It started with a home invasion.

I owned Authors Bed & Breakfast in Toronto and appeared frequently on television talk shows as an author-expert. My work not only provided a home-away-from-home for visiting authors, but also media and press exposure as their PR agent. When I opened, columnist Heloise called to wish me success.

Late one night, I awoke hearing my downstairs window blinds rattling. My guests were asleep, so I went downstairs to find a man with his head and one leg inside the window. As I reached for the phone to call police, I yelled, “Get out of my house!”

Stupid move. I was only a few feet from him. If he had had a gun, I might not have lived. But this was Canada.

The Toronto Police came, dusted his fingerprints and were able to find his prints in the system. Later, with police at my side, I identified him in court, and he was sent to jail.

A neighbor down the street heard about my intruder and offered to rent his home to me. Assuming his house was safer, I moved in. Big mistake.

Eventually, I realized the intruder, “Ward,” and my new landlord, “Rodney,” were in jail together. They must have seen me on television and plotted their revenge.

That’s when Rodney began harassing me. He complained to all the neighbors that I was destroying his house. Instead, I was repairing, cleaning, and painting over stains to make it attractive to guests. I watched his baby mama steal my mail. On one day, he sent five different plumbers to bother me. I found men on the roof looking down into the skylight as I showered. This went on for four months. As a writer, I recorded everything.

He left messages: “I will destroy your business.” Another message said, “I will take you out.” He didn’t mean on a date. Fortunately, I was a member of the community police liaison committee, so I called the precinct to report the death threat.

I asked, “Was Rodney responsible for the two women whose throats were slit in the stairwell?”

The constable said, “I can’t tell you, but you need to get out of his house and disappear. We can’t keep him from harming you.”

An officer from the Sexual Assault Squad said she went to court to keep him away from me. He was being released because two more women he savagely attacked on my street were too frightened to testify against him.

That terrified me. He was being released from jail and could come after me.

So, I closed my bed and breakfast, gave away everything to strangers, left the city, and went into hiding for nearly eight years with little income. No longer could I appear in public to promote books. I couldn’t accept speaking gigs for fear he would shoot me, or miss me and hit an innocent bystander.

I pivoted, offering to negotiate contracts for other speakers, but they wouldn’t hire me because I refused to meet them in person. (Only one person agreed to have me negotiate for her because we had a mutual friend, Margaret Atwood.)

He won. My speaking, publishing, and author promotion business never recovered, and my retirement savings now reflects the lost income.

I later discovered that my stalker believed I was running a brothel. A woman halfway down the street was indeed a madam, and he decided I was doing the same. I’m lucky that a dozen local police knew me personally and did what they could to keep me safe. My stalker-landlord came from a country where honor killings of family members was still tolerated. That was his culture.

Although my efforts put an end to the dozens of home invasions that had plagued my community, my neighbors stopped speaking to me as if I were the criminal.

The lesson? Get to know your local police. If someone starts harassing you, following you, or threatening you, record everything: times and places, messages, and photos. You may need them for court appearances, and some day down the road, you can write about your experience.

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Andrea Reynolds is a septuagenarian with about thirty how-to books under her belt. Her new project is APlacetoWrite.org, which she hopes to leave as a safe place to write for writers like her who have experienced threats of harm for writing.

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