Shared Story:
Abbie

Trigger Warning
The following screenshots contain mentions of suicide, self harm & grooming.

Hello, my name is Abbie, and this is my story.

As much as she will claim otherwise, the following is all true and in no way misinformation, disinformation or manipulated, and hopefully the screenshots above prove this too.

In October 2021, fourteen year old me (I am now currently seventeen) decided to follow one of my favourite creators on TikTok. This person was Amelia Connolly. She followed me back, and almost immediately started messaging me. I was amazed and starstruck, as any kid would have been, but those initial messages should have been the first red flag. She immediately started telling me that I was beautiful. 

Then, not too long after, we started doing Instagram lives together to play Roblox. Usually Retail Tycoon 2, if anybody cared for that detail. Instagram kept having issues so we decided to switch to FaceTime. So we exchanged phone numbers, and used that instead.

And then the messages started. It was nice at first, but this is how these things go. Building that trust is always the first step to something sinister, but I was too young and naive to believe otherwise despite some of my friends rightfully warning me.

Eventually, she asked me to date her. And I agreed. She then started flirting with me a lot and she used a lot of sexual language, and taught me a lot of things relating to sex that I should not have known at that age. She told me about how AMAB people pleasure themselves, for example.

She also told me that my (actually really kind and loving family) were abusive, and that I needed “saving” from them. She elaborately planned for me to move to Scotland with her the day I could, and she would count down to it almost daily. I felt pressured, and like I couldn’t escape it. She tol me to get my GCSE results via email or post and to not go back to my school to collect them. Thankfully I broke up with her before any of this could happen.

One time she also got into my google account without my consent. I fell asleep whilst connected to TeamViewer, which we used to watch YouTube with, and she took the opportunity to reverse-engineer the chrome password manager, to find my passwords and then use them to log into my account and snoop through my files. When I woke up the next morning, I saw that she had recorded a lot of what she had found and posted it on her Instagram story. She said the whole experience was “fun” and “like a puzzle”.

On my 15th birthday I went to the theatre with my best friend. When Amelia saw photos of me and her posted by my mum on Facebook, she immediately started asking who the girl was and if she would “steal” me from Amelia. I didn’t reply to her messages as I just wanted to spend time with my family, but Amelia was having none of it. We used Apple’s Find My (location sharing feature) to track each others’ location, and she set up a notification for herself so she would be notified the second I got home. When I got home she messaged me frantically, asking why I had been ignoring her. 

On the 25th October we met up for the first time in person. She came to my house and we went bowling and to McDonald’s. In the McDonald’s car park, she asked if we could kiss. So I did. She slept over at my house from the 26th into the 27th, and on the morning of the 27th she woke me up by stroking my hair. When I got up, I was still half asleep and not fully aware of what was going on, and she was helping me to get dressed, and then I realised that I was stood, fully naked in front of her. She was sat on my bedroom floor and had her phone in her hands, and it was sort of angled towards my body. She could have indecent photos of me, but I can’t confirm it for sure. In November 2022 I went to the hospital for my leg pain, and I didn’t want to talk to her about it so I didn’t. I ghosted her for a few days. In retaliation, she faked her own death and made sure I was aware that she was “gone”. She wanted me to feel what she felt, apparently.

Later in November a YouTuber made a video about my story, feel free to watch it (and read my comment) here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ljy7e0PcGM On the 6th December 2022 I finally got enough courage to leave her. She always used to tell me that she “couldn’t survive” without me, and she’d frequently talk about killing herself whilst we were still dating (see above). When I left her I felt really guilty as I thought that she would then go and end her life as she talked about it enough to make me feel like she would actually do it. My story isn’t even exhaustive, there is so much more to it. I’ve intentionally left some things out because I am not comfortable sharing them yet. And thank you to everyone who has supported me, you know who you are, it means so so much. And thank you to everybody who took the time to read this. #WeFightForTruth