The thing about living in an apartment or renting a room is… you have to deal with other people.
Depending on how the building is laid out, it’s almost like living with strangers. If your next door neighbor accidentally starts a fire, your home could burn too. If the person above you has a flood, it’s very likely that you’ll be dealing with that problem as well.
Not to mention, what if your neighbors in this same building are jerks? Or they have 20 drunk people at their place for a party? Or they practice their drums at 3 am?
These are all things to consider, and you might not even be able to research all of this before moving in.
My guest today is Tiffany. She was in a different country, and she rented a room to live in. There were other rooms, and other people living in those rooms, and they were mostly nice. But there was one guy who was not so nice. And he was pretending to be the landlord.
Tiffany’s socials:
Her podcast on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/bittersweetlifepodcast/
Her podcast on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thebittersweetlifepodcast
Tiffany’s Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/tiffanyparksrome
Tiffany’s book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071HD869D
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/210
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
The thing about living in an apartment or renting a room is… you have to deal with other people.
Depending on how the building is laid out, it’s almost like living with strangers. If your next door neighbor accidentally starts a fire, your home could burn too. If the person above you has a flood, it’s very likely that you’ll be dealing with that problem as well.
Not to mention, what if your neighbors in this same building are jerks? Or they have 20 drunk people at their place for a party? Or they practice their drums at 3 am?
These are all things to consider, and you might not even be able to research all of this before moving in.
My guest today is Tiffany. She was in a different country, and she rented a room to live in. There were other rooms, and other people living in those rooms, and they were mostly nice. But there was one guy who was not so nice. And he was pretending to be the landlord.
Scott
You’re American, you’re in your mid-twenties back then, and you decide to move to Rome, Italy, and not just visit, but actually move there. Why do that?
Tiffany
Well, it was honestly a lifelong dream of mine to move to Italy and to live in Italy. Ever since I was a little girl, even before I ever visited Italy, I had this calling, I had this desire. I was just fascinated by Italian culture, the language, everything. I had some Italian blood, not a lot, but I had just enough to sort of use that as an excuse that my ancestral home was calling to me. I also studied opera as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Of course, opera is deeply connected to Italy. Italy is where opera was born. So that just fueled my passion for Italy even more so. I just knew that, one day, I would live there. It was kind of something that was deep inside of me. I knew that, eventually, it was just a matter of time.
So, when I got to a point in my life in which I didn’t really have a career going on, I didn’t have a good job, and I had broken up with a boyfriend– I didn’t have my own place I had been living with my boyfriend, so I was kind of all of a sudden completely untethered. I had nothing. I was done with school. Nothing was holding me to the States. And I said, “This is the moment. If I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it.” And so, I did it.
Scott
So you just moved there. What was your plan? Did you know anyone?
Tiffany
I knew a few people, I didn’t really have friends there. What I had was some relatives of my grandmother – some distant relatives, like third cousins. They were not close family members, but I did already know them because I had gone to visit. I had spent a considerable amount of time in Italy before I moved there, particularly in the summers. I had met and stayed with these Italian relatives, so I had a little foothold, I had someone I could stay with while I was looking for an apartment. They lived in Rome – they live just outside of the city – and I asked them if I could and they were happy to have me. Unfortunately – and this is another story that we’re not going to go into that relationship – that kind of soured my relationship with them. So I’m not in contact with them anymore, but I do have to thank them for putting me up for a couple of weeks though, when I first moved to Rome.
As far as a plan, I had no plan. Not only did I have no plan, I did not have the legal right to move to Italy. I was an illegal immigrant. When I moved to Italy, I had no papers. I did not have Italian citizenship through my family because it was too far back. I was not able to get Italian citizenship. I tried. I looked into it. I really thought, when I first moved there, that was how I was going to become legal, but it didn’t work out for me. So it’s not so easy today, 20 years later, to just move to Italy as an American and live there under the radar. It was something that a lot of people did 20 years ago, but today it’s not as easy.
Scott
How long can you stay before you’re considered illegally there?
Tiffany
You can stay three months with a tourist visa, which you don’t actually have to get a physical visa. It’s sort of implied that you can stay for three months as an American. It depends on the country you’re coming from.
Scott
Did you have any ideas for a job? What did you want to do there?
Tiffany
I had the hope at that time that I might, eventually, have an opera career. But as far as a practical job that I could do while I was finding my way living there, I was and still am technically a certified yoga instructor. So I thought, “Well, that’s something that I could probably find a place to work doing that,” and I eventually did do that, and I thought, “Well, I can always teach English. That’s what many expats from English-speaking countries fall back on.” They say, “Well, I’m a native English speaker, so there’s always demand for English lessons.”
Scott
You also needed a place to live. How did you go about searching for that?
Tiffany
It was so hard because it wasn’t like today where there was no social media 20 years ago. I think that Facebook came into being in 2007. This was 2004 when I moved and there was no social media. There was Craigslist, but Craigslist was not good for long-term rentals. It was really just sort of short-term things. So what you would do in Italy, in Rome, particularly, if you needed an apartment was there’s a newspaper. It’s basically just classified ads. You buy it. It’s called Porta Portese. Now, it exists online. At that time, you just had to buy the paper and you just go through the classified ads looking for apartments, and it’s very challenging if you (A) don’t know the neighborhoods that well, and (B) don’t speak the language that well. I did speak Italian when I moved here. I already spoke the language proficiently. So I was already a step ahead of many people when they move abroad, but it was still a big challenge to try to understand the abbreviated ads. But that was how I went about it. I did find a place to live. I found a couple of places to live those first few months because they didn’t really work out. I think I had three apartments in three months.
Scott
Oh, man. Okay. You were looking for a specific neighborhood. I know I’m going to say this wrong, but is it Trastevere?
Tiffany
That’s exactly right. Yes.
Scott
Oh, wow. Okay. Why were you going there? Why did you want to go there?
Tiffany
Well, Trastevere is a very quaint and charming neighborhood in Rome. It’s across the river from the main attractions of the city. So it’s very central. It’s definitely central Rome, but it’s being on the other side of the river. It’s dense in bohemian air. Think of the left bank in Paris. It’s just a little bit more working-class, or it was at one time a little bit more artsy, a little tiny bit less touristy, and it’s very popular with foreigners and residents because it has that quaint aspect. It’s very medieval. It didn’t get built up in the Baroque period in the 1600s to 1700s as much as the rest of the city because it was a more working-class neighborhood. Therefore, it’s much more medieval now, the buildings are much older. So when you wander around the neighborhood, it kind of gives you the feeling of being in a small Italian town, even though you’re in a capital city, if that makes sense. So a lot of foreigners like it because it answers their idea of what Italy should be. It’s a little bit, maybe, stereotypical, but it’s quaint and it’s charming and that’s why people love it.
What I was looking for, because of budget reasons, of course, was I was looking for a flatshare. I wasn’t looking to rent my own apartment. Also, because I didn’t know how long I was going to be there and I didn’t have any job yet, so I couldn’t just go and rent an apartment. So I was looking to rent a room in someone else’s apartment and I finally found what I thought was just the most amazing apartment, which I believe was a five-bedroom apartment. There was the “landlord” who said that he owned the apartment – come to find out he was just renting that apartment but he said he owned it and he was subletting the other rooms out to expats and it was very centrally located. It was a very modern, convenient apartment, so it was very popular. I remember there was an American guy living there and a German girl and a few other people.
Scott
And the landlord’s name?
Tiffany
Stefano.
Scott
Can you just describe him? Because he’s kind of the subject of our story today.
Tiffany
He was in his early 40s. He was short and a little chunky. He was balding, but he had a very disarming manner. He kind of seemed like the guy next door, just like every man, the Italian version of just kind of a harmless, nice guy, not somebody who’s going to be hitting on you, just kind of a harmless middle-aged man. He was a little bumbling. He was a little bit nerdy, not excessively nerdy, but he tended that way like somebody really into technology and stuff. Generally, harmless and innocuous is how he seemed
Scott
So you had sort of a good impression about him when you first met
Tiffany
I had a great impression of him. And he was kind of funny. He had a decent sense of humor. He’s not the type of person who’s going to make you collapse laughing but he was– charming is too strong of a word. I wouldn’t call him charming, but he definitely was friendly and really could put you at ease. I had found two previous apartments before moving in there. They were both just like neurotic Italian women who were just really, “Oh, don’t use that plate, don’t do this, and don’t drip water on the floor.” They were so impossible to live with. So I met this man who just seemed so easygoing like, “Okay, sure, the rent’s 500, but I’ll give it to you for 450. Sure, you’re a nice girl.” It just seemed oh my gosh, what a change. And the people who were living there all seemed so, so friendly. Yeah, I was so excited to move in.
He said, “I’m having a little bit of a cash flow problem right now. Would you pay me four months rent in advance, obviously in addition to a security deposit? I’ll give you the next two months free. I’ll tack on two months for free because right now I don’t have a lot of cash and I need some cash.” I remember mentioning this to my dad and my dad said, “I don’t think that sounds like a good idea. I don’t think you should do that.” And I didn’t listen to my dad. I had so little money at the time and I don’t remember if, by that point, I had a job, or maybe I did but it was just maybe a couple hours a week or something. I wasn’t bringing in really any money. So I thought, “Well, if I do this, then I’m set for six months. I don’t have to worry about paying rent for six months.” So I did it.
Scott
What was your first indication that there might be something not quite right with Stefano?
Tiffany
It took a while. I’ll be honest. There was definitely a honeymoon period where I was pretty happy and I probably was very naive. I look back and I think there was some kind of network in the house, like, internet network. Of course, things have changed now. So now, I’m thinking, “If it were today, he would have just given me the wifi code.” But this was 20 years ago, so the technology was different then and he took my computer and was like, “I’ll set you up. I’ll get you hooked up to the ethernet or whatever it was.” I should have been a little more wary of something like that because he put something in my computer or he got some kind of access to my computer, which of course I didn’t discover for a long time.
It took a couple of months and it wasn’t until I started to become really good friends with a couple of people in the apartment and he seemed to always want to be involved in our going out or having a glass of wine at home. These were people who were my age. We were in our twenties. He was nearly two decades older – not that it matters. I mean, I’m happy to spend time with people of all ages, but it just didn’t seem kind of weird. I did, but if there were any signs, I was probably ignoring them. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be comfortable. So I thought, “Well, everything’s okay.” It wasn’t really until my mom came to visit that things started to really come out
Scott
And your mom actually was able to live in the same building.
Tiffany
So it happened that she decided to come for an entire month – the month of April – and it happened to be that one of the rooms was vacant. People were moving in and out very frequently. Because we were all expats, some people only live in Rome for– they come for an experience. They stay for six months or they’re students or what have you. So there was an empty room and I said, “Well, you should rent this room. You don’t have to get a hotel or anything. You can just stay here.”
Scott
Yeah. And you’re at the same place. That’s super convenient.
Tiffany
Yeah, we’re at the same place. It was super convenient. The kind of weird thing was that the layout of the apartment was such that this bedroom was actually technically an antechamber. It was a room that leads into another room. There was no hallway between this room and Stefano’s room. To get to his bedroom, he had to walk through the bedroom where my mom was staying which, I mean, looking back, I can’t even believe my mom was okay with that.
Scott
That sounds super creepy.
Tiffany
Yeah, I think, at one point, I might have said, “Do you want to switch rooms with me? I’ll sleep in that room if you want, and you can sleep in my room.” And she said, “No, it’s okay.” My mom is surprisingly laid back about some things, so she was okay with it. This guy didn’t do anything overt at the beginning, so you couldn’t put your hand on anything, you couldn’t put your finger on anything. I’m sure that he knocked on the door. I’m sure he wasn’t walking in on her because that would have been outrageous. Right?
Scott
That’s a deal breaker right there, yeah.
Tiffany
Exactly. So he knew how to walk the line, he knew how to stay on the right side of respectability, and I think this is what seduced me into overlooking what was starting to slowly happen and what would eventually happen. This is the kind of thing that he would do and it started to become more and more frequent. At least, I started to notice it from that time when he would say something that would just kind of psychologically upset you – he said to my mom, “Oh, last night, I was going into my room and you were talking in your sleep and you were talking about me.” I mean, that kind of thing is just odd enough that it makes you feel weird. It kind of gives you this creepy feeling in your stomach. And she just said, “I don’t think that’s true. My husband’s never told me that I talk in my sleep.” I’ve never known my mom to talk in her sleep. Even if you do, would you really stop and listen if you heard someone talking in their sleep? I mean, it’s just weird. So those were the kind of things.
I started to realize more and more from that time that he was trying to, for lack of a better word, psych me out like he was trying to get under my skin in some psychological way like he had a knack for it, like he knew just what to say. So you couldn’t say, “Oh, how can you say that? How can you do that? You’re being completely unreasonable.” Or you couldn’t really say anything, but nevertheless, he would manage to get under your skin or get in your brain like a little brainworm.
So my mom and I went to Umbria for a long weekend and he kept texting me. I can’t remember now what he was saying but it was weird stuff. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the situation where we’re like, maybe you’ve told a lie and the person that you’ve told a lie to is trying to psych you out and trying to make you feel like you don’t know whether they know or not, like maybe you know you’ve done something wrong but this other person, the second person, is not coming out right and saying, “Listen. You did this thing and I’m not okay with it.” They’re insinuating it without letting you know whether they actually know or not so that you are left–
Scott
Mind games?
Tiffany
Mind games! That’s exactly the phrase I was looking for. Playing mind games with you. So he was writing me these text messages and, to this day, I can’t remember what it was about but clearly. He was trying to play mind games with me from 200 kilometers away and my mom was like, “I needed her to point it out to me for whatever reason.” I was just ignoring it or I was blind to it and she was like, “This guy is weird. He’s messing with you. What is this? What is this he’s saying?” And then she brought up the thing he had said about her talking in her sleep. So when she sort of clued me in, then my senses were turned on and I started paying attention. I really wasn’t paying attention until that time.
Scott
Tell me about the break-in. What happened then?
Tiffany
Okay, so I had moved, as I mentioned, to Italy, partially in the hopes of maybe having an opera career. At that time, my first year in Rome, I was still actively practicing and studying opera, but I couldn’t really practice in that apartment because there were too many people living there. So, Stefano had out of the kindness of his heart, I thought, at the time, found this place where I could go and sing. It was this place all the way across town that was sort of an abandoned building that some actors had taken over and they were sort of occupying it and doing their shows there or rehearsing. He said, “You can go there. I’ve talked to them and you can practice in one of the rooms and they don’t care.” So I was doing this and it got me out of the house for a certain number of hours every day, in addition to my job.
Whether he did that on purpose to try to get me out of the house or whether he was actually being helpful, I don’t know. All I know is, one day, I was going out to practice and I was leaving the house, and there was a tram stop right in front of the apartment. It was on a busy street and I was waiting at the tram stop. I saw him come out of the apartment and he almost never left, which is something that I also didn’t pick up on right away. He was always there. He didn’t seem to have any kind of social life, and he didn’t seem to work outside the home, which was not that common back then to work from home.
I saw him leave the apartment, and he saw me, and he saw that I saw him. There was something slightly off about him at that moment, like he was nervous about something, but I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific. I thought about it afterward. I thought he looked nervous. He looked kind of odd, like something was up with him, but I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I came back and– keep in mind, at least five people are living in this apartment. So there’s almost always somebody at home. Usually, it’s him. Usually, it’s multiple people. So it’s very rare that nobody was at home. So I came back a couple of hours later, and he said, “Oh, Tiffany, there’s been a break-in. You should probably go check your room and make sure that nothing has been taken because I haven’t had anything taken but Steve had some coins on his desk and they were taken.” And I was like, “How could there have been a break-in? It was the middle of the day, first of all.” He said, “Well, I didn’t bolt the door. So, it’s very easy to get into an apartment that just has the latch without being bolted.
Scott
So he was saying there was a break-in, but you had just left. You were just leaving.
Tiffany
Well, I’ve been gone for a couple of hours. I’ve been gone for maybe two hours. But the thing is, well, it would have happened when nobody happened to be home. This apartment where there’s always somebody home that it would have happened right at that moment– and he’s Italian. An Italian would leave their apartment without bolting the door in the city of Rome is beyond belief, because break-ins are a problem in Italy and they are a problem in Rome, but people don’t leave their apartments unbolted for this very reason. So that in itself is suspect.
So I went into my bedroom, and I had a little jewelry box on my shelf and it was open on the floor and some stuff had spilled out of it and I went through it and pretty much everything was gone. Only the jewelry that I was wearing remained and it was all genuine jewelry. Nothing was ridiculously expensive, but it was all real gold, real jewels. So, for me, it was a huge loss also on a sentimental level because mostly they were gifts from my parents. So that was really just heartbreaking for me. I don’t think that I had any cash taken, but I did have one of my dresses taken – a long sparkly black evening gown was taken. The German girl who lived there, her favorite jacket was taken and nothing else.
I had a laptop computer in my room. I had a digital camera. I had probably a very old mp3 player, valuable at that time, none of that was taken. Every person in the apartment had a laptop and Stefano had a whole computer system. I mean, he was a tech guy, so he had probably a couple of computers. He probably had a stereo system. We had tons of tech in that house. It’s beyond belief that none of that would have been taken, that they would have just taken some jewelry and clothing. It just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense, but it was almost the way that he behaved afterwards that was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to call the police and have them come over and file a report.” And he did.
He called the police and they came. While the policeman was there, he was asking me questions and he said, “Well, can I see your permissible journal?” Which is basically a foreigner’s official document to be able to live in a country for either a temporary or a permanent amount of time and I, of course, didn’t have one. I said, “I don’t have one. I’m just staying on a tourist visa right now.” He kind of looked at me like, “Yeah. you’re not supposed to do that, but he didn’t care.” I mean, I have to be honest, the main reason that very few people cared at that time was because I come from a privileged country, a first-world country. If I had been from a different country, there would have been a completely different reaction. I’m completely aware of that. I don’t think that they’re as lax today as they were back then, but part of me – and again, I don’t want to be too paranoid here – thinks that Stefano called the police on purpose, hoping that that would come up to remind me that I don’t have legal standing in the country.
Scott
And it would make sense from his standpoint financially. He’s already got rent in advance and he could rent your room again after you get booted out of the country.
Tiffany
Exactly. Now, I don’t know that he wanted to get me deported, although I wouldn’t put it past him. I always give people the benefit of the doubt even after they do horrible things to me. Maybe, he did, but the truth is– I mean, he maybe didn’t know the law but I discovered later that if you rent out a room knowingly to someone who is living in the country illegally, you’re in much more trouble than the illegal person as the landlord, if you knowingly rent to them. So he could have actually been in big trouble as well. A couple of other things happened that were very unpleasant– animosity started to come out in the open. I started to feel like I didn’t really want to be there anymore but I was putting up with it because I had prepaid. I got an email from an ex-boyfriend who was living in the States, who I was still friendly with, and he said that he had been emailed a video of me in an intimate situation.
I remember coming home from work with cash on me, going into my bedroom, turning out all the lights, and hiding the money in the dark because I was afraid that there might have been a camera in the room somehow or some way that he was able to see where I might hide my cash. So, at that point, by June, I had some really bad feelings.
One evening, I had some friends over and we were talking loudly in the bedroom and we were laughing, we were having wine, and he was texting me, and he would never just say, “Oh, can you please be quiet?” He would say things like, “Oh, if you’re going to talk so loud, at least invite me in or things like this.” I mumbled something under my breath – what I thought was under my breath – to these people about how he was starting to get really unpleasant, and he texted me again and again, not saying, “I heard you say this,” but in a way that it’s ambiguous. Did he hear what I said? Did he not hear what I said? He just had this gift of messing with you. Did he hear what I said? He must have heard, but how could he hear? Yes, his room was right on the other side of mine, but the walls aren’t that thin, surely. So that was another reason I thought maybe the room was bugged.
Scott
Now you’re starting to think that you want to move out but, financially, it doesn’t really make sense.
Tiffany
I mean, it would have been at a loss. I mean, I think by the time I was deciding I wanted to move out, I had at least used those four months. I wanted to have the other two free months because I felt like I earned them since I had done my part of the bargain paying in advance, but it wasn’t as bad as if only a month had gone by. I had used up those four months that I had paid for. I was actually out with a girlfriend and two of her guy friends who were Italian, and I was telling them this story. I’m kind of a flippant person. I’ll tell us maybe a serious story in a flippant way, and they kind of were like, “You’re kind of making light of this, but this sounds bad. This guy sounds like bad news.” And I was like, “Yeah, he’s really unpleasant or this or that.” And they said, “Well, why don’t we come over to your apartment and have a cup of tea at your apartment with you and just see what he does, what he says?”
Scott
So they wanted to meet him.
Tiffany
They kind of wanted to meet him or be there, just make their presence known. I mean, these are Italian guys, so it’s like they’re on their own turf. You know what I mean? They’re not foreigners. There’s definitely a power imbalance in a country, in any country between the people who are native there and the people who are just visitors or immigrants or expats. So they wanted to kind of be like, “Okay, we want to show this guy that you have friends, that you’re not completely isolated and completely alone.” So they came over. The funny thing was he shot himself in his bedroom the entire time he would not come out because the guy was a coward. He was a total coward and he picked on women who were isolated, who didn’t have any connections, any friends, any relatives, and who were foreigners. So he did not come out of his room. But while we were sitting there having a cup of tea, one of them noticed there was actually, like, a little chalkboard and it was something that had been written on. It was like the kind of chalkboard you would write your grocery list on and something was written there. I didn’t understand it because it was written in Roman dialect. It said something like, “Vie qua e ti dona pizza in faccia” Come over here so I can punch you in the face – something like that. They said, “This is bad. There’s something wrong with this guy that he would even write this knowing that you wouldn’t even understand it. It’s just weird. It’s off.” And it was really that night that I decided in my head to leave. That wasn’t the light night that I left, but that was the night that I said, that’s it. I’m not staying anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore.
Scott
What was the incident with the knife in the kitchen?
Tiffany
That was the next day. I kind of felt like, after that night, after talking to those guys, after kind of getting a wake-up call, I should take the gloves off and stop pretending like everything was okay and just going about my business. I was in the kitchen. I was making something to eat and he was also being much, much more– his whole attitude, it changed. The shift was so slow from this friendly, bumbling, harmless guy to a psycho, which is really what he was. It was hard to even notice the change but, by that point, he had taken the gloves off as well. And he said, “Why are you always here? You’re always here. Don’t you have a life? Why don’t you have a life? Don’t you have anything to do? Your life is so sad.” Something like that. And I said, “I have every right to be here. I pay rent. I can spend as much time here as I want and I have friends.” I really think it was the day after these guys had been there because I was thinking about them and there was also a guy that I was dating. I had started dating. I said, “I have friends and you can’t intimidate me. I’m not completely alone.” I said something like that.
There was a little Ikea metal thing that you put your clean forks and knives in after you’ve washed them on the edge of your sink. There was one of those and there was a knife in it – just a regular steak knife. He just pulled it out and he held it up to me. He didn’t touch me with it, but he held it up in front of my face and he said, “No, you don’t have any power here. I have the power here. I hold the knife here, not you.” That was probably our last interaction, at least in person. I had a friend come over while I was packing, keep me company for part of the time anyway. The girlfriend who let her two guy friends come over the night before had an extra room in her apartment
Scott
And she was one of your English students, is that right?
Tiffany
She was one of my yoga students. I did end up teaching yoga and she found me. She found one of my ads that was hanging up somewhere in the city and I would go to her apartment and teach her yoga. She had an extra room and she said, “Tiffany, you got to get out of this situation. Come stay with me. If you need to stay with me, you can come and stay with me.” Thank God, because I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. The few friends that I had in town– I mean, none of them really had the space to put somebody up for the time it takes to find a new apartment, so I was really lucky. I must have sent her a text and said, “Can I come over tonight?” And, she said, yes. I packed up all my stuff and luckily it wasn’t that much stuff.
Scott
Just from your description of it, it seems like it would be kind of a traumatic thing. Were you scared? What was your emotion at that moment when you were packing up, thinking I got to get out of here?
Tiffany
I was running to the bathroom. That’s how bad it was. I was physically sick. I was very nervous. I mean. I was just as nervous as you would imagine being in a situation like that. The guy wasn’t really the type – I still believe that he’s not the type – to physically assault somebody. I could be wrong. But he’s more the psychological attack – the mind games. I didn’t think he was going to come into my room and attack me, he was going to hit me with a baseball bat, he was going to stab me with that knife, or he was going to jump on me. I really didn’t have that fear, but I still was afraid because he had so psychologically messed with me and I felt so unwelcome there. I just had to get out. I packed up my stuff. He didn’t come out of his room. I didn’t say goodbye. I just left. I think I took the keys. Actually, I still have the keys to his apartment. I’m sure they’ve been changed since then but I left and I went down to the curb where there’s a taxi stand.
I was sitting on this bench waiting for the taxi and I just had that feeling that you get that prickly feeling on the back of your neck when you know somebody’s watching you. I believe the apartment was on the fourth floor. I looked up and it was not his bedroom. His bedroom was on the other side of the building. He’d gone into one of the other bedrooms to look down at me and to see what I was doing. He hadn’t left his room while I was packing, so I guess he wanted confirmation of– he probably heard the door slam, saw my room was empty, and wanted to see. I looked up and I just gave him the finger. I know it’s so immature, but I just gave him the finger and he just gave it right back. That was that. A cab eventually showed up, and I got out of there.
Scott
So you had a temporary place to stay, but then things kind of turned around, right? You got a decent job, you had a place to stay with this nice Scottish woman, so it seems like things were looking up, right?
Tiffany
Yeah, things definitely changed for the better after that. I started working in tourism. I really enjoyed that. Working in tourism brought me into contact with a whole bunch of new friends and I just met so many people. The first year that I lived in Rome, I was very isolating. I had very few friends. I was very lonely. So, working in tourism, not only I was finally making decent money, but I was also making a bunch of friends and I found an apartment after moving out of that temporary situation with the girl I taught yoga to. Like you said, I met a Scottish woman, I moved into her apartment, rented a room in her apartment, and she was great, she was fun. Ended up having a really wonderful summer, which was– since I moved to Rome in September, that was really my first summer living there and I have very fond memories of that summer. But Stefano was not completely gone
Scott
Because you texted him, right?
Tiffany
Yes, I don’t know if I texted him or emailed him. Probably texted him. After I’d been out for, I don’t know how long – a week, a couple weeks, a month, I’m not sure – my confidence was sort of built back up. I wasn’t as scared and I said, “This guy owes me money. First of all, he owes me the security deposit.”
Scott
At the very least, yeah.
Tiffany
Yeah, secondly, he owes me for those two months rent. So I wrote to him and I don’t know what words I said, but I basically said, “You owe me this much money.” He said something like, “Well, I’ve gone through the damages to your room,” which there were no damages– “I’ve gone through the damages to your room and it turns out we’re even with all the damages.” I don’t owe you anything. Isn’t that nice? Now we don’t have to worry about anything. And I must have written back something like, “No, that’s not possible.” That’s when he started threatening me. The worst stuff that he did to me was after I moved out. He basically revealed that – or at least he claimed – he had photos or photocopies of my private diaries, which I had kept copious diaries of when I was living there, partially because I was not going out very much. I was not doing a lot. I didn’t have a lot of friends. So I was writing a lot in my journal and he said that he had all of these and that he was going to start emailing them to my close friends, family, ex-boyfriends, et cetera. To prove that he was able to, he sent an email to a group of people, which was a very random group, definitely two ex-boyfriends, a guy I was dating at the time, and a couple of friends, and my mom.
Scott
How did he have all those email addresses?
Tiffany
He had access to my email, somehow, because the email came from me.
Scott
Oh, so he was using your email account to contact these contacts. They were probably in your contacts list.
Tiffany
Exactly. He emailed me from his email address. He reached out to– again, it was a group of maybe 8-10 people and it said that it was coming from me, but it wasn’t like he had actually logged into my email account because there were no sent messages. I’m not seeing any sent messages. He was somehow able to use his technological skills to make it appear that this email was coming from me.
Scott
It’s easy to spoof an email account. Yeah.
Tiffany
Okay, so that’s what he must have done. He must have somehow had access to my emails because he had these addresses, he wrote to them saying, “I’ve started a blog.” He sent them a link to this blog and this blog had my face on it. It didn’t have my name, but it had a name that I liked to use as, like, a second name, let’s say a stage name, and he said, “Yeah, I’m going to be updating this blog. So, keep an eye on it.” And then he wrote to me privately saying, “I’m sure you wouldn’t want the people at your sister’s wedding–” because my sister was engaged and she was getting married that summer. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want the guests at your sister’s wedding to know what a porn diva you are.” Referring, apparently, to things I had written in my diary. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want Enzo, who was the guy that I was dating, who I was writing about. I’m sure you wouldn’t want him to read all these private thoughts. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your mother to see this and that.” I mean, to me, that was the scariest thing of all. That was much scarier than the idea of losing money. It was even scarier than someone holding up a knife to me, who I didn’t believe would use it because the thought that such private thoughts and experiences would be plastered up on the internet and people in your life would read them. I mean it was absolutely horrifying to me.
There were probably only 5-6 emails in total. It felt like a lot more. I felt like I was being stalked, to be honest, but at the end of the day, I just stopped responding. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. The only thing that he may have done is send some kind of video to my ex-boyfriend, which I don’t even know if I believe just because– not to go into too much detail but I feel like I wasn’t involved in anything at home. If anything, whatever I was getting up to that might be an intimate situation was not happening there, so I don’t necessarily know if that is true or if it was just insinuated to my ex that was what it was. He says he never opened it, he never looked at it, so the video may not have existed. I guess I’ll never know
Scott
This just happened to come into my mind. He sent emails to you, to people that you know, pretending to be you. Could he have not sent an email to you, pretending to be your ex-boyfriend?
Tiffany
That’s a very good question. That thought has never crossed my mind. I might have to reach out to him and ask.
Scott
That would be interesting to see if this ex-boyfriend remembers any of this because he may not even have been involved at all.
Tiffany
Yeah, now you’ve really got me thinking. I don’t know because yeah, it would definitely have been emailing because, at that time, it was very expensive to text somebody in a foreign country
Scott
Where you pay per text back then.
Tiffany
Yes, it would have been very expensive. So I wouldn’t have been texting him. I would have only been emailing him. So it is possible. It is possible.
Scott
Okay. A few months go by and you’re kind of starting to feel safe again and you’re traveling. What happened then?
Tiffany
His tactic of threatening me with these diary entries and this blog worked because I stopped responding to him, which is probably what he wanted because he didn’t want to have to give me any money. Time went by and you forget things and you move on, so I was definitely feeling okay. I had a comfortable place to live and I went back to the States for my sister’s wedding and that was in Seattle, but she was going to have her bachelorette party in Las Vegas. I was so excited that I was able to go because, just 3-6 months before, I just wouldn’t have had the money to be able to go and I was able to, and I was just so excited. I’d never been to Las Vegas and it just seems like such a fun thing. Of course, I bought my flight round trip from Seattle and stayed at the hotel with them. My sister and her friends – they all lived in LA. So they were all flying up from LA. I was the only one flying down from Seattle.
I was at the airport by myself. I went to check in as you do, and they typed in the name, number, whatever, and they said this reservation has been canceled. I thought, “What? You mean the flight has been canceled?” And I said, “No, the reservation has been canceled.” You canceled your reservation. I said, “No, I didn’t. Anyways, it’s a non-refundable flight. I canceled it for no money. Why would I even do that?” And they said, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s weird.” And it hit me that I had booked that flight from Rome, from my computer. My laptop computer in Rome, somehow, through the magic of technology, circa 2005, this guy had found a way to access that reservation and cancel it.
I’m sitting there and the knowledge of this is dawning on me and I’m like, “I’m not going to be able to go because I can’t just buy another ticket, especially at the last minute. What is it going to cost?” I’m thinking, “I don’t get to go on this trip. I don’t get to be there for my sister. I’m her maid of honor.” All these thoughts are going through my head. And I’m like, “Even if I tell these people this story, are they going to believe me?” I am just trying to work out in my own head what had happened. It was just dawning on me and I started crying. I tried to explain it to them and I was just lucky I had an agent who was compassionate and who was not too much of a stickler for the rules and they said, “Okay, don’t worry, we’re going to reinstate the ticket,” and they did. I got to go and I didn’t have to pay anything extra, and everything worked out. But yeah, it was ugly. That’s mean. That’s really mean. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. How do you even think of that?
Scott
And obviously, he’s the one that did it. I mean, it seems clear anyway.
Tiffany
Oh, yeah, it’s clear. It’s clear. Yeah.
Scott
Has he bothered you or contacted you since then?
Tiffany
No, he hasn’t. I did see him on the street after I met my husband but before we were married. It was probably because I ended up staying in that neighborhood for years. I lived in Trastevere until 2016, so I lived there another 12 years. Part of that time, I live, like, two blocks from that apartment. In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t see him more often, only probably because he hardly ever left, but I did see him once. I was on my husband’s arm – wasn’t my husband yet – and I think he’s a type of person who is only going to victimize people who he thinks are powerless and unprotected.
Scott
Vulnerable.
Tiffany
Yeah, and vulnerable. So when he saw that I was with someone– I mean, it’s sad. It’s really sad that, in this day and age, a woman needs to have a significant other in order to not be harassed. It’s sad but that’s unfortunately the way that it is in some cases. He never bothered me after that. I mean, I don’t think I ever heard from him, to be honest, after that summer, after those emails. Obviously, there was the trip that he tried to cancel. I never called him on that. I never accused him of that. I just didn’t want to go there. I just let it fly. So I don’t think that I even heard from him. But then, after he saw me with my husband, he probably thought, “Well, yeah, I’m not going to bother her again.”
Scott
As we record this, it’s been more than 20 years.
Tiffany
Yeah.
Scott
How often do you think about him?
Tiffany
Not often. Luckily, not often. Yeah, it really kind of feels like ancient history now. In fact, many of the details of this story, I hadn’t thought about it all since they happened, but it’s part of my expat story. I feel like every expat has at least one crazy story, if not more. I mean, I’d like to say I learned from it but, honestly, I still feel like I’m a very trusting person, so I don’t even know if I can say I learned from it.
Scott
That’s okay, though. I mean, you don’t want to lose that completely just because of this one guy, right? I think people are generally good and this guy just wasn’t. That’s all.
Tiffany
I always hoped that one day, because my husband’s father is a– well, he’s retired now but he was a police officer pretty high up in the Italian police, and I always thought, “Oh, one day, we’ve got to get revenge on this guy. You’ve got to go.” Because the truth is the way that he operates is totally illegal subletting this apartment out to foreigners. Now that I’m thinking about it, I met people after the fact who were living with him or who had lived with him and he had done weird stuff with them as well, and I always thought someday we’ve got to give this guy his comeuppance, but not had the opportunity yet.
Scott
It sounds like you do still think about him just a little bit in that sense, right? You wouldn’t be mad if you saw his mugshot. Oh God, I’d be
Tiffany
Oh God, I’d be thrilled. I’d be thrilled.
Scott
What are you doing now? What’s your life in Rome like now?
Tiffany
Okay. Well, I don’t live in Trastevere anymore, unfortunately. Not that I’m not happy where I am, but I do miss that wonderful neighborhood. It’s such a vibrant, beautiful place to live. I now live on the outskirts of the city near my in-laws. It’s like a classic Italian thing to live near your in-laws when you have a child. My husband and I have a 9-year-old son. I’m a writer and I published a book for young readers – middle-grade readers, so 8-12, 8-13 years old, more or less. I published that back in 2018. It’s called Midnight in the Piazza. It’s an art mystery set in contemporary Rome. I have a podcast called The Bittersweet Life, which started out as a podcast about expat life and the expat experience, but it’s really evolved over the years to be much more about just life questions in general, not simply living abroad. I’m also a tour guide and a trip planner. People trust me to plan their itineraries to Italy and to Rome. Yeah, that’s the gist of it.
Scott
I’ve always been kind of jealous of people who knew, from a young age, what they wanted to do, and you knew this is where you wanted to live and you wanted to make a life there and you’ve done it. That’s pretty cool.
Tiffany
Yeah, my mom says, “When you moved off to Italy, I thought that you’d come back eventually.”
Scott
Oh boy. Well, we will have links to your website and your podcast and your book. Your primary social media is Instagram. Is that right?
Tiffany
That’s right.
Scott
Good. So we’ll have links to all of that. If any listeners are traveling to Rome, they need to find you to have you show them around the city.
Tiffany
Absolutely.
Scott
If you’d like to contact Tiffany, you can do that through her website. In the episode notes, I’ll have links to that and her socials, and also some pictures. That’s all at WhatWasThatLike.com/210.
Our Facebook group question this past Tuesday was: What caused you to end a friendship? If something comes to mind, come on over and share it with the rest of us – WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook
And you might already know this, but all of the main episodes of What Was That Like are available fully transcribed. So you can read the whole episode if you want to. They are always at the episode notes page, which is the website then a forward slash, and the episode number. So today’s episode transcript is at WhatWasThatLike.com/210. You can read it right on that page, or you can download the whole thing as a PDF file.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And now – the Listener Story. This is a 5-10 minute story, sent in by a listener. It’s how we end every episode. I’d love to play YOUR story for everyone. Just record it on your phone and send it to Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.
This listener, Julie, gives us a little glimpse into what life is like when you’re legally blind.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.
(Listener story)
My name is Julie. I lost my vision as an adult. I’m now legally blind. I can see a little bit, but it’s like looking through straws. I use a white cane to feel what’s in front of me. I want to explain what it can be like when people ignore the fact that I have a white cane, or even worse, I’ve had people jump over the cane, kick the cane out of the way, push me out of the way, and you need to imagine not being able to see these people until they are right in front of your face. They just appear there, sometimes in midair. It’s terrifying. They go on with their day as if nothing’s happened, but I can’t. I’m left shaking and doubting my ability to get around safely.
I lived in France for over a decade. This was very lucky for me because the medical care there is really good and I got two years of really good therapy. This ranged from how to use a white cane to sitting in a circle surrounded by speakers to learn how to decipher the sounds around me. This was unlucky because people in France are a lot more self-centered, which made it very difficult for me as a person with a disability. To be clear, the majority of people, no matter what country, are good. They’re caring and they have situational awareness. Unfortunately, I can’t usually see the good people. When I do see people move out of the way for me, I thank them. That’s really important to me. Usually, though, it’s when I’m with somebody that they say “Later.” Wow, I can’t believe how everybody just parted when they saw you coming and then I feel kind of bad that I wasn’t able to thank these people for being so nice to me.
If I hear a child ask one of their parents, what is that or I see them staring at the cane, I’ll stop and explain it to them. I’ll show them how it works and I’ll even let them try it if they want to. This allows them to start conversations with their friends and family. Hopefully, people will understand more about what it’s like to have a white cane. I’ve even had parents ask me questions. I really enjoy being able to teach people about that. I try to leave the house at least once a day. I know that I need to get fresh air. I’m a real people person, so I need to see other people, but I also know that at least one person is going to make things really difficult for me. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a lot of people. But, when you see how it affects my day, it makes it really hard for me to force myself to leave the house again the next day.
I want to tell you about what happened to me the other day. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to me so far, but I’m still having trouble dealing with it. I went to my local department store. It’s the only one that I can walk to because I’m obviously not allowed to drive. While I was standing in line to pay and not moving, I felt someone pressing up against me on my right side. I started saying, no, but the woman was persistent. She pushed past me, tripped hard over my cane, broke it in half, and then fell on the floor. I looked at her and I said, “What’s wrong with you?” And she screamed at me and said, “I’m just trying to pass!” And so I said, “Is this how you treat disabled people? Is this your first day being a human being?” I don’t think that I can say what she said to me, but it was basically, “F you!” as loud as she could.
The store was packed and everyone was just staring. I stood there shaking with my mouth open. I didn’t know what to do. If someone had forced themselves onto a person with perfect vision and then poked their eyes out, that would be considered assault. But here, I’m told it’s just bad luck and bad manners when it happens to someone like me. I was so shaken up that I had a panic attack. Thankfully, two very nice ladies came over right away and they helped me. But this is still running through my head now, over and over and I’m trying to figure out, “What can I do to avoid a situation like this? What could I have done differently?” I have no idea how to keep myself safe. I don’t know how to handle these situations any differently and I have no legal recourse. Something similar happened to a blind man in France and they put the video on the news and tried to help find the guy. Here in Canada, I was told that there’s nothing that I can do.
So here I am, sitting at home, wondering, “Should I go out? Can I go out? And am I going to be safe if I go out again today?” And this is what it’s like to be legally blind.