Oh yes, Shaun Batterton. Rebecca, my lovely sister and any of my other family reading this, I’d rather you not. It’s okay though because it is posted as public. ā¤
I’ve had a very confusing few years but these years have given me quite a bit of clarity in the aftermath, which I am grateful for. I had much different plans for my life at the time these emails were exchanged. I was going to divorce my husband after my son graduates high school next year. I was very much looking forward to being alone and having (as I felt at the time) complete freedom. This had been my plan since we separated in July of 2017. God had other plans for us however, and this situation has brought us closer together as a family. My Son was baptised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in April and my husband and I have decided to keep on working on our 20 year marriage (21 in September).
So, who is Shaun Batterton and why was I emailing him? I’m not sure exactly when he became one of my followers on Twitter but I know it was while I had my first account @BetheneZ and he ended up following me to my other account @doesntmatter003. I had a good friend who had asked me to exchange prints with him. I so excited about it and had talked about it on my twitter account on occasion. One day I received a message from Shaun Batterton about exchanging prints. I answered him but I wasn’t interested because I didn’t think his photos were very good but most importantly we had never spoken to each other and hadn’t built up a rapport. I declined but I continued to answer him when he commented on my photos and such. The only evidence I have of these early interactions is that I happened to retweet one of his posts right before I started getting threatening messages and weird stuff happening on my accounts, which I can go into more detail in another post.
I closed all of my social media accounts but I started a blog in order to have a space to continue to post my photos. Shaun followed me there and was very encouraging. Some of the comments he made (which have now been deleted either by me deleting the blog post or because he deleted them) were strange and seemed to be from somebody I knew in person, but here are other comments he made on my blogs:
We exchanged emails and started conversing privately. I took it as a way for me to be able to finally tell my side of the story. I felt like there was so much miscommunication and there was a complete misunderstanding. I had been threatened so much with various things that year and when one of them seemed to have actually happened, I was devastated. I felt like this was my opportunity to tell him what happened and let them know that I didn’t want to cause anybody harm. I don’t have a lot of the emails we exchanged but realised towards the end of our strange interactions that I should probably start saving them.
I remember telling him my entire story and then afterwards people at my work reacting to the email as if they read them, including the fact that 2 days later there was a huge HR meeting for all of the managers and fliers hanging on the walls everywhere on how to reach members of management for any Ethics concerns. I was also approached by my coworker and told that his boss asked how I was and said I was intelligent. My coworker told him I was studying to be an electrical mechanic. His boss told him to tell me to talk to him about it. My coworker asked why he would have said that. The only answer I had for him was that I had a very long and difficult interview. I viewed it as them believing me and wanting to work with me.
Shaun and I continued to email each other but then it started getting too weird for me. Here some to the email exchanges between us. These are embarrassing but they are what they are. I’m way past being embarrassed by anything anymore.
The first one is a list of my emails between me, the West Valley City Police, and the Ethics department. The others are very personal messages to somebody who I thought was my friend and who I thought was trying to help me. He once told me that I should submit to ‘The New Yorker’ which I thought was laughable but sweet. It felt nice to have someone hear me, I felt I was finally reaching someone. I was desperate for that sort of understanding and I would take it any way I could get it.
After this email, I looked on Shaun Batterton’s twitter account and he had liked that tweet about the phone being returned. It was the same method that was being used to threaten me from the beginning. I was so confused and scared. I wasn’t sure how somebody from outside the company could have done this to me. I didn’t know what to do. I emailed him to try to get some answers. I thought he was trying to say that it happened and he didn’t believe my story. Here are the emails that followed.
I went to my supervisors to get some assistance. It turns out they didn’t believe my story. They were already being told another story that was twisting the truth. After I went to the supervisor about it, a couple of things she said stood out in my mind. It took me probably three days to finally realise what was happening. For as frustrated as I get about this and for as much as I don’t want to converse or engage in niceties right now, one thing is clear; if they would have believed me then I would never have known who was stalking and harassing me. That goes for everyone in the entire building. If you didn’t react the way you did I wouldn’t have known and for that I am grateful.
It is a really scary situation when you know your devices are being hacked but you don’t know why it is happening or to what end. When you put a name and a face to it, it becomes easier to face and fight. That is what I feel like I am doing, fighting an evil being done to me. All I want is for it to stop. All I want is peace. I’ve been going back to church and they say that your struggles and trials are never over but God will give you the strength to overcome. He will bring you peace. I can say that is true most of the time, but I am not perfect and I get angry, frustrated, and a little bit angsty sometimes but I’ll work on it. š
I am going out of town this weekend, so I will probably post some more Monday or Tuesday. Next up- The connections between Shaun Batterton and Greg Sometimes.
Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.
Bethene Zetterquist Photography 