Elise Matthesen

One of the most consistently shocking parts of learning that a charming person is also a predator, even when we see it over and over again like clockwork built from a kit, is how effectively the glamour works on people who, for whatever reason, aren’t part of the victim pool. The ability to silo your corruption is a predator’s most important survival skill, and an utterly alien mindset to almost everyone else — even when we’ve seen it before with others, from the outside or not.

I know you know this, painfully so, and I desperately wish you didn’t have to. But I wanted to contextualize a remark which might otherwise come off as pat or trivializing:

I hear you. I’m so fucking sorry you’re going through this, Elise. He did you deeply wrong.