Slings and arrows of outrageous (mis)fortune: A "Shaun Story" from Canada, 2011-2012

I met Shaun in Montreal at uni, at the beginning of the fall term (September 2011).  Now, he actually was enrolled in our program at the time, and for the few months that he was in my life he was employed – so it seems that in the long list of women he’s conned, I might have been one of the few that he actually never conned for money.  (In fact, the only thing I loaned to Shaun and never saw again was a USB key with class notes and my own research for a huge project that we’d been pairedtogether to do.)  That being said, in light of other stories I’m fairly certain now that had I stuck around, I might have eventually ended up in the same boat of moneylending and further emotional manipulation.

Before I go any further I must mention that I am currently 24, and when I met Shaun I had just turned 21 and was, as you already know, still a student in an undergraduate program.  I feel this is extremely important to point out because although we were never officially involved romantically, being some twelve or thirteen years my senior clearly did not give him pause on the whole “manipulation” issue, and so I must stress the fact thatany woman is in peril should she cross his path.  

While he may not have wreaked havoc on my bank account and while I may have extracted myself from his life before he could totally ruin mine, Shaun nevertheless did try to singlehandedly sabotage both my social and academic reputations once he clued into the fact that I was no longer going to tolerate him, let alone any more of his bullshit lies, excuses, and sob stories.  I had gut instinct kicking in fairly soon, in addition to the fact that around the time that I met him, I also made friends with another girlwho actually knew his family.  And once she noticed I was beginning to get a little cozy with Shaun, she stepped in and set me straight.  

I’ll admit that I was, at the beginning, rather taken with Shaun.  Though we never actually dated, we did hang out quite a lot and we did a lot of texting and E-mailing back and forth in between actually hanging out.  Reading through the lists previously posted on this blog, I found myself remembering moments in which he’d told me several of those very same lies.  He’d lost his fiancée and daughter in a car accident.  He was a practicing pediatrician at the children’s hospital (and somehow managed to go to classes and hold down a part-time job at a local burger joint).  He grew up in Northern Ireland (whatever his passport might say now, I can say in utter confidence that unfortunately, Canada can claim his natal citizenship...did I mention he also started talking with that accent out of the blue while still livingin Canada?!).  He had some kind of huge farm in Northern Ireland and was building the house of his dreams – but was constantly depressed by it all at the same time because his aforementioned deceased daughter would never be able to enjoy with him the fruits of his labors.  He had a dying aunt who was due to go any day now, and therefore he couldn’t possibly be expected to show up to class or project meetings.  

I also heard some that haven’t yet been listed here, such as ---

--- he was a first-stringer for that year’s rugby team at our university (when I went to verify that online and saw no mention of him on the team homepage, he told me that he’d been a late addition and the webmaster hadn’t been able to add his profile in yet…nope, it was never added!)

--- he set up a FaceBook event page for a non-existent match tour for a rugby team, of which he was, naturally, the captain

--- he had a cousin who worked for Aer Lingus who got him amazing deals on flights to Ireland all the time, and that for our project if I really wanted to he’d be able to fly me back to Ireland to do field research (he also pulled this one out of the hat for another project group in a different course that I wasn’t enrolled in at the time)

--- he and some cousins had a timeshare on a chalet in the Swiss Alps and could fly over there for a ski holiday on any weekend at the drop of a hat
--- he was going to change his name to "Eoighan McGurnaghan"

And when all of those lies were suddenly not working on me anymore thanks to the intervention of my aforementioned friendin October 2011, he started trying to get to me at the expense of my social reputation and my academic career.  Mutual acquaintances and friends at the local pub with whom we enjoyed several pints would come up to me when I made an appearance alone, and ask me if I could confirm or corroborate tall tales that Shaun had told them.  When I in turn asked what made them think I could do so, more than one told me that he’d named me as somebody who could vouch for his word because I knew him and trusted him well enough to be with him.  Though this did minimal damage (only a few of these mutual acquaintances actually liked him, let alone believed him) to my social reputation, it was still unsettling to come to the knowledge that I had been known as “Shaun’s girl” when in reality I had never been so in the first place.  

I mean, why would I want to be, when only a few weeks after meeting me he started his “two-faced” act?  Whether publicly or privately, he alternated between making me feel on top of the world to making me feel like his own personal doormat.  In front of my female friends he would act like a cavalier flirt, and afterwards would text me about how he didn’t really mean it – but that he also thought that this friend or that friend in particular was pretty hot and he wouldn’t mind having a tumble with them, either.  (Seriously.)  In front of my guy friends, he was still utterly pompous and arrogant:  his comments and stories and insights brought the proverbial male pissing contest(even when no such contest was currently present at table) to a whole new level of absurdity.  

The claim on his part – that of me being “his” girl – leeched into my academic life. A few weeks into term he started pulling the “dying aunt” card on me, alternating that between “flying to Ireland for field research” – all to explain why he was suddenlyAWOL from lectures.  Department policy in our program clearly stated that a certain amount of absences from certain lectures would result in being removed from the class roster, and that such action in turn could result in full termination from our program – barring personal emergency, bereavement, or some similar legitimate incident.  Since he’d been going on about the aunt at death’s door or flying off to Ireland for approved research trips, I figured he would have told our professors as well.

Turns out, he hadn’t:  in November 2011, I was informed of his expulsion from our program by the department head.  For the class where we had a project to do together, I was left holding the bag for the entire project at the risk of losing my grade – and all this transpired three weeks before the deadline.  Another professor called me in for a meeting in which I was made aware of the fact that when he had E-mailed Shaun to inform him of the change in his enrolment status, Shaun’s reply had implicated me as having some part in why his “legitimate” reasons for absences had never been made known to the faculty.  I never mentioned it to Shaun, but when he did finally tell me that he’d been removed from the roster for “stupid” reasons I told him that the syllabus had clearly stated that consecutive absences over a prolonged period of time would result in exactly this, and that the professor who got the ball rolling on his expulsion from the program was entirely in the right.  His response was to accuse me of being a brown-nosing overachiever who wasn’t quite clever enough to get the kind of grades I had –and to state that I must be sleeping with the aforementioned professor because it was the only way to explain my grades in that class and my loyalty to the prof.

I didn’t see or hear from Shaun at all between the beginning of December 2011 and mid-January 2012.  I ran into him briefly then, and received an E-mail from him the next day stating that I had come off as “distant and cold” and that he “didn’t like that.”  I didn’t hear from him at all again until mid-March, when out of the blue he asked me why I hadn’t told him that my father had passed away.  I’m guessing that FaceBook had assisted him in gleaning that nugget of information, as I hadn’t had any direct or personal contact with him at all.  

The last I heard of Shaun from anyone in the circle of our common acquaintances was sometime in early 2013, when I received a phone call from one of them warning me that Shaun might be back in Montreal, and that since leaving the city in 2012 had gotten into a relationship where the girlfriend had become suspicious enough to actually start digging into his life and personal affairs.  During that phone call I was made aware that Shaun had once called up several of his Montreal acquaintances demanding they be “references” for this girl so he could confirm his story to her; insofar as I know, the most anyone said was that he’d been in Montreal and they had met him on one or two occasions.  That was the very last I heard of this guy until coming across this blog via a friend who’d had the misfortune of being on his project team in a different class the same year I’d been subjected to the same. 

As you can tell, my “Shaun Story” differs from previous ones in that I wasn’t conned out of money, wasn’t saddled with him leeching off at my flat for weeks on end, and wasn’t even romantically involved with him.  Nevertheless, even without any of these things happening to me I was still tricked into believing him for a time – just long enough, really, for him to get really evil, mean, and nasty when I made it known that I no longer trusted his word or his integrity.  The moral at the end of any “Shaun Story” is that he has nothing to offer anyone that’s worth any kind of trust, that his word is worthless, and that his integrity is nonexistent.