High school can be a fun experience for teenagers, attending sports events with friends, school sponsored dances, dating. But it can also be a difficult time for many teens—pressure to perform academically, athletically, be social and avoid bullying classmates. It is simply wrong to add to the stresses of being young, a bullying parent of a classmate.
Every time her daughter and a friend or boyfriend broke up, the girl’s mother went on the attack. She began a campaign of cyberstalking and in-person confrontations.
When the daughter and her close friend parted ways, the ‘protective’ mother left a long sneering voice mail message for the ex-friend’s mother claiming that she had all kinds of evidence that the ex-friend had cyberbullied her daughter. She said she’d take the evidence to the police and get a restraining order.
On more than one occasion, she went to the school, and in front of students, falsely accused an ex-boyfriend of punching the daughter in her face. The boy and the daughter had gone on one date. She also threatened to rip his f*cking heart out. She texted his mother with the same false accusations and threatened a lawsuit.
After another boyfriend with whom the daughter had gone on two dates before breaking up, the ‘protective’ mother began a texting attack, telling the boy he was a bigger piece of sh*t than the first boyfriend. And that when her husband found him, it would not look pretty. She called him an awful human being and said he should be condemned.
With the second ex-boyfriend’s attack, the mother began using spoofed social media accounts using his name and photos. She mocked him for having divorced parents and said mean things like, “It must feel awful that he [his father] left him,” and “Do you cry every night because you daddy didn’t want you.” If those weren’t bad enough, she added, “What makes me happy is knowing that you’ll never have a father.” This is the mother of an ex-girlfriend—the daughter and boy went on two dates.
From court records, the next victim and the daughter dated for about ten months. They attended different high schools. After their break-up, the ‘protective’ mother contacted the ex-boyfriend’s mother and told her that her son had engaged in psychotic and abusive behavior. She wanted a public apology. If he didn’t apologize, she’d take legal action because he abused her daughter—all false accusations.
Again, she used spoofed social media accounts, not knowing how to cover her tracks, and attacked the boy’s physical features besides false claims of abuse. His torment followed him to college, where she sent disparaging messages to the college and fraternities. The college hired an investigator to investigate the mother’s claims and found nothing to support them.
She even sent messages from the spoofed social media accounts that she made look like they were from him to 20+ girls he knew and said terrible things about them.
The torment to the most recent victim was too much, so his family got a restraining order which the mother immediately violated. They ended up moving out of town and went after her through the legal system. Because the crimes used the internet and social media, the cyberbullying charge was a federal crime.
A psychologist and expert witness for the defense testified she’d found the mother to be driven by,
“Resentment and hostility toward other people” and with, “little empathy of the victims and no remorse.”
The expert witness also said, from her observations, the defendant,
“Remains convinced her victims got what they deserved.”
In an affidavit to the court, the mother justified her actions as being those of a protective mother. Three weeks before her trial, she pleaded guilty to many counts of cyberstalking and conspiracy to commit cyberstalking. She acknowledged her tactics escalated, and she intended to humiliate and destroy the last victim’s social relationships.
A federal judge sentenced the ‘protective’ mother to over three years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
A U.S. Attorney associated with the case said,
“It is the regret of the attorneys for the United Stated it took so long to stop [the mother’s] cyberstalking campaigns.”
Source: U.S. District Court, U.S. Department of Justice
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