Face Value.

It is with great reluctance I find myself reading again, for the third time now, Liam’s book … It was during an exchange of confidences with a close friend in December, the conversation turned to Liam … not that it had been my intention for it to, but because there were so many similarities …

I listened in great detail to her fears of her partner straying, his sudden apparent need for secrecy, the text messages or emails that would see him scurrying from the room … and closing the door firmly behind him … ” Its almost as though he is here, yet not here”, she said, and Liam’s words come back to me … ” You’re not there, you’re here, with me “, and I tried to dismiss the memory of his voice …If I remember correctly that would have been late November 2012.

” Its quite bizarre”, she said, ” Almost as though he is flirting with this person online who seems to demand his attention day and night, and at times I feel as though I’m in the way …in my own home” and a scary thought occurs … could there actually be female versions of Liam out there …? I shudder at the thought …

“I’m being ridiculous right?” she asks, ” I mean, its not as though he is meeting her …”. And so it was that I told her how Liam not only groomed me online but controlled, manipulated and alienated me from my family friends and work colleagues until I was a shadow of my former self. He told me my husband was an abuser, as was his wife, that we must be together …

As one rendezvous after another was cancelled, supposedly due to his illness, I began doubting his credibility … could he actually be playing me …? But I was in so deep I could barely motivate … I remember keeping my iPhone by my side … willing it to ping .. I was slipping into insanity …

My friend, absentmindedly reached for the bottle of Chardonnay … to refil her glass, and poured … and poured … So intent was she not to miss a word we had a slight accident … I gave her his book to read later that evening. Two days later she emailed me this …

Jo

Had I read this book taking everything at face value, I can easily understand why you, and others too, would contact him empathising with his terribly sad childhood. However, I am not looking through rose tinted glasses, neither am I in awe of him….

The first few pages, in which he positively gushes over his wife ( would that be the same wife he accused of physically abusing him?) and the rest it seemed, was very much “Poor me”. There is much talk of bowels and excrement, was there really any need to be quite so graphic? And the comment about pushing his legs together so he could pee on himself and what a pleasurable feeling it gave him … very weird. Did he talk about that to you Jo? You might want to google the word Urolagnia?

It seems he shifted his affections even then, all those years ago, so its hardly surprising he is a past master at doing so now … He is utterly contemptable. I have a feeling you’ve seen him off but be ever vigilent.

Amoral

 

They say time is a great healer. While I will not let what happened with Liam define me, I will NEVER, stop blogging tweeting and raising awareness about a man I believe needs to be exposed as a dangerous psychopath and online sexual predator. I accept that when he wrote his book over twenty years ago his sole intention was to shame the people who abused him … just as I find myself doing now …

To be abused as a child is something that never goes away … To be forced to touch an adults genitals and have them force their tongue into your mouth is beyond terrifying, and is at such a young age, something you feel is your fault … To be ordered to take your clothes off … and when you get to your vest and knickers its still not enough … and they feign sadness … that you don’t love them as much as they love you … and you are so confused, almost as though you are on autopilot as you do everything you are told to do …

While I accept Liam and I were both “mature adults”, ( his words not mine ), nothing could have prepared me for his obsession with what happened to me as a child. Having spent many years feeling ashamed and tainted, finally, it seemed, I had someone willing to listen, someone who told me a problem shared was a problem halved … where nothing was taboo … as though he really cared …

Like my abuser Liam groomed and manipulated me to such an extent I was highly emotionally dependant on him. There were many times he lost his patience with me for not agreeing to video calls where we would be able to “see eachother”, and often he gave me the silent treatment for failing to comply. I was deeply saddened by the lack of consistancy but by that time it seemed Liam no longer felt the need to impress me …

Shortly afterwards he felt it was somehow acceptable to speak of things that in my niavety I knew little of. Group sex threesomes and lesbians were merely something I had read of, but had never, experienced first hand nor was it something that appealed to me and I told him so. He persisted in talking of these things and it continued to make me feel extremely uncomfortable.

Like the young girl I was, who was temporarily stunned by the things that happened to me, I felt it again and somehow froze as his words appeared and I shuddered … dumbstruck and unable to pull away …

As a survivor of CSA I respected Liam, was in awe of him even, and extremely flattered by the compliments he showered on me at regular intervals during the day … It was never my intention for it to go any further than friendship … but I inadvertently overlooked my need to be loved so intensely … the way he described … the way he promised …

It wasn’t just his talk of french kissing me passionately ( although that in itself drove me wild with desire), or holding me in his arms … or even that he told me he wanted to be with me forever … it was so many things … all of which were nothing but sweetalk … a means to get what he wanted … a naked woman performing for him on skype … which I am happy to say he did not achieve with me.

The revelations of Liam’s truly despicable character, which started emerging last August, continue to shock me more than I could have imagined possible. To say I feel robbed would be a massive understatement. My marriage, which shattered into a million pieces because of my association with Liam sadly seems impossible to repair but at least we are talking …

I consider myself neither malicious or vindictive, myself and the other ladies did nothing to deserve this, it was not our fault. The aftermath of Liam’s actions lay with Liam alone. He must take responsibility … I continue to question how a person can be quite so evil …

Unscrupulous.

 

There are times when I wonder how Liam can look in the mirror without vommiting. How he dares to attempt to justify his despicable behaviour to vulnerable women, some survivors of CSA whose only crime was to show compassion to him.

I’ve no doubt there will be those who will say … but you were grown women … not young niave girls … but I can only say, at the time it didn’t feel that way. I will go one step further and say such was the level of his manipulation I allowed him to talk to me in a way I can only describe as inappropriate. It always made me feel uncomfortable and I tried in vain to steer the conversations back to the way they were in the beginning, but he was having none of it … ” We are mature adults Jo”, he said …

After the shock of discovering he had indeed been in an online relationship with another woman, I felt driven to analyse every email text and DM. The texts, which were very few, tended to be brief, invariably one liners giving out to me because I had not responded immediately to one of his emails. The DM’s were rather infrequent by this point, so it was mostly emails, although even that had dwindled to every few days.

I remember looking at my emails in early August last year and thinking I was going insane …I  couldn’t have possibly have written those things … And then I looked further back … and saw it … ” I need the password as well as the username”, and I gasped in disbelief … I had actually given it to him …

As my heart pounded uncontrollably I could only read in horror emails in my sent items I had absolutely no recollection of whatsoever … Perhaps I will never know if he emailed himself from my account or if I was so brainwashed he had manipulated me into doing it … I took no chances and immediately changed my password … but not before I created a whole new email account … I’m happy to say since then he has been unable to contact me …

Liam continues to use fake Twitter accounts in order to avidly devour the conversations between the women he played his cruel games with. He then sends threatening emails with an intention to guilt trip and further distress. His main Twitter account ( which as yet he has not tweeted from) presumably is to intimidate us …as if to say … “I’m watching” … What can I say …? Watch away … the best is yet to come …!

Duped.

I’d wanted so badly to go back to the cottage. There were so many happy memories … the boys when they were little, had so much fun there and, if I’m honest ***** and myself were very close … but we drifted apart … It was those things I wanted to remember … not the more recent things.

During my “online relationship” it became somewhere I escaped to … a place I could have “space” and “me time”. Since the relationship (that never was) ended as abruptly as it started, I’ve avoided going to the cottage. As if I would be haunted by the memories …

So last week I bit the bullit, packed a bag, and headed to the country …. determined, to not only confront, but bannish any memories of him connected to my special place. My cottage was never about him, neither indeed, were the songs poetry or quotes. I was never exclusive, so to allow the things I enjoyed before this unfortunate interruption to my life, to be tarnished by him, would be nothing short of foolish …

I’m still in shock if I’m honest. I was duped, sucked in, manipulated used and finally, spat out by the very person who’s views on abuse drew me to him in the first place. This man who presents himself as a paragon of virtue is nothing more than an online predator who hits on any woman who shows him an ounce of compassion.

I’ve struggled to find words to describe a person who has caused so much heartbreak and damage to so many women. While reading a news article I have found something that comes close …

” My view of him as an individual is that he has shown no empathy, no sympathy or any remorse for what he has done. Its as if he just doesn’t care”,

” He would try and convince each woman they were the only one he talked to”.

” He is a very sick person, controlling and manipulating”.