ou’re a pitiful whore. I would have liked to see you kill yourself. It would be very funny to know I was your last one."

With a calm voice, a guy threatens his ex-girlfriend, who had broken up with him after three weeks of dating because he was possessive and scared her.

The guy wanted revenge.

e set up several false Facebook accounts and sent nude pictures of her to her family, friends and colleagues.

He posted the photos on social media, setting the privacy settings to public, and also left them as comments on her friends’ posts.

He placed ads on female escort websites, providing her real name, pictures, phone number and address.

Then he called to harass her some more.

„If you ever want to have a big career, those things will exist and they could be used against you”, he told her over the phone.

or a month, the girl lived in digital terror. She tried to report the posts, but the guy created new accounts before the old ones got deleted.

Dozens of men from escort websites were trying to get ahold of her. She was afraid to walk the streets alone, thinking some guy might be waiting for her. She started having panic attacks and insomnia.

She gathered evidence and audio recordings of her aggressor and went to the police to file a complaint for harassment.

The police told her it was her fault. They passed her around from one police station to another for a year and a half, postponing her case and humiliating her. They made her testify three times, then they told her she’d be better off just dropping the charges; that her assailant can’t be convicted unless she actually killed herself.

When the guy found out she’d went to the police, he started pressuring her to drop the case.

The girl is about to withdraw her complaint. The search for justice has in itself become a trauma.

The photos are still out there, saved on some strangers' computers, and they can always come back to haunt her life.

he guy’s name is Vlad Andrei and he’s a fresh graduate from Political Sciences University in Bucharest.

He brags about having been a political party head’s counsel. This year he’s gone to the Netherlands to pursue a master’s degree, prepping his career in politics.

“Nothing can happen to me, I can do whatever the fuck I want, nothing can touch me”, he told the girl.

The future politician thinks that social rules don’t apply to him because his parents have money and influence.

His mother was a candidate for European Parliament elections, his step father is a  former deputy prefect of Bucharest, and his biological father is a head of department at the National Bank.

The girl’s name is Mara* and she’s a student at the same faculty. She got a corporate job in order to support herself. Her mother is a nurse in a provincial town, and her father is a driver. Her brother worked in the UK for a while as an agronomic engineer.

ara grew up in a southern Romanian city. When she was little, she wrote short stories. One of them, about a princess, won first prize in a contest. “Prince Radu and Princess Margareta gave us our prizes”, she recalls while smiling.

Her father took her to karate classes, but she didn’t last long. “You had to smack your opponents while making an intimidating sound. Since there’s nothing intimidating about me, I just couldn’t do it.”

It wasn’t until high school that she toughened up a bit, began listening to hip-hop and wearing oversized hoodies.

The first friend she made when she moved to Bucharest to study was Vlad, a guy who also listened to hip-hop.

She met him on the faculty’s Facebook group. “I was looking for someone who knew more about the curriculum.” She was working in the UK that summer, so they only spoke over the Internet at first. so at first they only communicated online. Mara would tell him about Albert Camus, while Vlad made up rhymes and talked politics.

One evening, she showed him her Tumblr page, where she shared artsy nudes posted by others. “He asked me whether I have any nudes of myself. I told him no.”

A few days later, she took a couple nudes of herself. “I sent them to him in August, while I was in the UK. I had just had an argument with my brother and I was looking for a reason to feel good.”

When Mara came back to Romania, Vlad went to her hometown to meet her. She didn’t like him. He was trying to persuade her to sleep with him at a hotel. She didn’t want to. She walked him to the hotel and then went home.

he wanted to end it right then and there, but she says he wouldn’t have any of that. “He’d ring me up around the clock, messaging me on Facebook asking why I’m doing this to him, why I left him alone in a big city where he doesn’t know anybody else.”

Mara softened up a bit and kept on talking to him online during summer break. “I had started feeling guilty, what with all his talk about how lonely and sad he was.”

Then he started making fun of her. He bragged about his parents’ money and laughed at her for planting daisies in the UK. “I told him I have more respect for a guy who earns his own money than for one who tells me: I’m going somewhere nice, my dad’s  paying for it. He told me women shouldn’t talk about money and how money is made.”

This time, Mara blocked him on social media.

But Vlad caught up with her in school. “He waited for me in the morning in front of the faculty building. He kept telling me what a wonderful couple we could be.”

Two months after the first messages, Mara hooked up with Vlad.

lad’s close friends realized there’s something wrong with his relationship to Mara. Some of them agreed to talk to me about it.

“He’s very misogynistic”, one of them explained to me. “He’s that guy, the educated dude who understands politics, and the girls are dumb, but hot.”

Vlad would ask for nudes and send them on to his pals, without asking for the girls’ consent. “He sent me a video of a sixteen year-old, naked on his balcony”, one of his buddies recalls.

“He sends dick pics”, says another one of his friends. “He even sent me some. Look how thick I am, don’t you wanna come over?”

“He’s a hundred percent at peace with what he’s doing. He thinks he holds absolute authority”, another friend tells me.

called Vlad and told him about the scenes I documented. He denied all charges and says he wants to sue the victim.

Then I called his mother and she confirmed the charges. “Vlad had some rather indecent photos of Mara and he sent them to some acquaintances of hers, including her brother, to take revenge.”

lad would become jealous of any guy talking to Mara. One day he wanted to spit one of her colleagues. “He told me: Why are you talking to that guy on Facebook? I’m gonna kick his ass!”

But the colleague spat him first. “Vlad took it very dramatically, he took off his coat, came up to me and said: Hold my coat, I can’t fight with my coat on”, says Mara.

“I got angry and I left. He picked his coat up from the floor, where he had thrown it, and came after me: Did you see what he did to me? You have to calm me down!”

That’s when she broke up with him. They’d been together for three weeks. “I told him: come over and pick up your stuff, I don’t ever want anything to do with you.”

Vlad wouldn’t hear it.

When he went to pick his stuff up from her place, he refused to leave. ““I wanted to close the door, but he blocked it with his foot. I grabbed the door with my hand, he was pushing and he hurt me”, Mara recalls.

“That night he wrote me: «I’ll give you three days to think this through, maybe you want us to get back together»”.

He told one of his friends that he wants to kill her.

“I’m not immoral enough to kill someone with my own hands”, he eventually told Mara over the phone. “And, these days, you can’t really do that anymore.”

He found another way to take revenge.

hree days after the break-up, Vlad had set up several fake Facebook accounts, some of them with girls’ names. He checked his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook profile and identified family members and close friends. He sent them messages like this one:

I’m a friend of Mara’s

she’s killing herself tonight

her last wish was for you to see these pictures.

And he attached Mara’s nudes.

o you know how easy it is to set up a fake account? It takes three minutes, seriously”, he told her over the phone. He used to call her and torment her with details about what he had done. “I just sent them - bam-bam-bam - to whoever liked your posts. Just everybody, totally fucking random.”

He started a group chat with her colleagues and sent all of them her intimate pics. He placed them in comments on her friends’ posts to make sure everybody sees them. He posted them publicly, with fake accounts in her real name.

One of her friends was scolded by his parents for having pornographic material on his Facebook account. “I don’t care who that boy is, I don’t care who his parents are. For all I care, a meteorite could fall over them, they can die screaming. I’d sit and watch. I’d light up a cigarette”, Vlad told her on the phone.

Then he looked for a larger audience. He posted her as an item for sale on Facebook groups.

He placed ads on escort websites with her pictures and phone number. “I thought these up like a wise guy, with different scenarios. It was all about creativity”, he explains to her over the phone.

He encouraged her to commit suicide. “If I were you, I’d jump out the balcony.”

ara learned of the photos while attending a rap concert. She noticed several missed calls on her phone. Her brother was desperately trying to reach her from the UK. His friends from Romania were looking for him after they had received pictures of his sister.

“He told me to get into a cab right then and head home. He had reached that point where he couldn’t even scream anymore. My brother said there was no place for me in Bucharest anymore, that I’ve embarrassed him and now how is he going to show his face back home?”

That night, Mara’s brother tried talking to Vlad, but he wouldn’t take his calls. “I know for a fact that one of my friends threatened him”, her brother told me. “He offered to help me handle it. If I had come over then, the night would’ve ended badly for someone.”

But he managed to reach his mother to ask her to put a stop to this. “You don’t do this even to your worst enemy”, he told her over the phone. “You’re a woman, just think what it would be like if you were put in such a position.”

His mom was startled when she heard what her son had done, but then composed herself and said this is out of her hands since he’s not a minor (even though he was living in her house, off of her money).

She did talk with her son and told him that he’s doing a very bad thing, and then he just continued to harrass the girl on the internet.

I called the mother and asked her what happened. She sighed, lit up a cigarette and told me: “I took every precaution as a parent. I told him what he’s doing is unacceptable. I inspected his computer and made him erase all the photos and stop this conflict. I think I was [Mara]’s greatest advocate in this case. That’s the most that I can possibly do. I don't have any guilt. I wound up in a story that doesn’t belong to me.”

he night she learned of the photos, Mara went home and thought about suicide. Her flatmate was also home, sleeping. She gave up the idea so she wouldn't hurt the people around her.

But she was ambushed by panic attacks.

“In the first few weeks I’d suffocate in class”, she says. She asked her colleagues to walk her home, just in case there’s someone waiting for her in front of the building.

“I spent more money on pills than I would’ve on a vacation in the mountains”, she told Vlad when he called to mock her some more. He laughed: “You people, you're one of those who believe in depression: Oh, Lord, life is so cruel, let’s slit our writs!”

Mara also had to answer in front of her parents, who didn’t really understand what she was going through.

This is your first big mistake, but we forgive you, they told her after they found out. It felt like they were blaming her.

“My father’s religious. He said to me: Eventually, we all get what we deserve.”

“My mother was very worried about losing face - how will she explain it to her friends when they’ll see photos?”

eanwhile, Mara was getting tens of calls and messages from unknown men. After the initial shock, she started gathering evidence: she asked some of the men to send her the links where they had found her phone number. “And they’d say no. It took a while to get one to send me the link. I was riding the metro, everything was dandy. I open a link, everybody around me was minding their own business, and there I was, naked.”

Her name and phone number were published on escort websites, with creative descriptions: “I like to be hugged during sex, I can cook and I constantly need attention while I’m around you.”

Mara contacted the website admins to ask that her personal data be removed. But they didn’t even reply. They would only take down ads when users were complaining that the escort isn’t reliable.

can be more evil”, Vlad told Mara over the phone. “This means betrayal. You walked hand in hand with me. My friends saw you with me. Nobody spits on me. I promise you, that guy will bleed. This I promise you.”

He meticulously explained to her what else he had wanted to do: “I thought that, on one of your exam days, I’d send someone to put on every desk a piece of paper with a link to a Wordpress blog with your name, your pictures and some testimonials. Everybody shows up on exam day. Public humiliation in its realest form, where people right next to you read that and all eyes are slowly turning towards you.”

When they saw that the harassment doesn't stop, her parents encouraged Mara to press criminal charges against Vlad.

She went on to gather evidence: she took screenshots from her chat windows and installed a call recording app on her phone.

One week after the first shares, Mara went to the police.

t the Police station she was greeted by a bored officer: «Let’s hear it, missy, who’s harassing you?», Mara recalls how the conversation started. “It seemed terrible that he was so ironic. Dude, we’re talking harassment, I could have been psychologically unstable.”

She told police officers that her former boyfriend published photos of her naked. She showed them the websites on her phone. “I had a cough attack when I saw them staring at the photos and saying nothing.”

One of them tried to crack a joke: “They were together for just three weeks; What would’ve happened if it were a year, I wonder?”

Then they sent her home, since the officer who handled complaints wasn’t in for a couple more days.

Two days later, they made her print her nudes and bring them in on paper. “I remember going to a copy shop and feeling super shitty when I handed him the memory stick with the screenshots. I kept thinking he’s going to look at them...”

She filed the complaint and came back to the police station on a weekly basis, to bring in new evidence as the harassment unfolded. She told them she has recordings of him, but they told her they didn’t even review the evidence. They asked her to come with her father, so they can take her seriously. She wanted to get an attorney, but couldn’t afford one.

One month later, they sent her to the Organized Crime division (DCCO). “When I went to DCCO, they told me there’s nothing they can do for me and that I should go to the other headquarters, because apparently there are two of them. I went to the other one and they told me hold on, we can’t help either.”

Finally she scheduled an appointment at the other HQ, at the General Inspectorate of Police. She went in with her brother and they met, in an office, with three police officers and a female psychologist. “I described the situation for them and they went and brought the file in”, her brother says. “After that, they started ranting.”

The psychologist blamed the victim. “That woman told me that he hadn’t forcefully taken the nudes, that it’s my fault, I sent them to him”, Mara recalls. “She twisted it around like, you’re to blame. Be more careful next time”, her brother also recounts.

Psychologist Adina Codreș works for the Child’s Protection Agency and helps the Police with child pornography cases. I subsequently met up with her and she told me that victims share their part of the blame. “I am of the personal belief that it is all up to us. If we choose to do something, we should at least take responsibility for it and face the consequences.”

ara felt betrayed by the authorities. “If they tell me what he did is OK, you’re trying in vain to punish him for it, it’s like they’re saying he’s right!”

The aggressor is also certain that police won’t sanction him: “That complaint will never come to a solution”, he told me over the phone.

ix months later: policemen at the local station notify Mara that they’ve begun two criminal investigations: violation of intimacy and threatening.

“I was pissed off: why the hell did those guys tell me he’d done nothing illegal?”