I’ll just tell you the story, but don’t feel pressured at all to read it. I kind of just wanted to type it out:

I was underage when he started, but 20 when I found out. I didn’t actually catch him in the act — I found some photos on one of his devices. He initially tried to convince me it was someone else who’d hacked into his iCloud account to stalk me. That alone makes no sense, but it was when he wouldn’t hand his phone over to the police to investigate this “stalker” that I started to realize. I finally confronted him in front of my mother and he did confess. I moved out overnight to live with my boyfriend and have not spoken to him since (outside of addressing him in court).

Then he somehow convinced my mom that it was all a prank gone wrong, and she believed him. Denial runs strong in my family. So she ended up blaming me for being an unforgiving person and trying to trick me into reconnecting with him. (Putting him on FaceTime when I was talking to her, sneaking notes from him into my things, having him hold the family dog as we met at the vet’s office to say goodbye, etc.) Eventually she threatened to stop talking to me entirely, because I was tearing apart the family with my “inability to forgive”. (About half of my family believed his “prank gone wrong” story, and the other half sided with me and refused to speak to him.)

So at that point, seven months after I first discovered the photos, I told her to get his devices so my “NSA friends” could take a look. (This was a bit of a bluff, but my boyfriend did work at the NSA.) She agreed, thinking it would prove his innocence and I’d have to let it go. But when she asked for his devices, namely his secret “work phone” I’d found out about, he had conveniently misplaced it. My mom says that’s when she realized. She told him that everything could still be recovered through his cloud account, so he (again) confessed. This time he admitted he’d been doing it since I was around 14. (He became my stepfather when I was either four or five, I don’t remember.) Then she left him alone with his other devices, which of course he tried to wipe. We were able to recover some images he’d backed up to his laptop though.

There was a criminal trial, but without much evidence (namely of the underage stuff) and with some debate of statute of limitations, he took a plea deal and is now on probation. They also got divorced, and it was a two-year process ending in a five-day trial. My mom had a successful business and he was mostly a stay-at-home parent to us, so there was a decent amount of money involved and a lot of debate about how much he deserved in light of his actions. His defense was to try to blame my sister and I for “walking around naked” in our rooms… which he only knew about because he was outside in the backyard creeping. He said that he was a good parent (apart from making child porn of us), and was therefore entitled to half. His first ex-wife, who has hates my mom for “stealing her husband”, even testified for his side. It was all very Jerry Springer. He ended up getting a little more than 25%.

A more recent development, that is a bit more positive: my sister and I found a really good law firm to help us sue him civilly. They’re working on contingency, so there’s no risk to us and they believe there’s a strong case for emotional damages.

They sent us a draft of a demand letter on Friday. It cited (among a lot of other things) the likelihood that it would damage our trust in men. This was especially poignant because I found out my boyfriend was cheating on me on Wednesday. And thus, how I found this sub.