The images used in this post are excerpted from several blog feeds and used under Fair Use guidelines to illustrate my narrative. The original, complete screenshots are available on request)
In the spring of 2011, I resigned to believing Affairs Valentino was ruined as far as marketing it to publishers. As Ms. Pickford was then a small indie publisher, I decided to let her put it into print and be done with it.
Bret opened more hit blogs and e-mailed me threats of death and gory descriptions of my corpse.
(excerpt from e-mail sent to me from David Bret - 2011)
Bret was also somehow privy to a great deal of information which was being passed on to him.
Included in his vocabulary of images and themes targeting me were: the persistent taunting image of a Kit Kat candy bar (based on an obscene post he made about me), images of old women and tattoos and references to my death.
In June, he posted I was involved in a cocaine arrest. This was based on a case which had nothing to do with me and involved a woman in Texas, half my age, named Evelyn Zumaya. (At the time there were seven in the U.S.) Despite my informing him of this, he began calling me a “coke-head” and posting cans of coke. He also added this cocaine defamation to an International Movie Data Base page on me which he set up specifically to publicize the cocaine story.
Throughout 2011, The Fraud Files blog served as the “team's” central clearing house and there they posted and linked to each other's sites. On The Fraud Files they posted under aliases, but they tagged themselves as a group under their own names:
In May 2011, I sent the Affairs Valentino manuscript to Ms. Pickford to upload into book format. I was done. But I felt an obligation to finish the work for the people I worked with: the family of Valentino's manager George Ullman and his godfather Frank Mennillo.
The “team's” online abuse targeting me during the first months of 2011 consisted of many themes including their discovering and posting my new address and location in Turin. When they posted who I was living with, thanking their “contacts” I became paranoid. In every case their posts were laden with death imagery and claims I was homophobic.
Ms. Pickford's indie publishing LLC became the publisher of record for the first edition of Affairs Valentino. She left Los Angeles in May of 2011 and moved to Utah to be with her family.
She lost the case Terhune filed against her on a technicality as she had no legal representation. She missed a court appearance and a bench warrant was issued. As she left for Utah she owed Terhune $100,000, was broke, destitute and in ill health. Bret devoted a blog to,”Hala Pickford Down and Out in Burbank.”
Because of the bench warrant for her failure to appear in court, the team began to post headlines broadcasting we were both wanted by the police with criminal warrants out on us. This was all false and an effort to meld Ms. Pickford and I into one person. Here he also links directly to The Fraud Files site.
In Affairs Valentino, First Edition, I included an introduction I called, “A Forewarning”. I did so to explain the reasons for my awful online search which was flooded with outrageous lies and images. Before Ms. Pickford left for Utah, she uploaded Affairs Valentino on Amazon. I hoped the nightmare would be over with and I could have my life back.
In early June 2011, Affairs Valentino appeared on Amazon. As the “team” members began posting all of the same defamation used on their blogs on my book's sales page disguised as book reviews, I knew there was little chance to save my book. Their “reviews” reported I forged documents, invented facts and sources and repeated the lies I had warrants out on me and a criminal drug past. Within days the book's sales page was removed; with a notice from Amazon saying I should “work it out” with the “offended” parties.
By June they were hitting the book hard and recruiting attack bloggers who were really them. They spread the lie that I forged all of the documents I used for the book, that I had no sources and they called my well-documented book, “Pure Fiction”.
From then on both Terhune and Bret announced Affairs Valentino was banned and for a multitude of false reasons; claiming it was homophobic. Bret began sending more violent emails:
I contacted his local police in England and filed a report claiming he was stalking me. They served him with a non harassment order saying he could not contact me directly or write anything about me where I was forced to read it. Bret mocked that by posting how he had a “protector” in the police there.
It was then Bret posted my obituary with subsequent articles about my “death”
Tracy Terhune continued to pursue collection of his 100,000$ from Ms. Pickford in Utah. She was then living in hiding and hoping not to be found and by August of 2011, it was my opinion based on what they were posting online, that she was being hunted.
Terhune began interjecting Affairs Valentino into his legal processes against Ms. Pickford . She published several other author's books so Terhune's focusing on Affairs Valentino was an insidious development to involve me legally in his case with her.
I fought back from my blog Affairs Valentino blogspot using any tactic to try and salvage the remnants of my reputation online.
I also went into hiding because of the “teams” death rhetoric, stalking, threats and their obsession with my location.
In the fall of 2011 we moved to Morocco and the daily bombardments from Bret and Terhune's blogs continued with Terhune then contributing from his blog “Valentino Wept”. I responded from a blog I opened just before my book was published which I called Affairs Valentino blogspot.
While we were in Morocco, David Bret was heavily involved in the case of a missing British girl, Madelaine McCann. Bret took the side that blamed the parents for the child's disappearance. I had no involvement in that case but those who were being attacked by Bret contacted me many times. I was also contacted by other people Bret attacked and this continues.
In the fall of 2011, I did check the McCann blogs and sites; obviously hoping they could stop Bret. At one point he was arrested and brought to his local police station on a charge of harassing one of the McCann's supporters. Nothing came of this arrest.
The McCann bloggers wrote how they contacted Scotland Yard because they believed the kidnapper was hiding the child in Morocco. When they posted the IP address of the person they reported as the kidnapper reading their blogs, I realized it was mine.
Terhune titled his hit blog against me Valentino Wept after the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus Wept. He was interjecting religious imagery and verbage to threaten and mock me. The menacing “tick tock tick tock” phrase also came into being as a way of frightening Ms. Pickford and myself into silence.
When a long post was published on the team's Fraud Files site in which the line “Angels Wept” was used, I suspected it was written by Terhune. The article offensively referred to my parent's names by their first names.
The awful impact of the Fraud Files site can not be underestimated. The Fraud Files was their clearing house and proxy. Meanwhile they continued to meld me as one unit with Ms. Pickford. The truth was we more often than not had little to do with each other, besides survive the attacks by Bret and Terhune.
In November of 2011, Bret threatened to open a hit blog about my ex-husband. He posted information about his employment, his employer's logo and I panicked. I closed my blog Affairs Valentino and went offline. This emboldened Terhune and Bret and my Google search worsened.
2011 was the year of the alias conversations, Bret using many aliases, Joey Jenkinson, Mrs. Trellis, Derek Alexander to name but a few.
In December of 2011, I fired Ms. Pickford and took Affairs Valentino out of print. The book I had just worked a decade of my life was dead at that point. But my husband Renato was determined to find a way to publish the book without leaving it open to their harassment and defamatory reviews.
For the next few months as I was off line, Ms. Pickford and Renato checked the awful sites which grew worse in my absence and captured hundreds more screenshots as evidence.
By 2011's end, Tracy Terhune began to post photos of stacks of folders he alleged were full of my defaming him. My blogs throughout this were consistent in my defense against their defamation. The “team” gaslighting claiming that I am the bully for responding became a major theme. Bret began posting how I was not only homophobic, Hitlarian but a cyber bully and a stalker. Exactly what they were doing to me.
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