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Man gets 7 years for ruining ex-girlfriend’s life online

Bruce Stimon, 47, listed his ex-girlfriend and her teen daughter on prostitution sites, got her fired from her job, and more in a year-long campaign of harassment. 

 

Chase Hoffberger

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 7, 2013   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 1:47 am CDT

A Massachusetts man was sentenced to seven years in prison after spending the better part of the past year tormenting his ex-girlfriend online, according to a WLJA report.

Boston native Bruce Stimon, 47, met Arlington, Va., resident Soraida Hicks on an airplane in 2011 and they began dating long distance shortly thereafter. Stimon showed Hicks with gifts during that time, including a new iPhone, which he put on his own family plan—a move that would allow him to access information belonging to her friends and contacts.

Then he used that contact information to tell Hicks’ friends that she’d contracted an STD.

Hicks broke up with Stimon shortly after finding out about his antics, but the tormenting continued. Before long, Hicks started receiving phone calls from adult men in northern Virginia who were looking for an escort. She looked online and found that her name and face had started to show up on escort sites around the Web.

What’s more, Stimon had filled out some of her profiles with the phone numbers of her employer and direct supervisor. She was fired from her bank job just a few days before her daughter’s Twitter followers were made privy to a video of Hicks and Stimon having sex.

“It was devastating,” Hicks’ daughter told WJLA. “I would go into the bathroom stall and just cry and would come back to class and act like everything was okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, and the abuse didn’t stop. Stimon turned to porn sites to advertise Hicks and her daughter as a “mother and daughter” sex package. Eager readers started showing up at their doorstep a few days later.

Stimon’s scheming went on for months before police could catch him. It took his venturing from Boston down to the Hicks’ Arlington neighborhood in an effort to slash his ex-girlfriend’s tires to get the man arrested.

Hicks, who’s been active in her efforts to get her name removed from the porn sites, reports that she’s only had limited success.

Photo via NewsworldsUK/YouTube

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*First Published: Feb 7, 2013, 4:44 pm CST