Lee Stobby,
On May 5th 2017 without my consent you exposed me to a potentially deadly disease, according to what you told me on May 7th 2017 just as we were about to hook up again. Ever since then my life has never been the same.
Photo by : Anjo Clacino On Unsplash
You were there. You were clearly pretending to not recognize me despite the fact we were standing five to ten feet from each other for a long time. When I eventually approached you after saying your name loudly several times, we spoke and were cordial. I saw you in public around West Hollywood once or twice afterwards and we were cordial but not friends.
I suffered a TBI in 2015 and my dog suffered in that I couldn’t play with her or walk her as much. I reached out to you and you kindly agreed to bring your dog over for playdates thus rekindling a platonic friendship.
Cinco de Mayo 2017 is when you exposed me, from what you told me, but that wasn’t the first troubling behavior I’d seen around you on a Cinco de Mayo.
We had previously hung-out May 5th 2016, when you invited me to the Abbey where your friend’s friends and/or coworkers had bottle service. The guy paying for it owned some sort of construction company in the South Bay I think, and was openly doing cocaine at the table (I don’t think he was the only one; I declined when he offered it to me). You were hitting on/getting handsy with a Canadian twink who was visiting with his friend.
When I arrived your hand was on his thigh, so I assumed that you were dating. I asked if he was your boyfriend and you laughed it off and said no, they were tourists and you had just lured them over with the offer of free bottle service, from what you told me.
The situation was clearly a shit show with how coked out the guy paying for everything was (you inadvertently sat on his bag of coke which hid it from security when they checked on our table) and how drunk some of the coworkers were.
Photo by : Jeff Tumale On Unsplash
I warned the friend of the twink you were hitting on, (who was giving me Vancouver restaurant recommendations so I could avoid the black-out drunk middle-aged office manager from the coked out guy’s company ranting to me about what a bad person she was, as she had been doing FOR A WHILE) that things were taking a crazy turn and they may want to go. He agreed and thanked me, and got his friend away from you. The bottle service ran out and you wanted to leave. I waited with you for your uber/lyft then went home. I should have seen this whole scenario as a red flag, but I saw it as the start of a tradition of us hanging out on Cinco De Mayo. I was so dumb.
We continued to be friends after that, hanging out every so often. You were even nice enough to watch my dog in September 2016, when I had a dog-sitter fall through at the last minute before my annual trip with my mother to celebrate my brother during the anniversary of his disappearance and death (an anniversary that this year you tried to leverage in an attempt to get me to sign an NDA for your sex crimes against me). It makes my skin crawl that I left my dog alone with you and introduced you to my mother.
Flashfoward to 2017. I was in the midst of attempting a career transition and had been studying for the LSAT for months. Additionally, I had been sick and had lost dozens and dozens of pounds, and I was in poor health and the doctors didn’t know why I was still losing weight. But one major factor in this is that I had had pancreatitis as a result of Truvada. As a result I wasn’t currently on Truvada (an HIV preventative). You knew all of this. We were friends and hung-out regularly, usually to watch Rupaul’s Drag Race at Flaming Saddles. One night (April 15th 2017) when we were meeting for it I texted that my mom would be with me because she was in town for my health stuff.
Prior to that, you and I also discussed my health situation extensively when we went to brunch on March 26th 2017 with my friend Tom who was visiting.
We also discussed your trip to the 2017 Berlinale film festival, and you raved about your visits to seedy Berlin gay bars where men and women were “throwing themselves” at you. You said that you had brought your “model” assistant Derrick with you to be your bodyguard.
I recall that Tom asked you if you “got laid” in Berlin, and I remember you freezing up a bit (I think it was the only time during brunch you weren’t talking) then getting quiet and saying no. This contradicts what you later told me (in the wake of you confessing to exposing me), that during your trip to the Berlinale film festival you performed oral sex on a man and weren’t honest about your status (I don’t think you got his name but I don’t recall for certain).
If memory serves, when Tom and I were in my car after we left the restaurant he mentioned that your story about the people throwing themselves at you didn’t add up at all (Tom knows Berlin well).
He insisted they were likely prostitutes (and/or trying to rob you) which you had insisted they weren’t. Tom said you were either lying or the most oblivious and lucky not to get robbed person on the planet (I’m paraphrasing). At the time I just figured you were naive about things like that; I now sadly know better and firmly think that Tom’s instinct that you were lying was the correct one. My experiences with you in May 2017 prove that you were far from naive. I was the naive one.
Photo by : Paweł Czerwinski On Unsplash