Podcast Episode 1: That Time I Found Out My “Followers” Were Real

Jen Friel can read a stranger in seconds. She always thought it was intuition — until the strangers started showing up everywhere. Watching. Rotating. Following a pattern only she could see. For years, no one believed her. Friends were confused. The police couldn't help. But Jen documented everything and refused to give up. When a single piece of surveillance footage finally proved what was happening, the truth was far more disturbing than she ever imagined — a co-founder arrested for attempted murder, extortion, and kidnapping.

But the biggest revelation wasn't about the people following her. It was about herself.

This is the unbelievably true story of Jen Friel, told in her own words for the first time.

A story about stalking, survival, pattern recognition, and the life-changing diagnosis that answered the question she had been asking her entire life: why am I so different?

Transcription:

What you are about to hear was recorded on an iPhone from inside an Uber on Friday, June 25th, 2021. "There was a guy staring at you guys. Can you, can you say it one more time? Okay. There is a guy right there in front of the hotel that is staring at you guys." "Thank you. It was weird, right?" "Yes. Yeah. Which means if you're going back, you gotta watch out."

"Yeah. No, we're not going back."

Welcome to Talk Nerdy to Me. This is the unbelievably true life story of Jen Friel. And a warning to those listening: once you hear it, you may never experience your own life in the same way.

Right after this Uber ride, I found out that someone I had co-founded a company with was arrested for attempted murder, extortion, and kidnapping.

I had spent four years before that trying to get someone, anyone, to take me seriously about what I knew I was seeing. Most people read a room; I read people almost instantly. I used to call it intuition. I had no other word or phrase to describe it. I was told I was paranoid. I personally thought I was just really good at reading body language.

It wasn't until later I realized what I was doing had a name, and it was a diagnosis. This is my unbelievably true story of how a terrifying stalking ordeal, the help of a private investigator, and a single piece of surveillance footage let me piece together not only how to stop what had been happening, but also the answer to the question I had been asking myself my entire life: Why am I so different?

It was Mother's Day on May 13th, 2017. I was at a restaurant called Nora's in West Hollywood with two of my girlfriends. As we sat at our table, I noticed a man a handful of feet away with what I could only describe as really weird body language. He was at the bar by himself, which isn't unusual, but it was where he was paying attention to that made no sense.

He was turned slightly towards us, legs crossed, and he kept looking up like there was something there, only there wasn't. It was a dark restaurant, and while I didn't see a phone, I could tell he wasn't looking at something; he was listening to someone. It was just off. Weird enough that when we left, right before we took the obligatory photo for the 'Gram, I had to ask my friends about it.

Her friends looked around, confused. "What guy?"

At that point, I didn't think it was us, 'cause why would I? Hollywood has a nickname of Hollyweird for a reason, and if you spend five minutes here, you'll understand why. So like most things in my life, I just made a mental note and kept on keeping on. But then it happened again and again.

A pattern started to emerge, or at least a pattern that I paid attention to. I would enter a bar, a restaurant, whatever, and about 15 minutes in—just long enough for me to get settled—a single male would walk in and sit down very close to me. Which, again, doesn't sound strange at first, but imagine it happened every single time you went somewhere, anywhere.

I was never alone, and I go to some really random and eclectic places, with pride, but I'm often only one of two people in that space in general, outside of the staff. So the consistency of what I was seeing was very unnerving. I was beginning to recognize a pattern and I didn't like it, so I called one of the two people who I know hired private investigators: my father.

Jen called her dad and casually asked, "Why do you hire private investigators?" Her father, who had spent many years working as an attorney for insurance companies, didn't even pause before answering. "The company would hire them to see if people were committing fraud," he explained. "Mostly disability claims."

"If someone says they're disabled but they're also training for a marathon, we'd use that surveillance to deny the claim." It was funny at Bring Your Daughter to Work Day as a kid. We would sit in an empty office and watch the surveillance footage from investigators. Looking back, I'm sure that was super illegal, but at the time, it was awesome.

They'd even do the thing of like, "What's wrong with this picture?" And a handful of 7- to 10-year-olds would chime in with the answers.

"I think I'm being followed," Jen said, her voice carrying a mix of confusion and certainty.

I told my dad what I was noticing: the lone men, the strange timing, the way they acted, and kept appearing again and again.

Her father listened carefully before responding. "You're in the C-suite of a startup," he said. "Your CEO is a convicted felon, and you're dealing with high-level executives at insurance companies. It's more likely than not that someone could be following you to assess potential liabilities. Make notes of what you see, but I wouldn't worry about it too much."

The CEO had been previously convicted of felony drug trafficking charges. I had never judged him for it; quite the opposite. I believe people who face consequences often saw the world differently. He had served his time, and in my mind, everyone deserves a second chance. I thank my dad for not judging me.

It's such an uncomfortable sentence to even say, "I think I'm being followed." I can still hear his voice as he laughed and said, "Daughter, you have always had followers." He was right. This wasn't Jen's first experience being a target.

When I was 16, my father, an attorney, West Hartford police officer, Officer Schwab, and attorney Owen Eagan stepped in to help me during my first stalking experience.

Together, we pursued a case that would ultimately set legal precedent in the state of Connecticut. Four lifetime restraining orders were issued against my former female best friends. It was the first time such an order had been granted in a non-sexual relationship. At the time, the legal system struggled to comprehend that women could engage in sustained criminal cruelty toward one another outside of a romantic context.

And I just learned recently that setting precedent is one thing, equivalent to like words on a piece of paper. These laws have actually been implemented since June of 2002. I found this out on a dance floor at a wig party from a Connecticut Superior Court judge. True story. In many ways, it resembled something out of Mean Girls, except this happened before the film was even released.

It wasn't a cat fight. This was criminal behavior. I had to explain to the court what an email was, what an AOL profile was, and how I captured the screenshots. At just 17 years old, before I could even vote, I became a tech expert in a court of law, explaining early internet evidence to judges and attorneys.

Her testimony was taken seriously for a reason. Jen had started typing when she was two and started her first tech company at just eight years old, built around helping adults understand computers. Tech wasn't a thing back then. When I taught adults how to type, it was helping them understand digital keyboards and how they've evolved from the two-finger typing one would use on a typewriter.

My background made me uniquely qualified to explain in plain terms how digital harassment worked and why it could be so damaging. This, by the way, was on AOL 5.0, which people had to pay access for to even see users' profiles. At the time, the biggest search engine was Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, and there was no cross-pollinating of profiles to search.

To understand just how early this was in the internet era, Gmail wouldn't even exist for another three years. I was able to clearly demonstrate how the harassment occurred, how the evidence was captured, and why it mattered. Ultimately, we prevailed in both the criminal and civil cases against my stalkers, even if it didn't feel like victory at the time.

That's my most vivid memory from this experience. We were leaving the courthouse in the criminal case, and I looked up to my dad and I said, "I know we won, but this doesn't feel like winning." He turned to look at me and said, "I'm so sorry you learned this lesson at such a young age. There are laws in life, but rarely is there justice."

Years later, a juvenile advocate told me that the precedent set by my case helped pave the way for countless other restraining orders like mine, protecting many more victims, primarily young women. I'm so proud of that, and it still makes me cry all these years later. These were the charges they were able to prove.

Female, age 17, arrested on a warrant charging her with one count of second-degree stalking, five counts of second-degree harassment, one count of breach of peace, and three counts of threatening. Female, age 16, arrested on a warrant charging her with second-degree harassment and threatening. Police said she sent a threatening email on the 25th of October, 2001.

Female, age 17, arrested on a warrant charging her with two counts of second-degree harassment, two counts of threatening, and one count of breach of peace. Police said she was harassing a Hall High School student. So clearly I knew what being watched felt like, but this was different. The consistency of the pattern was the only part of the pattern that was inconsistent.

Sometimes it would go on for weeks or months, then it would stop. I'd think it was over, and then it would start back up again. I didn't get danger vibes at first, 'cause remember I talked to my dad, but it was just this revolving door of people exhibiting the same exact type of behavior, which now included blatantly taking pictures and video of me.

It was surreal to not only see, but to predict the behavior of people I didn't know. Jen finally found the strength to start telling her friends what had been happening. One night, she was out with her best friend at a bar called Rascals in Mid-City. "I think I'm being followed," I said to my best friend.

She looked at me, curious. "What makes you think that?" "Watch. A man is about to walk in and sit down next to us. He won't talk to anybody except the server, and his body language will be totally incongruent. He'll stick out like a sore thumb." It's like having the Lifetime movie version of a private investigator following you.

And then, almost like clockwork, the door opened. A man wearing a chapeau walked in holding a book and took a seat right next to them. I immediately leaned over and whispered urgently, "That's him. He's tonight's investigator." My best friend let out this half laugh, half confused reaction. "Okay, now what do we do?"

"We have the best time ever. Let's get another round and talk about our periods and pooping patterns." We both burst out laughing. All I had in that moment was a series of patterns and body language. I had no real proof anything was happening. I also didn't know in that moment if my best friend believed me.

I never asked. I didn't need to. Just saying it out loud was relief enough. Later that week, things escalated, and then took an even stranger turn. It wasn't a new face. It was the same investigator from earlier in the week, the man in the chapeau suddenly appearing again, this time at a completely different restaurant in another part of town.

It was the kind of repeat encounter that stopped feeling random and started feeling very intentional. Los Angeles is the second most populated city in the country. Running into the same person twice is one thing. Running into them again with that same almost timed precision in a totally different setting was way too weird.

I didn't hesitate in approaching him. My reaction was instant and explosive. I jumped down from the barstool, walked over to him and shouted, "Why are you following me?" Now, normally, if a stranger shouted something like that in a bar, the response would be some variation of "Go home, you're drunk," or "Hey, you're crazy."

All reasonable reactions. His answer wasn't reasonable. He then launched into a literal laundry list of the places he had been and his wife, who he was waiting for, who was doing laundry. He gave an exact and full itinerary of where he had been and where he was going to. It immediately raised another question in my mind.

Why would anybody say that? Her friends could see how shaken she was. Their friend Eddie stepped in and physically positioned himself between Jen and the man. And that's when Jen broke down. "This is happening," she said. "This is actually happening." For the first time I processed it, not what they were doing with the information, whoever they are.

I had nothing to hide, but that a file somewhere existed with my life in it. Am I a name? Am I a number? It was a combination of creepy curiosity and sheer rage that I even had to think about this. I'm my own label maker, not you. Who the hell do you think you are? I don't remember much else from that night, just the deep gut-wrenching certainty that I was being followed.

My friend asked who I thought was behind it. I only had one name, and he was the CEO of my company. The technology Jen had co-founded was, in its execution, eerily similar to what she was now experiencing in her own life. The concept had even been featured on CNBC during a television show she appeared on called The West Texas Investors Club.

Jen secured an investment during Season One for an app she later sold. By Season Two, during a follow-up appearance, she introduced the core function of her new company. The company was a crowdsourced gig economy platform that allowed insurance companies to dispatch on-demand field proxies, similar to rideshare drivers, to photograph and record property damage, with uploads accessible to adjusters in real time via dashboard or whenever they wanted at their convenience.

But now that same concept that appeared on TV actually appeared to be playing out around me in my real life in real time. Strangers I had never met before were appearing in a dispatch-style manner and would then start to take pictures and videos of me and my friends. The similarities were impossible for me to ignore.

So the next morning around 10:00 AM, I made a phone call. "Are you paying people to follow me?" Jen asked the CEO directly. "No, Jen. Why would I follow you?" he replied sharply. The answer shattered the one explanation she had been clinging to. Jen burst into tears. If it wasn't him, then who was it? For the first time, she felt genuinely unsafe.

She grabbed her keys, called her parents, and drove straight to the police station. "I'm being stalked," I told the responding officer, "but it's by a group of people, not just one person." "So people are out to get you," the officer replied with a joking tone. In that moment, the implication was clear. She was paranoid.

I refused to accept that label. "No," I insisted. "It's one person or maybe a few people running the operation. I'm not quite sure, but the people showing up are proxies, that I do know, and they're appearing everywhere I go. I don't understand exactly how they're coordinating it. I just know it's happening."

The officer considered this. "How do you know they're there for you?" "Body language," I said calmly. I really did. He took me mildly seriously, but ultimately there was nothing the police could do. And then it hit me. When I got hit in the head with a brick back in 2012, nobody asked me why. They could see the gash in my head.

They could see the staples in my skull. They heard yet again that I testified in a court of law. But with stalking, an invisible crime, I was asked to be the psychiatrist, the police officer, and the victim all at once. I needed proof, but I had no idea what spy devices looked like outside of the obvious spy device, my iPhone.

So I decided to educate myself and went to a spy shop somewhere deep in the valley. The energy in there was less Batman Batcave and more like a seedy pawn shop stocked with sadness and sorrow. I thought about a burner phone, but when I was standing in Best Buy as an actual tech expert, I was completely confused by the devices I've spent my entire life helping people understand.

I questioned the access points and refused to make a move until I had the answers. That Monday, when the CEO arrived at the office, Jen asked if she could confide in him about something she had been noticing. They walked outside together and sat at the plastic tables near a KFC. She declaratively told him she knew she was being followed.

"The same investigator showed up again," she explained, "at a completely different type of place with the same body language as the others. I know you hire investigators. Does any of this sound familiar to you?" The CEO looked at her and responded bluntly, "Are you asking if I'm following you again? Why would I or anyone follow you, Jen?"

Jen didn't back down. "I know it's happening," she said firmly. "You can't move me from that. I know what I'm experiencing." For Jen, the real question wasn't whether it was happening anymore. It was why. What I've been trying to figure out is the motive. It's not professional. My father's hired investigators before, and he said normal, quote-unquote, "investigators" don't follow someone for years at a time.

That leaves one possibility. It has to be romantic, and whoever's doing it would need access to a lot of money. The financial commitment alone makes this a 1% of a 1% situation. Something else also feels so strange. They don't even seem like they're legit investigators. They're like characters playing this role.

The CEO thought about it for a moment before asking a practical question. "Your last two boyfriends are very wealthy. Are they still interested in you?" Jen shook her head. "No, I'm friends with both of them. They wouldn't do something like this, but I'll call them just in case." And I did, right then and there.

One by one, I explained the situation to them, describing the same details I'd been noticing and asking if there is any possibility that they were involved or if they've ever heard of anything like this before. Although the conversations happened separately, both men gave her the same response: "You need to go to the police."

"They don't believe me," Jen told the first of them. "Make them," he replied. "If anyone can, it's you." Jen thanked both of them for their support, but when the calls ended, she felt more uncertain than ever.

In the 2010s, I accidentally made myself internet famous as a dating blogger. Over nine months, I went out on 103 dates.

I know the exact number because I documented every single check-in on social media. I was using OkCupid, which relied on math to match people, but I wasn't just looking at compatibility scores. Without realizing it, I was profiling people. I got so good at reading profiles and reading people that I knew details about them before we even met.

My observations were so spot on, it made my blog really popular. Years later, Jen began applying that same profiling skill to the men following her, or at least that's what she thought she was doing. She realized whoever was orchestrating this wanted control. They wanted intimidation. They wanted her to know they were watching, and they only knew she was aware of them because she kept signaling it.

She was letting them know.

That's when I remembered Gavin de Becker. In the early days of my blog, I had an unusually enthusiastic follower. I managed to either guess Gavin de Becker's email, or maybe I just wore him down with persistence and many, many phone calls. But either way, the world's leading security expert actually responded to me.

He told me to read his book, The Gift of Fear, and pointed me to two specific chapters that he actually earmarked for me. His advice was simple and strategic: create a folder, filter the emails, document everything, be proactive, not reactive.

Jen applied that exact advice to her life. For the next year, she stopped acknowledging the people she knew were following her.

I watched, I took notes, but I refused to engage. That approach held until the moment I finally had proof that I was actually being stalked.

She believed that if these Lifetime movie-style private investigators kept following her, eventually they would make a mistake. And just as she suspected, they did. In the next episode, a cruise ship becomes the turning point. What was supposed to be a vacation delivers the proof Jen had been searching for.

It ends with a confrontation in international waters, game-changing surveillance footage, and an unexpected diagnosis that finally explains why Jen could see patterns no one else could.