Many Years in Captivity (the story of Stacey)

This whole Dr. Christopher Johnson scam reminds me of a person I used to go to school with. We were “sort of friends” from Grade 5 into junior high. Stacey (born "Anastasia" – but that’s not her real name) held some kind of strange social power that meant you were privileged to be in her friendship orbit. And she did have a sort of superficial attractiveness, though she was no beauty. But she ACTED beautiful (Meghan Markle comes to mind) and seemed to draw people to her like a magnet. Boys fell over each other to date her.  Stacey always got what she wanted, always won every argument, always got the highest grades in everything, and won lots of awards, which she received as if she was being crowned Miss America.

(Just to clarify: people have asked me if the images I used here are of Stacey. No, they're of me as a child  and adolescent. I just happen to like them.)

Still, there was something about her that everyone knew. She was dishonest. She was known to cheat on exams, and teachers knew about it and looked the other way. She stole other girls’ boyfriends. She even stole items from people’s lockers, and if you found out, you were supposed to feel flattered that she wanted your stuff. It was an honor to see her walking down the hall wearing one of your sweaters.

 After Grade 10 we went to different high schools, and I didn’t see her any more. Then a few years ago, I was on a Facebook page about the history of Chatham, Ontario where I grew up. It amazed me to see all sorts of familiar names in the comments, people I had not seen in years and years, including

.  . . you  guessed it! It was Stacey.

Her Facebook page was very interesting. Most of the photos featured her in elaborate yoga poses and modeling glamorous eveningwear. BUT, there was a strange subtitle on her home page banner that I didn’t understand. It said, “Enjoying life after many years in captivity.”

I thought, hmmm, does she mean she had a bad marriage, or what? It was hard to believe she’d stay in a relationship where she didn’t get everything she wanted. But there was more. There she was in a photo posing with a very familiar-looking guy, someone I knew from way back in Grade 5, announcing that they were engaged to be married! She included a description of how they met in elementary school in a special class for gifted children with Mensa-level IQs. Well, not quite – I was in that class, and it was one of those educational experiments of the 1960s in which every student learned at their own pace and only studied subjects they were interested in. The class was total anarchy and nobody learned much of anything, but Stacey thrived in it and soon went to the head of the class.

By this time I wasn’t surprised to see the names of all  sorts of people I had gone to school with in the comments, all congratulating her on her engagement, praising her for how beautiful and youthful she looked, etc. Somehow she was still attracting heaps of attention and praise.

I found all this fascinating and followed her for a while, though I did not contact her, feeling wary. Well, strange things began to happen. More and more of her material was being deleted from Facebook. The fiancé disappeared. Soon there was very little left at all except a name and one photo. Then even THAT was gone, along with the “many years in captivity”.

But then an even stranger thing happened. She popped up on YouTube.

She only had 11 subscribers and 4 videos, but I knew it was her by the familiar locations (she was evidently still in Chatham) and the sound of her voice. Then something even more weird happened. I began to see duplicate channels in her name. I counted four of them altogether, and they were virtually identical, with barely any subscribers and only a few very similar videos.

But why would anyone do this? Why would anyone set up multiple YouTube accounts with hardly any content?

It only made sense to me when the Dr. Christopher Johnson scam came up, and I saw that he too had several identical accounts with single-digit content. He seemed to be using them as a base for his scams, closing one and opening another if he got into trouble or was reported. Then I remembered “Enjoying life after many years in captivity”, and suddenly realized that Stacey must have done serious time for something. It was literal captivity, I think. At some point the law caught up with her, though I can’t imagine what she had done.

It could be she’s still trying to be that same charismatic, slippery character she was back in high school, running scams from her multiple YouTube channels at the age of 70. I guess today we’d call her a narcissist, but back then there was no name for it. I do remember crying in Grade 5 and my mother asking me what was the matter, and I tearfully said, “Stacey doesn’t like me any more.” Your self-esteem rose and fell according to your status in her friendship orbit. There is too little content in her videos to determine what her life is like today. but I’m glad I didn’t try to contact her. God knows what I might have gotten tangled up in.

UPDATE! I actually did find pictures of Stacey in the Chatham Daily News archive, but decided not to post them. But it’s definitely her, and I believe she has had a lot of work done.