My name is Joseph Lalli and I have been the victim of organized stalking and harassment for over 7 years in New York City.
In writing about my plight it is my hope that this will serve as a tiny antidote against the silence and despair that intimidation by predatory groups can produce in victims. I didn’t spend decades in psychotherapy inching my way towards a recovery from a lifetime of trauma only to now, at the age of 63, allow fear to dishonor what is my personal truth and my right to autonomy. In the time I have remaining, I’m going to try to live with as much dignity and self-respect as possible and that requires living in truth.
I also hope that my writing here will remind people of the horrifying toll that predatory behavior takes on individuals and families.
And in addition, I hope to remind readers that hidden in our society lies a thriving network of predators willing and able to target individuals.
Regarding organized stalking, for those who fortunately are unfamiliar with how such a sociopathic criminal act would be carried out, the following is a threadbare outline.
The first point that should be noted is that a person in my situation cannot have any personal relationships…no family, friends or even acquaintances. The first order of business when organized predators target an individual is to insure that such a person be socially isolated and therefore unable to receive any help or support.
In my case, I strongly suspect that many of my communication methods were compromised, at first without my being aware of this. This allowed the predators to both monitor my communications and to possibly identify my correspondents so that they too could be targeted and/or persuaded or threatened into taking part in the harassment. As you can imagine, this would drive away anyone who might be genuinely interested in a relationship. And besides, it would be unethical to bring someone else into my circle of victimization anyway.
Even providers of professional services were targeted in this manner.
It did not take long for the harassment to extend to nearly every corner of my life: grocery stores, movie theaters, museums, concerts, city parks, cultural institutions, on subways, at bus stops, events at all the NYC universities…in short, everywhere. The idea, I presume, is to make the predation inescapable.
There was a strong street surveillance effort. A VERY common tactic was for the harassers to suddenly, and in an exaggerated manner, step in front of me on a sidewalk. After this occurs a few times, you come to understand that it is not coincidental.
A lot of street theater was utilized…groups or individuals who I have to presume were paid and coached to engage with me and then harass me. In some cases they physically harmed me, but mostly in an “accidental” manner. All of this is done in a way which ALWAYS allows for plausible deniability.
Mimicry is a frequent tactic. Mocking amusement or laughter also.
Even the use of children is not beneath them.
Besides simple harassment, the stalking was often geared towards degradation, infantilization, and humiliation, perhaps for the purpose of provocation. The idea may have been to try to get me to act out since I would then be discredited and their criminal activity would be less vulnerable to being exposed.
Please understand that since this harassment has been carried out by a very large cohort, it is often a different person doing the harassing, although there is a core of harassers who return with some frequency. Sometimes, it appears that a behavioral conditioning modality is used that allows for the force and impact of the harassment to be passed from one criminal to the next. (If every time you ring a bell, you also administer an electric shock to a lab animal, it is not necessary for the same lab technician to be present for the animal to learn that the two stimuli are related.) At other times, a never-seen harasser will appear with an active one, after which the new harasser will become active. Again, the strategy is to make falling victim to predation unavoidable and to engender a sense of powerlessness.
So what is left of a life where a relationship to another human being is no longer possible? Where all connections, even to the past, have been severed? I can tell you that something does indeed remain, however emotionally impoverished and psychically fractured it may be. The key is to remain focused on finding some beauty in the day-to-day.
This is not to say that the constant predation has not likely taken a few decades off my life expectancy, but in the few healthy years I may have remaining I will do my best to tell my story. For now, it may be my only measure of justice.
Resisting and protesting is not only a demand for redress, but can also be a form of redress itself. So these posts in addition to allowing for the exposition of my continued trauma will, in my eyes, in my utter isolation, deliver some emotional relief.
When one is confronted with evil such as this, it compels a widening of the scope of one’s thinking beyond the limited duration of one’s lifespan to accept and imagine that change and justice may take longer than the time you have on this earth. And that is fine, as it also heightens your sense of the sacred and the eternal.
“Hope… (is) a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather the ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”
– Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1990
P.S. Although the pandemic has so far interrupted the pattern of stalking, it has of course increased the sense of social isolation for all of us, even for myself, if that is possible.