I could use some advice about a situation with a good friend of mine. Here is what is going on:

I have a good friend who has been dating a new man for the past 3 months. She is 26 and he is 49, she has a long history of dating older men. Recently she and I have been talking more and more often and she often speaks about how confused and frustrated she feels about the relationship with this guy. She used to be very independent and self-centered both in good and bad ways but lately she has been working hard to be more open and committed. I am concerned however, that he is being manipulative and controlling of her and she is trying so hard to make it work she is missing all the signs. First off he does have a good paying full time job but he was divorced after a long marriage and has a 14 year old daughter. He is paying child support, alimony, and has had a few DWIs which have been costly because of court and lawyer costs. He is currently in a court ordered treatment program that he must pay for and because of all of this cannot support himself. He was staying with friends but those friends asked him to vacate for a few weeks while they had family in town so she agreed that he could stay with her for that time. Naturally he was told at the end of the two weeks that he couldn’t move back in so he ended up just staying at her place. She was upset and wanted him to find a place because she doesn’t believe in living with a man before marriage… but after a number of weeks he decided that since it was working out he would just stay with her. She reluctantly agreed that he could stay and is currently clearing out her small office (she lives in a two bedroom apartment) to make room for a bed so that the daughter has a place to sleep when she visits him on the weekends. Apparently he is not helping out with rent, utilities and she is paying for all the food and has even lent him some money which he hasn’t paid back. She tells me about how hard she is working to be accepting because he does cook for her and she wants to be more considerate of her partner. Next she was nervous because she keeps a diary on her computer and she caught him reading something she wrote once and because she didn’t have a password on her computer she wanted me to come over and help her. I helped her lock her account, add a password, and create a guest account for him because that is what she wanted. Apparently when he found this out he was very upset that she wasn’t being trusting of him and didn’t want her to have a password on the computer because he couldn’t install his music software and such on his guest account. That to me seemed like another warning sign. She has been talking about moving into a larger apartment wit him and making things more serious which also has me worried.
A few weeks after this she called me worried because he had been trying to install a bunch of things and now she was getting some odd security warnings that worried her. She asked me to come by and sit down with her to try and find out what was wrong. We spent hours going over her computer and were able to find a spying key logging program installed that was tracking everything that was being done on the computer. We also discovered that there was a secret e-mail being sent out on her computer with the logs on the computer. We couldn’t find out anything else so I talked to some computer security experts at work and he suggested that I hooked up her computer through another laptop and used packet capturing to catch those e-mailed logs and try to find out where they were going. At the time she thought it was her creepy landlord but I ran the captures and had the security people at work look at them and we found a bunch of info including the e-mail they were being sent to. Well… the logs were all being sent to her live-in b/f e-mail account. I showed her all the logs and evidence and I never said a single bad word about her b/f. She was very upset naturally and said she didn’t think that her b/f could do something like that. She went through the logs that we found and was able to discover his e-mail password and logged in to see his e-mail. She didn’t read any of the e-mails but there were logs from her computer going back for weeks. I also found a new log in his e-mail from my laptop that I had used to do the packet capture; it must have gotten infected too. We deleted that e-mail and I formatted that laptop and I left so she could talk to him that night.

She called me the next morning and explained that they had a big fight and it didn’t go well. He had denied that he did any of it and he believes that I was the one who planned all of it out so that I could frame him and get them to break up. She also said that she didn’t believe he could do anything like that to her and she believed him when he said it wasn’t him. Lastly she said that he didn’t want her to talk to me, see her, or come over to her place anymore so she cancelled

Filed under: Call accounting