The Monster Under the Bed
Turns out, they’re in our bed.
When I was a kid, I was told that monsters weren’t real. Folklore and horrors told us that they were under the bed or inside the wardrobe and you could scare them off with a torch or a prayer or by sleeping with your feet tucked in. It took a few decades to realise that the monsters don’t live under the bed at all. They grow up, learn to hold eye contact, and crawl into your bed pretending to love you. They borrow your charger, your toothbrush, and prey on your kindness. They say things like I’ve never met anyone like you before, and you believe them because why wouldn’t you. You don’t expect evil to look like heartbreak with a nice smile.
I met this monster in 2023. A handsome man who cried at airports, clung to me in public and said he’d finally found someone who understood him. He was the kind of man who could perform vulnerability so convincingly that you ended up wanting to rescue him, and that’s exactly what he counted on. Within weeks I was paying for flights, food, hotels, lawyers, fines, the coat he stole from Zara, the entire tragic theatre of his life. Every time I tried to set a boundary, he collapsed. He wept, begged, swore it was the trauma. He’d been through so much. I thought I could fix it. What I was really doing was feeding the monster.
And that monster grew bigger beside me. It sucked all my power, all my kindness and turned it into ammunition.
He stole my wedding ring, hid cameras in my apartment, filmed me without my knowledge, sent explicit videos of me to friends, threatened to send them to family, including young nephews and nieces. He built fake email accounts and flooded my business with thousands of anonymous forms filled with abuse. He impersonated people I loved, my husband, my friends, my clients, and he did it all while insisting I was the one who had lost control. The man could twist gravity. He would shatter something, point to the pieces, and tell you you’d thrown it.
One night in Italy, after months of screaming and gaslighting and sleeplessness, he baited an argument, called the police, showed them an old cropped video from Atlanta where he’d hidden a camera and filmed me confronting him after he’d cheated. I was arrested and spent forty-eight hours in a cell because the monster had learned to edit. That was when I understood what real danger looks like: calm, articulate, tearful on command.
After that came the online war. He used my photos, my name, my voice. He created porn profiles, emailed colleagues, spam-phoned my friends, tried to destroy my marriage, my work, my sanity. He registered usernames like lyingqueen and patheticlyingfaggot and used the same phone, the same IP, the same rage. It was obsessive, relentless, and for months it felt like living inside someone else’s psychosis.
On the thirty-first of July this year, almost a year after the abuse and insanity started, the police finally arrested him. They have his phones, his laptop, his digital fingerprints on every threat and every impersonation. He was released the next day pending court. Justice is slow, but forensics doesn’t lie. Somewhere right now a technician is scrolling through the proof that every nightmare I described actually happened, and that’s the only kind of peace I can accept.
People love to say time heals, but that’s nonsense. What heals is evidence. What heals is watching a predator run out of stories. I don’t need revenge, I just need quiet, and for the first time in a long while, I have some. I needed to put it down, and thanks to the promping of friends, I started documenting it all.
The monster under the bed was never under it at all. He was sleeping beside me, pretending to dream, planning his next act. The good news is that monsters eventually make the same mistake: they think they’re smarter than everyone else. They aren’t, because they always leave a trail. And when you turn on the light, it’s not the flashlight-under-the-covers kind of glow. It’s a police interrogation lamp, and it’s bright enough to show everything.
Check under your bed if you want. Mine’s empty now. The monster’s gone, and this time, I’m the one sleeping with the lights off.
The story starts here.
