It normally starts with a quite normal email, talking about how he wants to take your pictures. When you look at his pictures you might find them fairly good, so you answer the email.
What surprises you is that his answer is really quick, and has a strange feel to it. The phrases are normal: "When can you shoot?", "Can you get here this weekend?", "What is your MSN and mobile?" but the whole message has a kind of a hectic, stressfulness to it; he feels to eager. But, since you do not trust your gut feelings you send him your contact data.
He is then most likely to call you soon. He will talk a lot about himself and he may talk trash about other photographers. When you talk about the work/pictures he will quickly move into questions like "Shall we meet for a coffee or a bar?", "When can you come here?", "You can stay at my house." or "I can come to you this weekend." Once again, it is mostly normal questions but the main part of the discussion is not about the pictures, but about him, when to see each other and, as before, it has an eagerness to it.
If you say no to him, he will get irritated and argue with you. The bad cases will even be insulting. "Who do you think you are!?", "I can pick any model I want! You are too new to understand what you will miss!". But if you steer the conversation towards when to meet, he will calm down and become nice again. It is all about their egos. The Stalker has a big ego and it is not really in line with the real world.
If you decide to meet or shoot with him, he will give you a lot of personal compliments. If you, as he asked, go out for drink after the shoot, and you politely turn down the upcoming offering of having sex with him, he is most likely to be abusive and insulting again; even violent. For most models, the limit is reached and you tell him to f*ck off and go to hell. If you are smart you do this when there are a lot of people around you and he will most likely leave. If you have had your guard down to long, you might get the offering when it is late, dark and you are all alone with him. Now you have so much less options!
Let us say he left you in a storm of abusive words. But! Even if you basically told him, screaming to his face, that he was a scum, he will not give up! Some days later, or at least the next weekend late at night, you will get MSN messages or an SMS about seeing each other again. At this point he will explain that you are something special; not you as in you singular, but you as in you both. Together. As a couple. Soon. If you turn him down, he will once again become abusive. And ask you to give him a chance. He will tell you how good boyfriend he is.
And this goes on, and on, and on.
What stops him/makes him react: Save all his text messages, MSN logs and emails and go to the Police. Then tell him you did it. In that order. Just threatening of going to the Police does not make him stop, since he knows most of you are too lazy or too much of a chicken to actually do it.
Even if the Police may not be able to do anything at this point, the records will be there when he will do it to someone else. And trust me, he will. Is it not sad, that first after a major crime (rape or murder), big enough to written about in the papers, a lot of models come forward and tell their stories? Isn't that a bit too late?
How does Models-n-Shoots's Creep Defense try to keep The Stalker out:
- Your name and any contact data is hidden until the last step of a deal, when you Confirm you will take a job.
- Only customers with companies can sign up as customers. The Stalker is seldom interested enough to have a registered company but there are actually a few who have.
- The is always full information to you about the Assignment Request Sender's company, taken from a central database directly linked to the registry in that country.
- The Assignment Request Sender, the person who sent the job offering, has name, contact info and ID picture shown in the job offering. This way you can ask other in the business and you can call the company and verify he works there.
- If other Talents have worked with the ARS and/or the company before, there will be Trust feedback about him/the company.
- Models-n-Shoots will have contact forms for sending in tips and logs, anonymous but traceable. For now, you can send it to me: morre@morre.se
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