PRIVACY & DIGNITY VIOLATIONS

A person close to Aidan did this to me. I will not name them—they know who they are. I address them.

Your actions and behaviours have created a climate of continually increasing trauma and unsafety for me ever since Aidan’s death. 

You engaged in the non-consensual distribution of vulnerable and intimate personal communications, subsequently citing your actions to me to intimidate and shame me into hiding: While what you shared was not imagery, it was still semantically intimate material—with emotionally, psychologically, professionally, and sexually compromising details. You then told me that you’ve had many others read it and I am therefore unwelcome at a public memorial—which is to be held at my place of primary professional affiliation. You shared, and then weaponized my shame, over my experiences of extreme vulnerability. If you had shown people a naked video clip of me obtained from his personal devices, you could not have traumatized me more.

The shock of my private sexual-emotional-psychological sanctum with my partner being thus invaded, exposed, scrutinized, and discussed publicly is not something I will be able to overcome. No amount of mental health support (which I have) can erase the permanent damage done to me. And you should stop bringing the words “mental health support” to your lips—it’s disgusting coming from you when you have been continually taunting me that he never loved me and actively attacking me behind my back. Violators don’t get to harangue survivors about getting mental health support for anything.

The feelings I live with now are similar to what they would be if I was violated and filmed in my sleep—by a gang, no less, with you as leader and facilitator. To clarify, I’m making a moral and psychological equivalency to describe my feelings, not a literal equivalency. I am now in therapy for ptsd with sexual intimacy breach components because the trauma I’m experiencing lands in the same internal territory as sexual assault would—that of the psyche, of bodily reaction, in the sense of violation, powerlessness, loss of control and dignity. Imagine what you have done by hitting the deepest boundary of selfhood.

Ethical Implications of your Actions

ONE

On the most basic level, nothing I write, even of impersonal nature, should be accessed or shared without my knowledge by third parties for whom it was obviously not intended. I hold the copyright of anything I author, no matter what it is, and this copyright exists for seventy years after death. 

TWO

Personal communications are based on a reasonable expectation of privacy (unless consent to share is obtained), which even the recipient is bound by—and you were not the recipient. Sharing my private correspondence of clearly vulnerable nature between myself and anyone, particularly an intimate partner, without my explicit consent is a massive and gross violation of my privacy and dignity. In addition, this document also contains recollections of my trauma (including of sexual nature) that I was narrating to my partner within this document. This sort of breach causes me tremendous emotional distress, exposes me to public ridicule and embarrassment, compromises my public image, and opens me up to potential hostility and harassment from third parties.

THREE

Getting individuals from my professional environment (the university) to contact me to communicate your discouragement of my free movement across my community spaces is psychological intimidation and social bullying—even if it is disguised as noble concern and accompanied by patronizing offers to meet up to talk separately as if to somehow help me heal.

In fact, it is highly perverse to invite anyone from my professional network to meet me alongside yourself (the hostile party) to discuss aspects of my intimate relationships without asking me first. This compromises my sense of safety and dignity in my professional spaces, potentially making it hard for me to agree or disagree freely. It also forcibly blurs my personal and professional boundaries in a way that I did not choose myself, making it awkward and distressing for me to navigate these complex spaces and hierarchies. It exposes me to potential gossip, defamation, alienation, judgment and slander in an institution where I study or work.

All of these exposures have naturally heightened my threat surveillance instincts, created a very reasonable fear of how I might be viewed or received in public, and therefore, paralyzed my external self-presentation. I wonder how far you have circulated or described the contents of my personal communications (or others across overlapping networks may have now done). I know you have used that information to at least verbally reveal parts of my experiences to someone in my professional space—the same person you asked to communicate with me your discouragement of my free movement. I clarify that it is not their fault and they have been nothing but respectful. Overall, I experience crippling anxiety about setting foot on campus physically or even engaging remotely as a professional within these spaces. 

FOUR

Telling me—let alone when I’m grieving my deceased partner—that my relationship’s complexities and my healthcare decisions to seek or not seek mental health support for my life's traumatic experiences (where I am the victimized party!) is why I am not welcome to publicly socialize or identify myself as I wish—the cruelty, aggression, and harassment that that constitutes is staggering.

Furthermore, citing pain or harm caused to other people by my presence at my fiancé’s memorial or people's lack of forgiveness for me or us—which you have driven through your violation of my privacy—to further shame and guilt me into silence and erasure is a grotesque form of gaslighting and harassment. Not to mention, this confirms that defamation and slander has already occurred as a result of your actions—which you have gloatingly admitted to in writing.

FIVE

Whether any mental health support was sought or not for my life’s personal tragedies is my private health information of which you know nothing. You don’t get to comment upon my healthcare decisions, let alone judge or humiliate me publicly or privately over whether I chose to or was able to seek a certain service, particularly a psychological support service. 

More concerningly, the implication that I am somehow to blame—or that I have some form of mental afflictions that are the reason for my partner's suicide is a psychological attack based on a complex circuitry of humiliation and forced vulnerability: it produces severe guilt, shame, and moral injury for something that I did not cause, not to mention, for my life's greatest tragedy—the loss of my fiancé. 

Your persistent framing of an intimate relationship as the cause of someone's suicide is the worst form of emotional torment you could subject a grieving partner to. Berating me for the complexities of our relationship—and for lack of mental health support for the relationship itself—is ghastly. I could similarly berate certain people in my partner's life for causing his suicide—rubbing in their faces his own descriptions of deep unhappiness in those relationships over many years. I could also ask why mental health support was never sought for those problematic dynamics. I could talk about the conditions that were set for him in his last days within those relationships—conditions he told me were impossible to meet and made him feel utter despair. However, I do not believe in wounding someone so deeply by telling them that because his death was surely not anyone's intended outcome.

SIX

For what it is worth, I have frequently sought and utilized mental health support whenever I have needed it—not that it is the slightest of your business. However, you seem to be totally insensitive to the consideration that there was also a need for discretion to protect my vulnerable partner from certain types of risks. If I chose to do that for my partner at my own personal expense, then that is my prerogative, not yours. 

Lastly, because of the contents of what you shared, you have also violated my partner. You shared dignity-compromising information about him from our correspondence—to which he did not and would not consent. The innermost realms of a person's psyche are only to be accessed at their explicit invitation. You have devastated my sense of loyalty to him by making my words cost him his core dignity. 

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