The state of my virginity, according to Daniella Mestyanek Young

You get a lot of advice when someone starts making videos about the state of your virginity or who you’re fucking or whether or not you were sufficiently abused as a child. When they accuse you of the very shit they’re doing—questioning whether or not you’re allowed to write your own story. Friends tell you they’re really sorry. But the only thing you can do when a narcissist is playing narcissist games is grey rock them. Don’t say anything at all. Give them nothing. So you grey rock them.

They just keep on coming. I don’t know if grey rocking works in an attention economy. Can you grey rock a narcissist with ninety thousand followers on social media who’s found that using your name will get them attention? We tried to grey rock a presidential candidate once. Tried it with libsoftiktok. Just ignore them. Treat them like the fringe lunatics they are. But you don’t have to give someone content when they’re happy to make it up on their own. These aren’t people talking shit to your coworkers or posting weird lies to their private facebook accounts. The fuck do you do when a video about whether or not you were raped as a child gets responses congratulating the video’s creator on “taking the high road.” When people treat this as some sort of hilarious spat between writers. But only one of you is fighting. You’re told to stay silent.

What do you do when you’re a public figure, when all you’ve got is your name. You can call lawyers. For every one who tells you they’ll be glad to send a cease and desist, you’ll find another saying don’t do anything. It just amplifies her. But she’s already louder than me. And what if, while I’m trying to write a book, trying to stay off social media for own mental health, she’s the only voice people hear, the one telling them that I’m waging a shadowy campaign to silence a victim.

The problem with a cease and desist is it doesn’t mean much, not unless you’re willing to back it up, willing to sue. I thought I was, for a moment there, a few months ago, when I first realized my name had become content. I don’t know how long it’s been going on. Months or years. Maybe someone else can go through the videos. I can’t. I tried once but they fuck me up, and there are so many of them, somewhere between four and nine videos a day. I didn’t find out until shit hit the fan back in January or February.

I’d been off twitter nearly a year. Last I saw of Daniella Young, she was being roundly mocked for claiming she was one of the first women in “deliberate ground combat,” a term that appears nowhere in Army doctrine. The veterans on Twitter, and everywhere really, tend to get a little touchy when someone misrepresents their service. Some of the vets pushing back on her claims were actually some of the first women in combat, years before Daniella came along. They had a field day when she repeatedly claimed the Pentagon wanted to have her killed for writing about the Army. She doesn’t post much on Twitter anymore, possibly to avoid vets laughing at her, possibly to avoid a Pentagon hit squad. Who knows.

It’s hard to know what Daniella’s thinking. I tried to figure it out. It’s something you do when you’re someone like me, someone who responds to threats with either fight or fight. Which is to say, I have PTSD. Daniella knows this. It’s why she makes videos about whether or not I experienced CSA and encourages her followers to question the status of my healing. She wants a response. She wants to watch me lose my shit on the internet. Then she can point to my anger and say, Look at this crazy bitch. I told you she was crazy. I told you she was unhealed. She hasn’t done the work.

The work, according to Daniella, is to follow Daniella. She wants to heal me. She wants to heal all of us. Which may be where all this started. Hard to say. But since I’ve spent a little too long trying to understand the sort of threat she poses, we’ll start there, in a facebook group with a couple hundred survivors of a cult. This is where Daniella thought she’d find her audience. And for the most part, when she published her book, her fellow survivors were supportive, as they always are.

I’m not saying we’re some monolith who agree on everything. We don’t agree on much at all. We have one thing in common. And it was a long damn time ago. Most of us are middle aged now. We’re scattered all over the globe. For the most part, the posts in the survivor group these days are jokes or memes, random arguments about politics, updates on people’s lives. Who got the cool job they applied for. Who’s going to grad school. Whose kids got into their choice college. Who got a new dog. You’ve been in a facebook group. But considering our past, when any one of us does succeed, at anything from growing tomatoes to publishing a book, I’ve never seen anyone be less than a little fucking over the top with the congratulations and fuck yeah and holy shit you did it and good for you.

I’ve been the beneficiary of this support. It feels amazing. So it was a little fucking strange when Daniella started giving interviews, disparaging other survivors, saying things like, “Yeah, exactly. Anyone who writes about Children of God gets a lot of crap from other survivors. They'll be like, That's not your story to tell,” or “they're so far in their cognitive dissonance that if they stopped for one second and admitted this was one of the worst cults in the world, they'd break down completely.” Then she compared us to holocaust survivors. And, no. Just no. Some of our fellow survivors didn’t take it well. They started making fun of her. They started talking shit. Who the fuck wouldn’t.

Daniella got pissed and left the group. At some point she stopped posting on Twitter. I thought that was the end of it. A lot of us did. But at some point, she started threatening people.

This threat was public. Most aren’t of course. The podcasters she’s referring to are two cult survivors who run a little podcast with probably a few hundred listeners. They’re about the kindest people I know and they didn’t say shit about Daniella. But truth doesn’t matter much to Daniella. This is about the time she started posting screenshots from cult support groups. Her reasoning is, well, I’ll let her tell you.

Not surprisingly, survivors who are just trying to get through their godamn day like everyone else, people who’ve crawled and clawed and scraped to find their paths in this world with little to no education and less support, didn’t fucking enjoy being called unheralded. I shouldn’t have to tell you by now that no one called her a fucking Judas. No one told anyone to not read her book. But more importantly, by posting screenshots of private conversations for her tens of thousands of followers, carefully cropped to fit her narrative, she took the one place a lot of people have and she made it unsafe. No one can talk in there without worrying she’ll use it for content.

The fucked up thing is, because most survivors aren’t broadcasting their pasts, there’s fuckall they can do. I’m open about my past. And I’m scared of what she’ll do. I really am. I don’t know if I should be. But at what point do I know? There’s no manual for this that I know of. How do you know she stops at posting weird shit? At what point does an obsession turn violent. She’s already come after my friends. Does she come after my family next?

Which brings us back to suing, and why I can’t. She’ll go scorched earth. They always do. She’ll use discovery to take down and expose every person in that group who’s ever made a joke about her. She’s already threatened friends, accused me of fucking her aunt, because why not throw a little homophobia into the mix. She will ruin lives, to hurt me.

We’re all just waiting for the next goddamn post, the next threat. I try to ignore her. I try to work on my book. I hang out with friends. I answer email. I walk my dog. Whatever. Anytime I get dragged into this, I lose a few days. This is because I’m unhealed, according to Daniella. According to the VA, it’s because I’m crazy. I don’t like talking about my mental health unless there’s a reason. Here’s one. This is what PTSD looks like, for me.

I know she’s a threat. I can’t tell you what sort of threat. And I can’t tell me either. My bones only know one sort of threat, the existential sort. Existential’s one of those words we use to often. I mean that once triggered, another word we use too often, I only know she is a threat to my existence. I’m triggered when someone uses my history of CSA and SA as content, apparently. I’ve figured out some ways to deal with things like this. The first thing I do, once I’m done hyperventilating or crying in the damn corner, once I’ve dunked my head in ice water a few times, I try to find out everything I can about the threat. For the most part, this calms my mind. I can tell myself this is a weirdo in another country or a kid seven states away who’s just trolling. I can tell myself this is a person who cannot harm me.

This doesn’t work with Daniella. So I get stuck. I keep watching, like checking the locks. I have to see her coming. I have to know what she’ll do next. And because there’s no answer to those questions, I’ll just keep bouncing around like a fucking Roomba stuck under a table. That is, until I find help. That help used to often come from other survivors in a support group. But that’s not an option now. I do have friends and I do have family. But when you have a brain like mine, your brain tells you that these are the people you don’t ask. You’re a burden to them. They don’t want to hear it. Fortunately I’ve been in therapy long enough to know I’m full of shit. But it takes a minute, or a few days. Still. And Daniella gets another few days of my life.

I’m tired of it. I know I am currently triggered. Because she’s been doing it again. I spent the last couple days in and out of an emergency vet dealing with a very sick dog. Daniella spent the past few days telling her followers that I’m making fake accounts to troll her. That the accounts she’s referring to are in my own name and I am not a fucking moron and will happily troll her from my own public account, and have, those things don’t mean much to Daniella. That she’s just lying on the internet doesn’t mean much to my fucked up brain that was already having a shitty week. And I’ve been fucked up all day. Over her. Again.

I swear to Christ it’s like watching someone try to start a cult. She needs attackers, all truth-tellers do. It’s how you know someone is telling the truth. And she is telling the truth, like AA is a cult and jobs are cults and everything is a cult. Please buy a signed copy of her book and a cult robe on your way out. I make a suitable nemesis I suppose. She can pretend to take the high road, pretend to promote my book whenever she pretends I’m attacking her, pretend my book is hateful and cruel and I yelled at readers while her book is friendly and accessible and includes free shipping.

I know I’m triggered right now. I haven’t done shit all day but try to figure out the threat. But there’s nothing to figure out. I know that too. I expected her to be angry when I told her I couldn’t blurb her book. I knew she was a threat then. I’d read some of her posts. I’ve met her before. So I tried appeasement. I told her I respected what she was trying to do. I told her I wished her the best. I told her I was happy, truly, to let her be the face of cult survivors. I wanted no part of it. I just wanted to be a writer. I had a weird story and I might as well use it. But I wanted to write about anything else.

She told me I was lying. She’d read my book. She knew what I wanted.

I said okay. Best of luck.

This conversation is paraphrased. I no longer have access to my twitter account. But it’s close enough. I got into the why at this link.

I didn’t expect that years later, she’d be doing this. I should have. But I didn’t. This shouldn’t be the price of not blurbing a book. So here we are. She’s now taken a support group from survivors she pretends to represent. She’s threatened people I care about. And she’s threatening me. And I’m done. I’m done losing time to her. I’m done being scared. And the thing I want more than anything else is for no one to know, no one to see the shit she’s saying about me, no one to help or go out of their way, no one to fight for me. So maybe that’s my brain being an asshole. But I don’t know. I’m unhealed and unheralded. I don’t like being told I have to shut up and take it, again. And I’m not your fucking content. I tried to help, in the beginning, when you asked how to get published. When you asked how to find other survivors. And I helped. Now you want to be famous. I’m still here to help.

You like to imply that I have a google problem. I don’t. I’ve got nothing I’m ashamed of. But you seem to think I should be. Let’s see how you like it.