I started a long post yesterday but decided to delete everything and rewrite it. In short, some woman left six ranting, obscene comments to some of the posts here, accusing me of all sorts of bizarre things. Apparently I have been harassing women who have had miscarriages, but who are also successful best-selling novelists, and who are also disabled, so I’m a terrible writer who’s been banned from all Baby Loss (miscarriage) sites on the entire internet, and will be visited by the FBI for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act, but also I will be visited by Virginia child services because I am actually a fourteen-year-old boy who needs to be rescued from, ah, me?
This would have just been funny, only she actually CALLED me on my PHONE and left a voice mail calling me an obscenity and again threatening me with the FBI. So it’s actually kind of troubling. Now I’m not shocked she got my phone number; I do have a domain name for the website and you have to have a phone number for that. It didn’t occur to little old nobody me that I probably should have set up a special mailing address and phone number just for this site, and in any case that would not have stopped unwanted calls, merely moved them to another phone of mine. I might finally end up changing this one I’ve had for almost all my time in Virginia, I don’t know. She hasn’t called again, and I suspect the number she used was spoofed.
It occurred to me that someone might somehow be using my name and other info to harass her and people she knows, it’s not exactly difficult to do. Well I’m sorry if that’s the case, but all I can say is that I, the real Andrea A. Harris, is not taking valuable time out of my day to harass people for any reason, never mind miscarriages. It also occurred to me that this person may have had a miscarriage or more than one and not just be some sort of weird obsessive, and if so I am sorry for that and hope she gets the help and comfort she needs. I might also suggest that spamming someone’s website and making obscene phone calls is not the way to get that. Anyway, I am not a therapist, so if any other comments of this sort are left on here or I get another phone call from a spoofed number, I will put the comments in the trash, and block the number. I have little patience for nonsense of this sort.
Addendum: I wasn’t sure I should mention this, but the woman’s voice on the phone was ever-so-slightly familiar. The thing is, she had that sort of thin, medium-toned, hard-r’d (where the “R” is untrilled and very clear and pronounced at the ends of words instead of being dropped as in a Bostonian or Deep South accent) white American woman voice that a lot of women I’ve known have had. The thing is I can’t think of anyone I have met, however briefly, who would do this unless they’d had some big psychological upset, or had been turned against me somehow, a circumstance I find too ridiculous to entertain seriously. And she didn’t act like she knew me. So, it’s a mystery!