'Ethereal and Sensate' Date Was a Cyberstalker
Self-described on an Internet dating site as “ethereal and sensate,” the man who called himself “Mystic” seemed to match that description on first meeting.
An American living in London, he said he was a divorced former theater director and landscape gardener and poet and looked like “an arty middle-class type,” writes an unidentified woman in the London Times. He was even a vegetarian.
But after she’d been involved with him for a few weeks, red flags were beginning to flap. One night, over dinner, he told her that he wanted to get a new job–working as a counselor with people who’d been abducted (and presumably returned) by aliens.
Ending the relationship–after repeated e-mail and phone harassment–eventually required two court cases. Nightmarishly, “Mystic” reappeared on the same dating site under an assumed identity, even though administrators removed his profile after his first conviction for harassment. Eventually, she realized when she was called by a new man to whom she’d been linked by the Internet dating site that “Dominic,” aka “Sirocco,” was the same man she already had a restraining order against.
“He had evaded all the security procedures by giving a false name, false e-mail address and false photo. But he had used his real credit card,” she writes.
The continued contact earned “Mystic” another conviction earlier this month, as Highbury Corner magistrates’ court in north London, for harassment and breach of a restraining order and conditional discharge, the newspaper reports. He will be sentenced in January.
