STBXW has been impersonating me with my old email
I don't usually post on reddit, or interact much ever on the internet, so apologies if anything's unclear or worded strange. I tried to tell the whole story and ended up with way too many words. I'm also very scared of making this post because I'm afraid my STBXW will see it, as she uses Reddit sometimes, but I feel crazy right now and I could really use outside perspectives. I have no idea what subreddit to put this in, so I'm making a best guess.
-
Anyway.
My STBXW(f30) asked me(f33) for a divorce about two months ago in the middle of a big fight. We'd be married 10 years in December. For me, it came completely out of nowhere. Don't get me wrong, we have problems. We fight, a lot. She yells, a lot, and I tend to shut down and let my depression get the better of me most of the time. It isn't healthy for either of us. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back after two and a half months I realize that maybe she was right. Divorce is probably healthier for us, especially since she doesn't seem to want to fight for the relationship like I did.
Now, to fully explain what happened, we need to go way back.
She and I, we'll call her Gloria, married shortly out of high school. We both had abusive parents, so I guess we sort of...trauma bonded. We moved during covid from a small town to a big city to go to college together. This did isolate both of us, and we became our only meaningful social interaction for the next few years. This was probably not healthy or good but I don't think it was a particularly unique struggle. I think lots of people experienced this during covid, we just had it magnified from also being in a strange place.
Fast forward to last year, and Gloria reconnects with her old high school friend group. They begin having regular hangouts over discord, playing tabletop games and such. I am not explicitly uninvited from these but the vibe was very clear. She would lock herself in our bedroom to have these long calls with her friends and be visibly unfriendly or upset if I ever came in the room to get something. I didn't think much of it. She's a shy, private person, and these are friends of hers I'd never met. This was their thing, and that was fine. My feelings were hurt but I respected the unspoken boundary and would avoid the bedroom if she was inside alone with the door closed and I heard anything that sounded like voices. Our apartment is small and cramped, there's little privacy to be had. It made me feel a little lonely and unwanted since I'd still not managed to make friends after living in our new city for a few years, but it was fine. I was solidly trying to stay out of her way.
At first it was just DnD nights, then it was talking to them on discord more than she talked to me. It hurt my feelings a little, but I was happy she was hanging with friends. I made some online friends through a game I play so I was talking to them, too, so it was fine. Maybe I should've seen it coming? I feel kind of stupid.
Her friends tell her in late February that her old best friend a few states over, let's call her Debbie, was being thrown a surprise birthday party. These friends paid for Gloria's plane ticket to come, since our money is super tight and neither of us could afford just flying to another state for a birthday party(or so I assumed?). So my STBXW Gloria flies out for two days to go to this birthday party. I drive her to the airport, say goodbye, and tell her to send me lots of photos of what this city I've never been to looks like.
She doesn't. She sends like, one? She actually doesn't text back much at all. I work both days she's gone so I don't get much in terms of chores done. When she gets back, she blows up on me over it, yells for a few hours about everything I've ever done wrong and some new things she'd never mentioned that I'd done wrong before that I don't actually remember, and tells me she wants a divorce. She says some very mean things in the middle of this, I cry a lot, I apologize a lot. I don't say much, I mostly just stand there as she yells at me.
This all hits me like a truck. I didn't expect it. I was already going into the motions of washing dishes and tidying the kitchen for dinner when she blew up on me.
I spend a few days begging her to let me try, since she said I was the reason this was happening. She says okay, and I try so hard to make everything right. I dial up the niceness, start reading up on how to improve in the areas I needed to, I clean more.
Then she tells me she left a bunch of stuff at Debbie's place. Okay. Cool. She makes plans to fly out to go grab it roughly...two weeks after the first visit? On the inside I'm like....isn't that a waste of hundreds of dollars? Just mail it? But she also obviously wants to see her friends again. So I drive her to the airport, say goodbye and she flies off to another state. She does not give me a hug goodbye because she's in a hurry. This hurts my feelings but it's okay.
She's only supposed to be gone five days, March 19th to March 24th. Tuesday March 24th rolls around, I am texting her, excited to see her again, asking when she lands so I know when to leave to pick her up. She spends most of the day ignoring me, then says she rescheduled her flight to Thursday so she could land in a closer airport and not the major city airport she flew out of. I'm disappointed and sad, but fair. No one likes that major airport she flew out of and I certainly didn't want to go back there either.
For the whole of the 24th her responses are sporadic and she mostly ignores me. I send her things like 'hows the day going? did you do [insert activity she'd mentioned]? I miss you! Excited to see you!' I ask her to call me later that night because at that point I'd started getting really lonely and sad alone in the apartment. She did, eventually, but barely talked to me, talked super quiet like she didn't want anyone to hear her, then hung up in the middle of the conversation.
She didn't respond the rest of the night. She actually almost stopped responding entirely the rest of the trip and was rescheduled again to Friday. I sent photos of the garden, bugs, told her about my day.
Eventually she got back home, then was in the hospital for a uti-turned-kidney-infection. She did not want me at the er intake so I waited in the waiting room. I wonder about this now. Even then I had a horrible, sinking suspicion. Deep inside all I could think is...did whoever she was with give her that?
Two weeks pass with little happening. I go to an event without her because she does not have a ticket to it, have the most fun I've had in literal years. When I get home I immediately fall into a bad depression because she sits me down, literally the next day, and tells me that she spent the trip kissing someone else. Kissing Debbie, her old friend. She tells me this because "it'll be easier if you're angry." I cry for the rest of the night and she keeps saying, as if confused, "why aren't you mad at me?" because all it did was crush me. I then cry for the rest of the week.
Fast forward to this weekend. I am to drive a long way alone on the highway to look at houses with my parent, who is buying a house for me, him, and my sibling to live in. Gloria is supposed to live with us as well, at this point in time. After everything, we aren't really getting along or speaking. She has started quietly sleeping on the couch of her own choice, and I sleep alone in bed and cry a lot.
The day before I leave, Gloria leaves. She spends the night before in the bedroom on a discord call with Debbie, packs her things, goes to work, then flies out to...somewhere. I realize halfway through the day as I'm preparing for my long drive that her stuff is gone. When I confront her she says she's going to her grandparents and didn't tell me because she thought I was going to react poorly. I, predictably, react poorly to this, because I love her grandparents and why would I care if she went to see them? I do not believe her.
-
This is where I should pause to mention an additional piece of this whole story.
So, at some point in the past, I don't know when, at least a year ago, maybe more, I was looking for something that I also don't remember. I ended up looking through her nightstand for it. I found a drawer filled with sex toys I had never seen before. I kept this to myself, left it alone, and figured hey, if she wanted to keep stuff like that private, I wasn't going to pry.
After her second visit, she returned with a jar of handmade little paper stars. She said they were decorations at an event she went to with her friends, that they were piled on tables and when the event ended she and her friends just filled their pockets with them. I literally thought nothing of it until i found one sitting on the dresser and accidentally spilled water on it. While trying to dry it, guilty I'd ruined one of her souvenirs, it dissolved and there were handwritten words on the inside of the paper strip.
"It will be magical, no matter what kind of wedding we have."
I freak out. That's not the sort of thing a decoration would have written on the inside. I find another one, open it. It says something similar, but unfortunately I only took a photo of one to confront her with and I can't remember the wording. Nauseous, I checked the nightstand drawer of secret sex toys and there was a huge pile of unfolded paper stars, all with handwritten love notes on them.
I confronted Gloria over text as I got ready for work and we fought, I was absolutely livid and asked her straight: how long have you been cheating on me?
She never actually answered the question. She just dodged it by wanting to speak to me in person instead of through text and giving me a weak story about how the stars were really old and a gift from her friend Debbie who was in love with her in high school but they never worked out, and how she opened one or two, realized what was inside, and didn't open the rest. I only knew this was a lie because I knew about her secret nightstand drawer, but I didn't bring this up because I didn't want to invade her privacy by mentioning her collection of probably expensive private sex toys.
Alright. Unpause.
-
When she packed her bag and left to 'go to her grandparents', guess what drawer was empty? If you guessed her secret sex toy drawer, you win! I checked it as soon as she said she couldn't tell me she was leaving to go see her grandparents because I'd get upset. Why would I ever be upset that she was visiting her grandparents, who I also love? I'd be sad, maybe, but I would never be mad or argue about it. I'd probably suggest meeting up because they live only a few hours from where I was gonna be with my parent.
(actually, that's probably why)
I tell her I wouldn't be mad about her grandparents, multiple times, and she ignores it, instead tells me I'm being paranoid and making up scenarios, so I counter by telling her I don't believe that she's visiting her grandparents at all because she doesn't even like her grandmother buying her dinner, no less buying her a plane ticket, and if she really was seeing her grandparents, she would've just told me. (and also who brings a drawer of dildos to their grandparents house!)
This turns into a massive argument that only ends when I crumble and start apologizing.
I go on my drive and have a nice weekend with my parent and find a house. (yay!)
During this trip, she uses my Doordash to send food not to her grandparents, but to Debbie's house a few states away. I am not surprised at this point. I don't even mean to bring it up, but when she mentions hanging out with relatives I tell her to stop lying and just admit she's in [insert state].
She stops responding at this point. I send her a screenshot of the doordash order, then change my doordash password so she has to use her own. My texts stop saying delivered around 8pm so I assume she blocked me. I admit to losing my temper and sending a few petty, angry texts and emails(since if she blocked me, at least I know she wouldn't block my email too.). It was immature and nasty of me and I regret it. However I refuse to regret being angry at all though.
(For the record, I didn't just send angry emails, I also sent photos of animals and a photo of us that showed up on the floor of my car, slid out from under a seat that I must've missed while cleaning it. Not just anger.)
While changing my doordash password I change my email password, too. Just on a feeling. I then try to change the password on my email's old, never used, backup email.
It will not let me. It keeps asking for a code from her phone. I get frustrated. I can't change any of the security features of my email. It keeps asking for more codes. Then I see two read emails on the front page: one in February as a security notification about my main email's password being changed, and another from March 2nd. It was a recovery code to get back into my main email.
I freak out.
Before all of this, I didn't care. She knows all my passwords to everything. Hell, she knows my bank account password. I never knew any of her passwords to anything, but I trusted her with my life. We used to share a phone before my sister got me mine so of course there were no real boundaries.
Yet here I was looking at proof that I changed my password as a way to put some distance between us after she said she wanted a divorce, and she circumvented that to get back into it.
I have proof I could not have read this email in March. Late last year, my laptop got dropped and broke. My sister bought me a new one and at the same time bought me a new phone. I have never signed into this email on these new devices and have the "new sign in on [device]" emails this month to prove it. This email is well and truly gathering dust, but because of the temporarily shared phone and apple id situation, it was still on her phone.
I tell her to get out of my email and spend the night in my hotel bashing my head against the 'change password to enter code I can't see' wall. I change my main email's recovery email as a stopgap.
She eventually responds to me on Monday, while I'm driving back. She's very, very angry about me calling her a coward for blocking her and the angriest of the four one sentence emails I sent over the two days: "blocking me only makes me angrier just so you know". Like, I regret sending it. I did send it angry at 1am. I will admit I shouldn't have said that, it made the situation worse.
We argue a lot, she tells me her grandmother wants her to get a restraining order against me. She says the four emails and like, two angry texts I sent are not a normal way to respond to someone who's blocked them, no matter what. She insists she is not in my email.
I agree. At the end of the night, laying in bed, I send this:
"I’m still really angry but this isn’t healthy for either of us. I’m overreacting and not expressing anything but anger. I’m going to block your number to cool off and so I can’t keep the fight going.
If something happens email me. I’ll keep an eye on my email. I’ll unblock you thursday morning. I’ll set a timer. I won’t forget and I’m not doing it out of spite or anger I genuinely think if we keep interacting it will be unhealthy and make things worse. I have the next few days off work and I’ll clean the apartment and try not to dwell on my anger. I’m sorry I spent two days being angry and passive aggressive. I didn’t intend the photo of us to be a guilt trip I was alone in my car after saying goodbye to dad in [location], found it under the seat, and got really sad. It was still functionally a guilt trip. I genuinely feel like I’m heading into a mental breakdown over the divorce and I don’t know how to keep myself on an even keel. I’m going to try harder to do so."
I block her.
But, I am still angry she refuses to admit anything. She won't admit she went to see Debbie, she won't admit the stars, she won't tell me how long she was cheating. I'm angry every argument is like arguing at a wall, where I say something like "who lies about their grandparents? that's so messed up" and she says something like "You’re actually so fucking self centered it’s insane". I'm also angry she got back into my email without asking.
I start digging through emails, through google drive. Trying to find evidence of things she accuses me of that I don't remember. Doing this, I notice she is not logged out of her email on my phone. I know you're not supposed to go in people's emails. I know this. But all I could think was why did she lock me out of my email?
At this point I really regret having so many of these arguments where we open our chests and pour out all our hurts and frustrations and pain in text form, because during my digging, I found out that she was using my old email to send gross, abusive messages to herself. The same day I was sending her happy texts, excited to see her that day. March 24th. The day her flight was rescheduled.
I took screenshots of all the emails, emailed them to myself for proof they exist, and then told her not to come home. I have changed every password for everything I can think of. I told her to give me back my email and turn off the two step verification to her phone and even though she says in the email chain "I don't even know how to do that" in the middle of the argument I tried to login and suddenly it was connected to MY phone number instead.
She has completely backed off arguing with me as soon as I told her I had proof I didn't send them, was willing to call a lawyer, and just wanted to sign the divorce papers and never speak to her again.
-
I feel like it's impossible to tell this story without including examples of what my texts that day were and then examples of what the emails were. So, here's an imgur link.
These are not the worst or grossest emails that she sent. There are worse, more sexually explicit ones. There were also snippets of things I actually said through previous long email chains of us working through our feelings and problems with the divorce, taken out of context and sandwiched between disgusting things I would never say in a million years. They don't even sound like me. They sound like an abusive love interest in a wattpad fic. Going backwards in time, they cut off at 3pm but the wording of it implied there had been more that she had potentially deleted.
-
TL;DR: She's been probably cheating for a while now and has been using my email to send fake abusive emails to herself and sending them to god knows who. She has had access to all of my passwords to everything digital for ten years.
-
I am now really freaked out. I'm concerned about what she's been pretending to say as me. I'm terrified of who she may have shown these fake emails to, or how long she has been doing this. I'm in such disbelief this is happening that I keep having to look at the new device sign in emails to prove to myself I didn't have some sort of evil alter ego who took over my body and sent the emails while I was literally just...being so normal that day. Literally nothing feels real right now.
I don't know what to do other than not ever speak to her again.
I will have to, realistically.
We have had terse interactions of little words through email about how we'll need to sign divorce papers, and how she wants all of the furniture in the apartment. She still refuses to admit she sent the emails. She's, understandably, locked me out of her email so I can't dig for more and she's definitely deleted them by now. Unfortunately, she deleted any record of them from my old email as well, and there's no way to get them back with a gmail account.
Should I be worried? What the fuck do I do at this point? I still love her so much. I'm so scared. I can't stop crying. I'm so worried that all of the ten years we were together was a lie. I'm not used to being alone, either, which also sucks. We were inseparable before all this happened, despite the arguing and yelling and fighting.
Edit: Cleaned up the imgur link with a better gallery. Added a TL;DR