Review: 'Dear Professor: A Woman's Letter to her Stalker' by Donna Freitas

I had heard of Donna Freitas' memoir, Consent, but had not quite had the courage to pick it up yet. When I realized she had written a public letter to her stalker, I figured it would make for a good introduction. Dear Professor is an impressive work that, while short, packs a punch. Thanks to Scribd Originals and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this work in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 28/4/2020
Publisher: Scribd Originals

For more than two years, Donna Freitas’s graduate school mentor, a priest and celebrated scholar, stalked her, forever changing her life. In her 2019 account Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention, she re-created, in novelistic detail, the story of being traumatized by her professor’s obsession with her, of how he used his power to try to rob her of her own. Freitas’s story has been hailed as “groundbreaking” (Kirkus) and “an important testament for the #MeToo era” (Publishers Weekly), “illuminat[ing] our ideas about harassment and harm” (Rebecca Traister). But readers’ responses to its publication, and the author’s experience of seeing the public’s response, impressed upon her that there was more to be said: not from the perspective of the naive young woman she was in graduate school, but in the fully empowered voice of the woman—the writer, teacher, and Title IX researcher and lecturer—she has since become. Pulling no punches, she speaks out here, in this searing Scribd Original, in a direct address—a letter—to her stalker. 

Dear Professor confronts and galvanizes. It is a public accusation and a personal confession. Above all, it is a guide to how to express and claim one’s anger, to use it to good and healthy effect to explode the shame that victims of stalking often feel and the silence they are often forced into. It acknowledges the grief of what was lost through years of trauma—the life that the author’s younger self had planned and invested in, including a very different kind of academic career. And it embraces what’s been gained: empathy, resiliency, adaptability, clarity, and more—all highly useful ingredients, it turns out, in becoming an expert on matters of consent and in successfully pursuing a writer’s life. It asks if either forgiveness or outing her stalker by name (something she’s assiduously avoided in print and at her readings and lectures) is necessary to her healing. Is what her former mentor did to her or may have done to others in any way her responsibility? How much can be expected of victims of such pernicious harassment? And how can Freitas continue to protect herself and her right to choose how she overcomes?

At once intimate and incendiary, Dear Professor is an act of liberation and self-love and an invitation to others who’ve been victimized to accept their pain and outrage, assign fault where fault is squarely due, take pride in what must be a uniquely personal journey, and say no, and no again, to censorship, secrecy, and stigma.

 One of my most insidious fears has been to find out one day I have a stalker. It is the kind of crime that is so deeply intimate, so invasive, an so hard to put an end to. Police isn't always sure what to do with it, meaning you're left with no help or recourse. If you can even go to the police, that is. If you aren't slowly but surely cut off from everything, always haunted and hunted. Since it is such a fear, I ran into a few surprising emotions while reading Dear Professor. The main one, which I should have expected, came from that place where fear and internalizes misogyny mix and ran thusly: 'Why would you write a letter to your stalked? Do you want his attention? Aren't you asking for it now?' Over the past few decades, so called 'rape revenge movies' have become more and more popular. Nothing quite as visceral as a woman hunted and abused standing victorious over her abusers, covered in their blood and not her own. And yet this is not how the story goes and the release those movies offer is false. (For a great review and take on this, see Pajiba's review of Promising Young Woman.) As such, I couldn't help but return to this question of why  Freitas would put herself back out there like this, actively addressing her abuser this time.

The open letter has existed for a very long time. Although (usually) addressed to only one person, these letters are meant for a wide circulation, meant to be read by as many people as possible. Perhaps the most famous is Émile Zola's J'accuse...!, directed at the French president but published in L'Aurore in 1898 to draw attention to the anti-semitism at play in the arrest and sentencing of Alfred Dreyfus. There are various reasons for writing open letters like this, not the least of them being to engender a sense of shame in the person addressed that their misdeeds are now so publicly known. In the case of Dear Professor, I dare say the key ones at play are both a desire to draw wider attention to the issue of stalking and the desire to show that one can live well after. While she has no interest in ever seeing her stalker again, Freitas, through her work and through her writing, makes it clear that this is an issue that still engages her. 

 Freitas' tone is accusatory, but also jubilant. She is not goading but she is radiating a freedom that must outrage her stalker. She also uses Dear Professor as a place to explain some of her own choices, such as not publicly naming her stalker or staying off social media. Both are understandable and once again make the case that life isn't a Hollywood movie. There may never be a completely satisfying end to these kinds of crimes. Freitas does her best to be as uplifting as possible in Dear Professor, but the undercurrent of fear is still there and it is sadly one that I believe no victim of stalking can ever quite shake. But through publishing her account and putting her own words to paper, by confronting it head on publicly, Freitas does inspire a kind of hope. I will definitely be reading her memoir, Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention, next. 

I give this book...

4 Universes.

Freitas shares a few very important messages in this open letter, namely both her remaining fear and her determination to keep moving forward. Stalking is a difficult thing to move past but I believe that by sharing her account Freitas can help other men and women to also take that next step.