Yeah. I was a victim of what's called resentful stalking. Definition below.
Resentful stalking arises when the stalker feels as though they have been mistreated or that they are the victim of some form of injustice or humiliation. Victims are strangers or acquaintances who are seen to have mistreated the stalker. Resentful stalking can arise out of a severe mental illness when the perpetrator develops paranoid beliefs about the victim and uses stalking as a way of ‘getting back’ at the victim. The initial motivation for stalking is the desire for revenge or to ‘even the score’ and the stalking is maintained by the sense of power and control that the stalker derives from inducing fear in the victim. Often Resentful stalkers present themselves as a victim who is justified in using stalking to fight back against an oppressing person or organisation.
It sucks because this isn't really what you think of when you talk about stalking. My stalker definitely did not have any romantic or sexual interest in me -- she wanted to hurt me.
And if you noticed the pronoun in that last sentence, that's another problem. Both she and I are women. The police were more helpful for me than they are for many stalking victims, but you really got the sense that they thought we were having a catfight and she wasn't a real threat because she's a woman.
My stalker was a former student at my university who did something pretty shitty while she was here and got some backlash for it from the community. She dropped out and I didn't think about her much for a few years. Then she emerged on the internet, long after anyone really remembered or cared about what she did.
The accusation was initially that I and one other person secretly masterminded the backlash against her, and that this constituted violent abuse. She pretty quickly stopped specifying what actually happened, likely because it's obviously 1) bizarre and 2) not abuse, so from then on, I was just a "dangerous abuser."
She tried to start a viral campaign doxxing me, which thankfully didn't take off. She made a lot of posts online about my alleged crimes. She started contacting my friends and acquaintances and demanding that they stop associating with me, and then started harassment campaigns against them, too, if they didn't agree to cut me off (the technical term for this is a "secondary victim").
She started making self-righteous posts about making me suffer and inflicting consequences. She announced her intentions to come to my campus. I got a police protection order. She tracked down my email and started contacting me, demanding to know where I'd be when she was here, accusing me of upholding white supremacy and misogyny by involving the police (for reference, she is white), telling me I needed to atone for my crimes, etc. I obviously didn't answer.
For a while she would go on and on about how she was going to wait for me just across the property line. Or how she was going to find me at another campus where I also took classes. I'm fairly certain she had friends spying on me.
Then she showed up at my actual university. For a while no one knew where she was. She'd post pictures online of herself in the dorms that were obscure enough to make it impossible to know which one, or which room.
Eventually she got arrested. She was furious. More nasty emails were sent. She started contacting anyone and everyone, including staff at the student religious life building where I was involved and the president of the university, to tell them about how I was a dangerous abuser who needed to be removed for the safety of the community and obviously hated abused women.
And then she just stopped one day. Dropped off the radar. Last we saw of her, she was trying to use her victimization to grift and insisting that the entire university as an institution had abused her now.
It sort of fucked me up, especially because I am a survivor of physical and sexual abuse. I don't feel like I can tell most people what she did because I am afraid they will believe her or side with her. I don't trust most people very much anymore. When it was happening, you constantly had to wonder about what was coming next. No one really knows or understands what stalking is, or what it's like, or why you're so afraid, so it's pretty lonely, I guess. It's weird to just go on with life never having had any closure.