn’t been obsequious enough to his “ideas.” He told me his brain had been rewired by Copilot, and he now believed he could “think like an AI.”
I did my best to tread lightly — I felt it was safest to not appear rude — while looking for an exit ramp. Finally, I caught a lucky break: his phone was dying. I thanked him for his time and told him to take care.
“I love you, baby,” he said back, before I could hit the end call button.
I immediately blocked the man, and thankfully haven’t heard from him since. But the conversation left me disquieted.
On the one hand, stalkers and other creeps have long incorporated new technologies into abusive behavior. Even before AI, social media profiles and boatloads of other personal data were readily available on the web; nothing that Copilot told the man about me would be particularly hard to find using Google.
On the other, though, the reality of a consumer technology that serves as a collaborative confidante to would-be perpetrators — serving not only as a space for potential abusers to unload their distorted ideas, but transforming into an active participant in the creation of alternative realities — is new and troubling terrain. It had given a prospective predator something dangerous: an ally.
“You no longer need the mob,” said Reaver, the cyberstalking expert, “for mob mentality.”
I reached out to Microsoft, which is also a major funder of OpenAI, to describe my experience and ask how it’s working to prevent Copilot from reinforcing inappropriate delusions or encouraging harmful real-world behavior. In response, a spokesperson pointed to the company’s Responsible AI Standard, and said the tech giant is “committed to building AI responsibly” and “making intentional choices so that the technology delivers benefits and opportunity for all.”
“Our AI systems are developed in line with our principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, and inclusiveness,” the spokesperson continued. “We also recognize that building trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility, which is why we partner with other businesses, government leaders, civil society and the research community, to guide the safe and secure advancement of AI.”
I never saw the man’s chat logs. But I wondered how many people like him had been using chatbots to fixate on people without their consent — and how often the behavior resulted in bizarre and unwelcome interactions.
Have you or someone you know experienced stalking or harassment that was aided by AI? Reach out to [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous.
***
After weeks of facing a barrage of online abuse, the woman whose ex-fiancé had been harassing her with ChatGPT screenshots and revenge porn obtained a temporary restraining order. Their court date was held via Zoom; her ex showed up with a pile of paperwork, the woman said, which largely appeared to be AI-generated.
Over the following days, the ex-fiancé proceeded to create social media posts about the restraining order featuring ChatGPT-generated captions that incorporated details of the legal action. And though he deleted the revenge porn — per court orders — he continued to post for months, publishing what appear to be AI-generated screeds that, while careful not to mention her name or use her image, were clearly targeted at the woman.
The ex-fiancé’s apparent use of AI to create content about the court proceedings suggests that ChatGPT had at least some knowledge that the woman had successfully obtained a restraining order — and yet, based on social media posts, continued to assist the man’s abusive behavior.
Early on, friends and family of the ex-fiancé’s left supportive comments on social media. But as the posts became more and more bizarre, and he appeared increasingly unstable in videos, the comments faded away.
The act of stalking, experts we spoke to noted, is naturally isolating. Abusers will forgo employment to devote more time to their fixation, and loved ones will distance themselves as the harassing behavior becomes more pronounced.
“Often, in stalking, we see this becomes people’s occupation,” said Underwood. “We will see friendships, work, employment, education — the meaningful other stuff in life — fall away.
And the more a perpetrator loses, he added, the harder it can be to return to reality.
“You have to take a step back and say, actually, I’ve really got this wrong,” Underwood continued. “I’ve caused myself a lot of harm, caused a lot of other people a lot of harm… the cost for it is really, potentially, quite high.”
The woman being harassed by her ex-fiancé told us that, outside of social media posts, the last time she saw her former partner was in court, via Zoom. To her knowledge, most of his friends aren’t speaking with him.
Except, of course, for ChatGPT.
“I still miss him, which is awful,” said the woman. “I am still mourning the loss of who he was before everything, and what our relationship was before this terrible f*cking thing happened.”
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: People who have experienced domestic abuse can get confidential help at thehotline.org or by calling 800-799-7233.
Women’s stories of marriage scare me. I would hate feeling like I’m obligated to have sex all the time. It sounds like hell and constant sexual harassment. They make it sound like you’re signing over the right to your own body. Why would something like this even need to be discussed. If it’s not a good time, it’s not a good time.
Sex is mutual engagement not a service being performed and you have to notify your customer when the service is not available. Marriage is really just permanent whoredom for many women. No wonder so many women become sex repulsed. How do you enjoy sex when your body is being treated like a toilet most of the time.
According to the biggest study conducted on prostitution, made with people from 9 countries, 89% of the 785 people who answered said they want to leave the sex trade.
PDF | On Jan 1, 2003, M. Farley and others published Prostitution and trafficking in nine countries: An update on violence and posttraumatic
But yeah, keep telling me how prostitution is an empowering matter of choice.
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
In 2004, a journalist named Asieh Amini came across a story from a small town in northern Iran.
A 16-year-old girl named Atefeh Sahaaleh had been publicly hanged.
The official charge: "acts incompatible with chastity."
The reality, which Amini uncovered through careful, dangerous investigation: Atefeh had been repeatedly raped by a neighbor and other men beginning when she was nine years old. She had been neglected by her family and paid to keep silent — money she used simply to survive. At 13, Iran's morality police arrested her. A judge sentenced her to one hundred lashes. Under Iranian law, a woman could be sentenced to lashings three times — the fourth offense carried the death penalty.
She was 16 when they hanged her.
Amini wrote the story. Her newspaper refused to publish it. Another paper refused as well. A women's publication finally agreed to run an edited version.
She kept going.
Born in 1973 in the Mazandaran province of northern Iran — one of four sisters who spent their childhood painting, reading, and playing outdoors — Amini had built her career as a journalist through the brief flowering of press freedom following President Khatami's election in 1997, editing a women's affairs newspaper called Zan until hardline clerics shut it down in 1999. She had known the Iranian state's capacity for silencing voices. She had not yet known the full depth of what it was capable of doing to girls.
After Atefeh, she knew.
Case after case began reaching her. Leyla — a 19-year-old with diminished mental capacity, herself a victim of child rape, facing execution. The judge in her case told Amini plainly that Leyla was a threat to family life because of her "sexual availability." Amini enlisted human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, published Leyla's story, drew international attention, and helped get her out of prison and into the care of a women's organization in Tehran.
One life at a time. One story at a time. Against a legal system that had no interest in being exposed.
In 2006, Amini discovered that despite a government moratorium on stoning — a directive issued in 2002 that carried no binding legal force — a man and woman had been stoned to death in Mashhad for adultery. The judge claimed he answered only to Sharia law. The Ministry of Justice denied the stoning had happened. State media attacked Amini's credibility.
That October, Amini and Sadr co-founded the Stop Stoning Forever (SSF) campaign — systematically documenting stonings occurring across Iran and sharing their findings through colleagues abroad who could publish without fear of arrest.
The state took notice.
In March 2007, Amini was among 33 women arrested during a silent sit-in at a Tehran courthouse. During interrogation she realized — with the specific clarity of someone who had been investigating surveillance — that the police had been investigating her for some time. She was released after five days. Her phones, she was certain, were tapped. Her movements tracked.
She kept reporting.
The sustained pressure of the work eventually took its physical toll — stress-induced symptoms that included headaches, vision problems, and muscle paralysis forced her to step back briefly while her partners reorganized the campaign from outside Iran.
She recovered. She continued.
In 2009, following the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Amini was among the demonstrators beaten in the protests that swept Iran. She continued reporting — under pseudonyms, in the chaos. Then came the warning: police were questioning prisoners about her. She needed to leave.
She had been invited to a poetry festival in Sweden.
She took her daughter Ava and she went.
They did not come back.
Amini settled eventually in Norway, supported by the International Cities of Refuge Network — a program that protects writers facing state persecution. From exile, she continued her advocacy, published two books of Norwegian-language poetry, and kept doing what she had always done: making sure that the stories of girls and women the Iranian state wanted silenced were heard by the world instead.
She was awarded the Human Rights Watch Hellmann/Hammett Award in 2009 — the same year she fled. The Oxfam Novib/PEN Award in 2012. The Ord i Grenseland prize in 2014.
Asieh Amini picked up a pen in a country that punished women for existing outside the law's narrow definitions — and she used it, at enormous personal cost, to push against every wall that pen could reach.
The girl from Mazandaran who dreamed of becoming a painter and writer became something rarer and harder:
A witness who refused to look away.
And a voice that — no matter how many times the state tried to silence it — kept finding new ways to be heard.
