Ep. 264: “15 Years of Fear: A Stalking Story”

Beau: How much does someone need to know about you before it’s a problem?

Anna Nasset: One evening a man I don’t know came to my gallery door.

Beau: This week, what started with a stranger showing up at Anna Nasset’s art gallery quickly turns into a nightmare.

Anna Nasset: When I started to get messages, they would say things like, “It was nice to see you today,” but I never saw him anywhere, that’s when I was like, something is going on.

Beau: Some of what you’re about to hear is difficult. We’re gonna talk about stalking, threats, mental illness, violence, and what you can do about it. Because…

Anna Nasset: Stalking is the one crime you can go to before the homicide happens.

Beau: I’m Beau Friedlander, and this is What the Hack, the podcast that asks, in a world where your data is everywhere, how do you stay safe online? Anna Nasset, welcome to “What the Hack.” Thank you so much for joining us today.

Anna Nasset: Thank you for having me.

Beau: Now, what are the diplomas behind you?

Anna: So my background is that originally I was into fine art. That’s what my degree is in, that’s what my life was about, was art and different ways of getting there. But one of my proudest things in life is that I owned an art gallery out in Washington State for many years, but unfortunately lost that due to being stalked by a stranger. And so now I live in Vermont and started a business to do graphic and web design for victim service agencies, to do kind of trauma-informed design that victims could really take in and access, ’cause it’s a very unique position when you are in that kind of traumatic place of needing sources, needing services to understand those things. But as I started my business, people started asking me to speak, and so I accidentally became a public speaker, and then really just started to educate myself, specifically on the crime of stalking and other things relating to the needs of victims of crime, and train and instruct all over the country and sometimes internationally as well. So a very weird career pivot out of a really, really bad thing that brought me to where we are today.

Beau: Trauma-informed graphic design. That to me sounds like such a niche. Now, tell me, it sounds to me like you’re saying that there’s a visual component to the transmission of information for people who have experienced severe trauma.

Anna Nasset: Absolutely. One of the biggest things is really simplifying things down. We often give a sentence to a victim, and they’re only picking up a couple of those words from that sentence of what they might need. Like, we’re informing somebody about services, criminal justice systems, all sorts of different things on what might be the worst day of their life. And so it’s really simplifying the language that we’re using. I often will look at things and be like, “This needs to be rewritten at, like, a third-grade level.” We don’t wanna talk down to people. We just have to understand those pieces of it. And it also comes to things like adding additional spacing in between paragraph lines, like in between lines, like a little bit extra spacing. And then also understanding the power of colors, that you want high contrast, but some colors like a red can be really jarring, things like that. So using a lot of neutral colors is important as well. And then a lot, like sometimes if you’ve got to have a lot of information on a page, making sure that you’re bolding the pieces that are the most important, like that word that says protection order, making sure you’re bolding that, so that when a victim is looking through all this different paperwork about a system, they can take that information in to the best of their capacity in that moment.

Beau: Well, keyword capacity. And you know, I think corollary for me is the amount of information that people retain when they’re in a car accident.

Anna Nasset: Mm-hmm.

Beau: If you have not been in a car accident and you’re listening and you’re like, “Well, that’s a rather niche thing,” you know someone who has, and you’ve all heard the stories of people who are trying to recount what happened, and they have no recollection of what went down. They know, they remember afterwards, you know, but they don’t remember the blow-by-blow of what happened when the accident was actually in process. And with trauma victims, people lose whole blocks of time. And when I say blocks of time, Anna, you know this, people lose years.

Anna Nasset: Yeah.

Beau: So when they’re just first coming in contact with the idea that there might be help, I mean, frame of mind, panicked, right?

Anna Nasset: Right.

Beau: And maybe feeling guilty that they’re crossing a line that they’ve promised the person who’s harming them that they wouldn’t cross that line. They’re being manipulated.

Anna Nasset: Right. Absolutely

Beau: And so, and there’s a million reasons why that information has to be like sugar water.

Anna Nasset: Right. Absolutely. And I think of it this way, like even now, you know, I’ve been a victim of crime, of stalking for the last 15 years, and recently I had to go through some paperwork about a service I needed to sign up for. And even with all I have, even with going out and training people, doing the work that I do, this is, you know, my career, my field, I sat down to fill out this paperwork and my mind, like I could not figure out what the hell I was doing. I’m looking at words, I’m like, “What is this?” So then I email the person who sent it to me with all these questions that were clearly right in all the paperwork, but my little brain just went back to that place of like that panic and trauma and all of those things. I think about it this way a lot. I have all of this training, I have all of these resources that I’ve researched and studied, and still even in those moments, I have a hard time comprehending. And I speak English as a first language. I have an education. When we look at that and go, okay, well what about the human who needs this service that has other barriers in place? It makes it so much harder to access those tools and understand what systems are there for them to protect them.

Beau: Oh my gosh. And that is the number one bar for entry to somebody trying to change their situation is knowing where to go.

Anna Nasset: Yeah. I think about it this way, if you’re somebody who is creating literature or works for an organization that has services that face victims, we need to be designing for the victim that has every single barrier in place and making sure they can understand it. And if we can do that, there’s a good chance that others, that everybody else will be able to understand as well.

Beau: Now, you got into this work… I think it’s fascinating. It makes perfect sense that there would be a whole language for the graphic design pointed at victims of various stalking, harassment, sexual assault crimes.

Anna Nasset: Domestic violence, all of those, yah.

Beau: Trauma. Trauma. Trauma, trauma experiences of all stripe.

Anna Nasset: Right.

Beau: So, you got into this, you said, through personal experience. Tell me about your gallery that was this great accomplishment that out in Washington State.

Anna Nasset: Yeah, it was the love of my life there for a while. As I said, my background was in fine arts, but I love working with people, I love building people up, and so it really had been this goal of mine to own an art gallery. But I had no money. I had nothing. And so I had an opportunity to buy this art gallery in Port Townsend, Washington, and I sat down and I wrote a damn good business plan, and I found a private investor and I bought it, which was incredible, something I’m still very proud of when I look back on it. And I had that gallery for several years. And then one evening a man I don’t know came to my gallery door and knocked on it. I was creating a window display, and I popped out and opened the door a little bit and he gave me the gift of a painting and told me he wanted to show artwork at my gallery.

Beau: Which sounds innocent enough, I guess, because artists are pretty brazen, self-promoters.

Anna Nasset: Yeah, you have to be, right?

Beau: No, some are, some are. I mean, my partner is an artist, and both of my daughters are artists in their own way, and boy, do they stink at self-promotion. No offense, everybody. You know it’s true. But so, I love you. I love you very much. I’m in so much trouble now, Anna. But…

Anna Nasset: I’ll never tell.

Beau: But as a gallery owner, you know that to be true.

Anna Nasest: Right. I would get approached all the time by artists who wanted to show artwork, so it wasn’t that out of the ordinary. It was a little odd to give me a painting. And I just got, like, that weird gut feeling, you know, when we’re like, “Something seems a little off here.”

Beau: It sounds like a lack of boundaries, ’cause that’s potentially a gift worth 500 to $5,000. Right? And you don’t know the guy. Weird.

Anna Nasset: No. I mean, by the state of his art, he wasn’t gonna be getting $5 for it, but that’s just my opinion.

Beau: All right, so you’re just doing the window display at your gallery, and a guy comes after hours and wants to talk to you. So, why not? Open the door, and he gives you a painting. A little weird, and is there a conversation, or do you just kinda leave it at that?

Anna Nasset: There was a short conversation. I mean, this was 15 years ago, so I don’t remember what it was, but I gave him my business card and was like, “You know, send me some other images, send me your bio,” you know, typical, “Send me, send me your artist statement,” whatever it was. From my art critic self, I would say it was not of the standard of which I showed. So I went about my weekend. It was a busy weekend. I saw that he emailed me. I saw that he left some messages on the gallery phone. I was like, “Well, this guy is really eager.” And so Monday or Tuesday, I sat down and looked at the artwork and was like, “Yeah, I’m not interested,” and sent him an email saying such. And, you know, thought nothing of it. Very quickly he would start sending me Facebook messages. Now, we weren’t friends, never had been friends on Facebook, but you could send messages very easily, especially back then. And that was when I started to go, “What is going on here?” ‘Cause he told me the painting was called “Marry Me.” He told me then that he didn’t know if he wanted to marry me. I was like, “Whoa, we don’t like this.” Started to comment on my physical appearance. As the days went on, he would send messages like, “It was nice to see you today,” but I wasn’t seeing him anywhere.

Beau: That’s the like, say something to make them feel bad about themselves kinda. That’s just like an incel. That’s like, I’m not sure I wanna marry you.” And by the way, saying something nice about your appearance could just be a stepping stone to starting to tear you down. And so, like, I’m getting real creepy vibes at this point. How about you?

Anna Nasset: Real creepy vibes. I did a Google search of his name, and up came this report or paper from the courthouse that talked about how he had been required to go to Jefferson County Mental Health Services, which was the county that we both lived in, and how he had threatened to harm people that work there, saying that he felt like he might need to kill them. So that’s a lot for a Thursday afternoon when you’re just trying to run your business.

Beau: That’s a lot for a whole month.

Anna Nasset: Yeah. Yeah.

Beau: So, he Crossed a line with you in the messaging to the point where you thought, “Weird guy, I think I probably need to do a little digging,” and it sounds like you barely dug at all and found something.

Anna Nasset: Right.

Beau: Okay. And then what you found, just to be clear, was that he had really scared some people.

Anna Nasset: Yes, and that he clearly had some sort of mental health diagnosis if he was being mandated to go to the mental health services in that county. So that was kind of the twofold. It’s like, okay, this person who I don’t know, who came to my business after hours and gave me a painting, also has some sort of mental health diagnosis and has threatened to harm people. This is not great information. And I usually would keep my business open till about 6:00, but that day it was maybe 3:00, 4:00, I immediately closed for the day. Because the last place you wanna be is where they know you are.

Beau: That sounds like some hard-won knowledge you may not have had at that point. So how did you know that when it comes to a stalker, the best thing to do is not be where they think you’re gonna be? Was this intuitive in the beginning or like, did you just freak out and were like, “I’m outta here”?

Anna Nasset: I think I probably just freaked out and was like, “I’m outta here.” And I didn’t even have the language for the word stalker at that point because no, I was like, “What is happening?” Like, this is just, this is wild. So yeah, I just closed for the day and left and went to my boyfriend at the time’s house and was like, “What is this? What is happening?” And you know, I think a lot of people, this is something that we see so often with stalking, is it, the rates of it getting reported to law enforcement are only about 40% of all stalking cases get reported to law enforcement.

Beau: I bet you it’s way less than that even. I mean, that’s like a published number, right? So you gotta figure, you know, there’s sort of low-key stalking that never gets reported.

Anna Nasset: Oh, oh yeah. I mean, I would say everywhere I go and train, I have so many people come up to me afterwards and go, “I didn’t realize I’d been stalked.”

Beau: Well, I mean, to be fair, I don’t think my ex-wife listens to this show. She might sometimes. Hi, Melissa, if you’re listening. When we met, I was a young book publisher, and on Sundays I would always go to Teddy’s Bar and Grill, where she was a bartender.

Anna Nasset: Mm-hmm.

Beau: And I would get dinner at the bar with a manuscript and work, kind of watching sports.

Anna Nasset: Mm-hmm.

Beau: And when I arrived, all the rest of the waitstaff would say, “Mel, your stalker’s here.” And was I stalking her? Yeah. Well, I had a crush on her, and I was very clear about that, and I’d asked her out and she’d said, “I have a boyfriend.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll wait.” And, I guess the only difference is we ended up getting married, so she didn’t mind. But I don’t know. I mean, we ended up getting divorced, too, so maybe she did mind in the end. I’m just saying, like, so that line, that’s sort of how courtship begins kind of.

Anna Nasset: It’s a very gray line.

Beau: So let’s talk about it. So that’s what I want to get to, is, like, you had a boyfriend. So did Weirdy McWeirdy Pants know that you had a boyfriend?

Anna Nasset: Initially, no, I don’t think he did. And there’s a couple caveats to this as far as, like, I had been recently divorced, and so-

Beau: Did he know that?

Anna: I believe so. There’s a lot of answers I will not have because I don’t talk to him, but we do see that, like, the timing in which he came to my gallery was shortly after I got divorced. And if we look back historically several years prior, there were other things that happened that were probably him. We think that… And basically we know that he was watching me for a couple years previous to when he first made that. So we can think, if we look at this and go, he probably knew that I was divorced or no longer with this person. I’m now alone a lot. This is a time to come out of the woodwork. So when he did, I was dating somebody, and so I talked to my boyfriend at the time, and what I did was I thought, “Okay, I don’t wanna communicate with this individual at all.” Like, leave me alone. But so what I did was I changed my relationship status on Facebook to in a relationship, and as soon as I did that, he messaged me on Facebook and said, “I see you’re in a relationship, but maybe you still wanna be with me. Like, do you wanna go to the movies?” This and that. And so, yes, he knew I was dating somebody, but it clearly wasn’t a deterrent.

Beau: He was a line crosser.

Anna Nasset: It’s crossing that line and it’s really causing an individual fear. If your behavior is causing a rational person fear for their safety, the safety of others around them, or severe emotional distress and you continue it, that’s when we see stalking.

Beau: How does Weirdy McWeirdy Pants know that he’s causing you distress?

Anna Nasset: That’s a great question. I think that if we look at his behavior contextually, ’cause I would pretty quickly find out that he was a serial stalker or he is a serial stalker. And so within that, there should have been a knowing that that behavior was inappropriate.

Beau: Cause it’s happened quite a few times, and so he’s had the experience of other people being weirded out by him.

Anna Nasset: Yes, he had already been, you know, law enforcement I quickly would discover were well aware of him.

Beau: Oh gosh.

Anna Nasset: So there is that component and, like, not to get too into, like, legalese here, but a lot of laws say, like, that the stalker either needs to be told to stop their behavior, and even if they aren’t told, they should have the knowledge that what they’re doing is causing their targeted victim fear.

Beau: That is not the case in every state though, as you know. and we just did an episode featuring someone from Wyoming who was not the target of a stalker, but whose daughter and whose daughter’s boyfriend were the target of a stalker who was a parent, I kid you not, who was interested in the boy either for herself or for her daughter. It was so bizarre. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I really recommend it. And in that particular case, she was able to get Wyoming state law changed, to change the definition of what a stalker was and what the punishment of stalking a minor was. So I agree with you, legalese is not the most interesting thing here. I mean, it is and it isn’t. The most interesting thing here is sort of the fact that this happens a lot. The line is blurry until we say what the line is, and here’s the line: I don’t like it.

Anna Nasset: Right.

Beau: I don’t like it, period. And this, by the way, happens to men as well as women. When I was in college, I had a professor who made it very clear that he was interested in me, and I didn’t like it, and I couldn’t get him to go away for the world. I couldn’t get him to stop.

Anna Nasset: Right. And we do know that one in three women and one in six men will be stalked at some point in their lifetime.

Beau: Or abused. One in six of men will be abused even. Yeah. Yep.

Anna Nasset: It’s the same stat as sexual violence. So yeah, absolutely. And we do tend to look at the female victims, but that does not account for all of the male victims as well, and it’s really important to raise that. And in a situation like you just shared with your professor, you also then have a power dynamic, which can be even, like, that’s such a huge challenge. You’ve got someone who holds a position of power, whereas you are a student. And we also need to always be looking at, you know, I’m talking about a stranger stalker. You’re talking about someone of authority stalking. The rates of stalking within an intimate partner setting are really the biggest ones that we see.

Beau: Now, I would be remiss not to mention, that I, in my spare time on the weekend when I’m not on the clock, I co-host a podcast with the One In Six organization. And I do it with Anthony Edwards. It’s called You’re Not Alone. It’s just, the second episode has just dropped. You can find it wherever you get podcasts. It’s called You’re Not Alone, the One In Six podcast. So I’m very familiar with the territory, Anna. And so…

Anna Nasset: Love it. Well, I don’t love it, but I’m really happy to hear that.

Beau: Well, I think it’s super important for men to talk about this stuff. But my, one of my daughters was very quick to point out, “That’s fine, Dad, but one in three women are targeted.” And I was very quick to say that means that everyone should be talking about everything.

Anna Nasset: Yes. I agree. Yeah, we have to be opening up these conversations, and I think that it’s just societally in everything that we see, it’s much more challenging for men to have that place to really have dialogue around these crimes, and it’s incredibly important that we do include those voices. And I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with different male speakers and trainers throughout my career, and I’m so glad I get to do that and to really lift up their voices as well.

Beau: Now, the guy hasn’t really crossed the “official” line with you yet, but it sounds like we’re getting kinda in the territory of life starting to suck as a result. You’ve just closed your shop up early. You’ve had the sense that you need to get out of there. You talked to your boyfriend about it. And have you spoken to the police?

Anna Nasset: Not yet.

Beau: Okay. So where are we now? What happens?

Anna Nasset: The next day I would go to the police. And what I did was before I even went there, I called a friend of mine who was an older gentleman in the community who was involved with, like helped with the drug courts, ran different programs, would volunteer at the county jail. So basically, if there was anybody causing problems in the community, my guy knew about it. So I called him up and was just like, “Hey, have you ever heard of this guy?”

Beau: Weirdy McWeirdy Pants. I can’t stop calling him Weirdy McWeirdy. But he’s more harmful than that, so I apologize. I don’t mean to minimize it.

Anna Nasset: I have a lot of work names for him. So we can call him The Roach right now.

Beau: The roach. Well, you did say he crawled out of the woodwork, so he is a cockroach.

Anna Nasset: Yeah. Someone told me that’s what they called him recently. I was like, “I kinda love that.”

Beau: The Roach. It makes sense. So let’s call him The Roach from here on out. If you’re confused, Weirdy McWeirdypants just became The Roach.

Anna Nasset: Let’s do it. So I didn’t even get the Roach’s full name out when my buddy was like, “You need to go to the police.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” Like, this is bananas. I just… Like, I’m running my business. Why, what is happening? This doesn’t happen to people. And so I did go to the police, and they were very well aware of the Roach and problems that he had caused in the community. They start to tell me about how he had a history of stalking people in the past for short spurts, that he had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And to be clear, not everybody with schizophrenia is gonna go out and stalk. Most people can live beautiful, brilliant lives. His specific kind has manifested in this way. And so he came from a prominent family in the community with access to any help and services they were happy to provide for him. But I think we see this a lot, where that individual doesn’t wanna take the medication ’cause it changes the way they feel. And they’re… This is where we are. So I’m given this information. And then I go back out into the community ’cause you can’t just go and arrest somebody right there. You need to have multiple points, multiple actions. And one thing I needed to do was tell him… So I’d responded to that first email. I think I responded to one other Facebook message just kind of confirming I’m not interested in showing your artwork, and then I never responded to any of the other messages. But at that point, in order to, if I needed to get a protection order, I had to say, “Do not contact me, communicate me via any means. Do not come to my business, my home, any place else.” That was the line. It was like, “Here’s the line. Don’t cross it.”

Beau: Right. So you had to, in order to be protected, you needed to put that line in the sand.

Anna Nasset: Yeah, a lot of states have that where, like, you need to verbally and/or in written form say to the individual, “Leave me alone.” And so I did that, and that obviously did not work. And I didn’t go and pursue a protection order right away because there is a part of me that was like, “Maybe this will just diffuse,” like, “He’ll move on to somebody else,” this and that. But as I said, what none of us knew at that time is he’d already been watching me for several years. So for me, this all began November 2011. But in reality, it would’ve started in, like, 2008 and 2009. I just didn’t know it. I kept documenting things. I kept giving over whatever messages, things like that. I had a wonderful officer, and that was kind of my point person, and just tried to do the best I could. But you’re also, like, now in the winter in Washington, where it gets dark at, like, 4:00 in the afternoon, and I’m sitting in my business terrified of what could happen. And so I’m closing my business a lot, things of that nature. If I saw him on the street, you know, I’d be… My first thing was, like, how do I make sure others are okay? So if I’m trying to sell, like, a piece of jewelry to a customer, ’cause I showed a lot of custom artisan jewelry, like, I’m just freaking out, so I can’t do my job to sell things ’cause I’m in that state of panic all the time.

Beau: Right. Get it. I get it. I get it. So now it’s starting to affect your work life.

Anna Nasset: Mm-hmm.

Beau: Really, the power of the stalker is not just appearing before you, but also the effect that they have when they’re not there, because it never leaves your mind once it’s there.

Anna Nasset: Yes. I said to a friend recently who was dealing with a groundhog on their property at their cabin, and they were like, “This groundhog is driving me nuts. It’s digging holes over here and over here, and I’ve been, like, setting up snares, and I have a live trap here, and I’ve been sitting outside at night. I slept outside because it’s just like maybe I can catch it. I’ve been researching groundhogs and learning all about, like, the etymology of the groundhogs.” And so my friend is telling me this, and finally I just look at them. I go, “You know how you feel about that groundhog? Imagine that in your brain for 15 years.” And he just goes, “Oh my God.” And it just really helped me kind of, like, frame it out a little bit better of what that’s like, because it is so different than other crimes where you have a start and a stop, right? This is just always kind of existing ’cause it is a psychological crime. And there’s a lot of other components to it, but it’s a psychological crime, which means it just kind of festers in there—the unknown. And what happens with that, we see with a lot of victims is because of that mental duress, when they are going to report to law enforcement or other people, oftentimes they could look like the person who’s having a mental health episode. Because you’re coming in and you’re listing off random shit that’s happening that don’t seem criminal on their own. It’s not criminal to give somebody a painting. It’s not criminal to send them messages. It’s not criminal to show up places that they are. But we’re looking at that fear component, and when you have that fear-

Beau: And it is criminal to plant a fear that’s permanent and causes somebody to not be able to function.

Anna Nasset: Right. Yep.

Beau: So eventually you did get a police restraining order. The police were aware of the fact that this was happening. So did they watch? I mean, they’re not gonna just sit outside of your door and watch?

Anna Nasset: No, police are not bodyguards.

Beau: How did it go down that he finally did get a tap on the shoulder from the police?

Anna Nasset: So I know the police went and told him to knock it off, and he continued. And so they built a case and he was arrested within a couple of months and ended up… That’s the point that I actually got my protection order as well, was when he was arrested. And at that point, he ended up pleading guilty to misdemeanor harassment against me and serving 364 days in the county jail, which is the maximum sentence…

Beau: It’s a lot.

Anna Nasset: Yeah.

Beau: It’s a lot. Yeah.

Anna Nasset: I thought, great, I’ve shown him. We’re good here. He’s never gonna bother me again. He got out of jail and initially just kinda skirted things. You know, there’d be times like he was at the bus stop that I drove by. That’s not a big deal. That’s fine. But he would be in the grocery store, and he’s supposed to leave because I have a protection order, but he wouldn’t leave. And so it was those types of things where I started to continue to see that behavior. He also does a lot of letter-writing, and he wasn’t sending them to me directly, but he would send letters, and he still does this to this day, to the police department, to other elected officials. And in those letters, he really started to talk a lot about one, that he and I were married, so there’s that fun fact, and all the different ways in which I should be killed. Very graphic, detailed things.

Beau: And that doesn’t get him arrested?

Anna Nasset: No, ’cause he wasn’t sending it to me, and he didn’t say, “I’m going to kill her this way.” He said, “She should be killed this way.” Language.

Beau: Goodness

Anna Nasset: Right. So this went on for a while, and eventually I closed my business because like I just, I was not a functioning human, and I was not doing good as a business owner. I was closing all the time, things of that nature.

Beau: Who was making you aware of the content of these letters where he talked about what should happen to you?

Anna Nasset: Law enforcement initially did, and I saw one of the letters and was like, “Yeah, I never need to see these again.” And so they kind of kept me abreast of things when I needed to know, is what I would say, was that it wasn’t something where they notified me every time there was a letter. And still to this day, like, I don’t get notified, and that’s fine. I don’t need to know that. I just know that it happens.

Beau: So has this behavior stopped now that you’ve left town and you relocated or is it continuing?

Anna Nasset: It continued. I ended up moving to where I live now in Vermont, and it continued. He started to send me messages again through Facebook, things of that nature. He eventually was arrested, and in 2019 we went to trial out in Washington State, where he was found guilty of felony cyberstalking and aggravated felony stalking, and was sentenced to the maximum of 10 years with you having to serve a little over six, which at the time was the longest sentence in our country’s history.

Beau: Phenomenal. That’s great.

Anna Nasset: That is great. With that being stated, he was released at the end of March of this year and is on community supervision at this time, and there’s been a lot of nuances to that to clearly indicate the fixation on myself and some others has not gone away by any stretch of the imagination.

Beau: I can imagine. This was the impetus that got you into your current work though, and that is, I mean, always with any hard thing, we were talking before we started recording that, I’ve had my own experiences with hard things. One of the most useful, and I’ll say gorgeous things that ever happened to me was somebody asked me, “What’s the gift in it?” And you started a new career, so tell me about that. Now, I mean, I know you said you kind of stumbled into it, but let’s talk about it, and let’s talk about what you do and what people need to know if they need help.

Anna Nasset: Yeah, I think with the question what is the gift in it, when we got that sentence, I looked back and was like, this sentence happened because of incredible people, incredible law enforcement, advocates, prosecutor, judges just doing their job.

Beau: And you got to witness all those people being awesome.

Anna Nasset: Amazing, right? And I looked back at that sentence and I was like, I don’t wanna be the exception. This needs to be the standard for others as well. And that’s what really compelled me to start doing training and to start doing speaking and awareness and things of that nature. But really my favorite thing to do is train, train those people who are working in the systems, training law enforcement, training advocates, prosecutors. I love it. And it’s a way that I get to say thank you, but more so I’ve also found my people. Like, just a bunch of weirdos like myself who have big hearts, who wanna create change, who wanna save lives, and that’s been such a tremendous gift to me to find this tribe of mine. I love it. And, you know, even now it’s like these are people I can call on to advise me on steps I need to take for my safety right now. So I’ve worked to make others safe, and it’s also helping me and for my own safety in very real time, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.

Beau: And then one of the other things that’s really amazing that I’m hearing in what you’re saying is, when you work on a common problem with people who are as focused as you are, you learn new tricks.

Anna Nasset: Yep. I’m learning things every day.

Beau: Now talk to me about the kinds of things that law enforcement doesn’t know that you help them understand.

Anna Nasset: I think one of the biggest things is that we see, law enforcement they go through their academy for a couple of months, and maybe during that academy they’re getting an hour or two training on stalking while they’re being trained on everything else they have to remember. And so a lot of times they do not understand the connector points to stalking and other crimes, the connector points to homicide, to really looking at, like, it’s in there. If we take the stalking seriously, we can save lives. But all too often it’s dismissed. It’s like, “Come back when something worse happens.” Well, what worse happens? We’re assaulted, we’re attacked, we’re murdered?

Beau: All the things that happen are bad.

Anna Nasset: Yeah. So it’s really giving law enforcement the foundation of what is stalking to really understand the different models around it, to understand the intersection points, especially to interpersonal violence, and to give them the skills to start to investigate, write PC reports, give them the tools that are gonna help that prosecutor, who’s the next step, be able to take this case.

Beau: And also, it sounds to me like the takeaway that I’m getting here is establishing in their minds that they don’t need to wait for the more egregious crime, because this is crime enough, and it’s crime enough for a person to do serious time and they need to just be thinking of it in those terms. Like, just like we used to hear in the ’70s that marijuana was a gateway drug, stalking is a gateway crime.

Anna Nasset: Right. A friend of mine, retired Sergeant Mike Davis from the Vancouver Washington Police Department said to me, and I use it in all my trainings, “Stalking is the one crime you can go to before the homicide happens.”

Beau: Yeah. It’s the real-life version of what they were talking about in “Minority Report.” Like, you don’t need to be clairvoyant.

Anna Nasset: Yep.

Beau: You just need to pay attention to what we know is true about stalkers

Anna Nasset: And so it’s educating those people so that they also can educate victims and empower them to document everything, to keep logs, to help them understand what stalking is, to understand that there’s an advocacy center in their community that does serve stalking victims. It says domestic and sexual violence on that sign, but they also serve stalking victims. And so it’s really making sure people understand all of the resources in their individual communities that can help support victims of these crimes.

Beau: Now, how do people find you?

Anna Nasset: You can find me at annanasset.com

Beau: And what sort of things can they ask you for? What do you offer?

Anna Nasset: Well, I don’t do direct services, so, that is one thing is because I travel around a lot, I’m not the best person to do direct services.

Beau: That means a person’s being stalked, they wanna talk to you.

Anna Nasset: Right. So what I try and do, because also they could be from a state that I don’t know, you know, I’m not an expert in their laws, things of that nature. So usually if someone reaches out to me, I try and provide them the advocacy center in their community. And that’s a great place for them to do a first step. Now, if you have listeners here that are in the victim service field or in the criminal justice field, I provide trainings to them. I do, you know, I can review things for them, things of that nature. So I do a lot of that work. I also do some consulting for companies that provide larger victim service tools. For instance, like VINELink, which is a victim notification system. I do some consulting for them to make sure that the things that they’re putting out there are the best tools for victims to be able to access. So a little bit of what my business started of like, how are we designing this? I still do some of that as well.

Beau: Annanasset.com is the website that you can go to if you wanna learn more.

Anna Nasset: You can also read the whole book. It’s called Now I Speak.

Beau: Available wherever you get your books. And so I think that this has been eye-opening for some of our listeners. And for those of you familiar with the problem, I hope that we helped enrich your sense of what’s available out there.

Anna Nasset: And I do wanna mention one of the greatest places to go and learn about stalking. They also do not provide direct services, but is SPARC, which is the Stalking Prevention Awareness Resource Center. It’s stalkingawareness.org, and that is federally funded under Office of Violence Against Women. They’re incredible researchers. They do lots of trainings as well, and so they’re really a go-to for people who are wanting to learn more about stalking, whether they’re a victim or a loved one is, or they work in the services field.

Beau: Anna Nasset, thank you so much for joining “What the Hack?”

Anna Nasset: Thank you, Beau, for having me. So great to be here. Have a great day.

Beau: And now it’s time for the Tinfoil Swan, our paranoid takeaway to keep you safe on and offline. If someone is making you uncomfortable, document it. Don’t delete texts. Don’t wait until you know exactly what’s happening. You may never know exactly what’s happening, and it doesn’t matter. Document it. Save the messages, all of them. Even if they creep you out, just let them stay on your device because you need them. Take the screenshots. Report what’s happening to the platform where it’s happening, whether that’s Meta or TikTok, wherever it is. Write down what happened. Because sometimes the individual things that happen don’t look like much, but when you keep a log, a journal, a diary, it adds up. And the pattern is the story. It’s the story the police need to help you. The internet can give someone more ways to find you, watch you, and to get to you. And this show is all about pushing back and removing those things and making you harder to get, harder to find, harder to reach. But you gotta do your part. So if something happens, that’s what you need to do. Document it as if your life depended on it, because it might. And stay safe out there. We’ll talk to you next week. Looking forward to a series we’re working on about surveillance pricing. You’re not imagining it. Prices really do change based on who you are and what they, and they is a really big category, what they know about you. Stay tuned. What the Hack is produced by a bunch of people. I’m one of them. Andrew Steven is another. And Sarah H helps out enormously from time to time. We’re available wherever you get your podcasts. If you are a regular listener to this show and you don’t use DeleteMe already, I want to tell you, you should. If you’re not and you want to, here’s what to do. Go to joindeleteme.com/wth. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth and get 20% off. I kid you not, 20%. 20% off. That’s joindeleteme.com/wth.

Learn More:

• Hear another stalking story from one of our previous guests on What the Hack and learn about Wyoming stalking laws.
• Read more about Anna Nasset’s mission and history.
• Listen to more from What the Hack.