Epilogue. My thoughts on Surviving Keri Smith, and messages for people in the story.
This is the end. For now. But who knows what tweets we'll see in 2023.
Don’t start here. This is the end of the story, for now.
Start at chapter 1.
I’m writing this starting at 12:23am on January 1, 2023, and my husband just made me watch a movie called Dog to ring in the new year.
It’s about a traumatized dog that was embedded with the Army Rangers in warzones and was taking her final trip to her master’s funeral, and then to be put down, being driven by a person who served under her master who has mental health challenges of his own.
Movies about dogs always make me cry, whether they have a good or a bad ending, and I told my husband so. He promised me there was a good ending.
And there was.
But I still cried.
And then my husband said “it’s a movie about how things can get better. He and the dog healed each other.”
No matter how bad things get, there can always be healing.
I hadn’t quite wrapped up the final chapter of this book when I sat down to watch the movie and I’ll publish this epilogue after I get it done, but I wanted to write this now. Because the movie and my husband’s words resonated with what I’ve been going through in the past two years with this - things can get bad, but they can always get better.
Writing this book has been a cathartic experience for me, and I kick myself for not doing it earlier.
I really thought that if I just showed people the tweets that they were sending, that would be enough to get them to see the full scale of this, but you can’t comprehend the journey of the past two years until you look at it in this format, with context and explanation. I wish I had done it this way from the beginning. Maybe I would have been able to stop Keri and her cancel horde before they came for my friend.
There is a still a mob that exists on the internet that is out for my blood to this day, and that mob has been almost entirely created because of the things you’ve seen Keri Smith do in this book. This is something I will never escape from, and the people in that mob will never look at the truth. All they know is outrage.
But, at least I’ve finally said my peace on it. And have something to show people all the evidence. It’s made me much more calm about the entire situation. If anything ever happens to me, people will know exactly where to look, and I suppose that’s something.
Whether or not there are future chapters in this book is entirely up to Keri. Given that one of her last acts of 2022 was to go back to her old habits of pretending none of this is happening, I don’t have high hopes. If she wants to keep on tweeting then I’m more than happy to keep on documenting it for posterity. It will be much easier now that I’ve caught up on every single tweet for the past two years. Now it’s just a matter of maintenance, and I’ll be able to do things in real-time.
But I hope it’s unnecessary. I hope that Keri looks at what she’s done - really looks at it - and chooses another path.
As the last part of the story, for now, I wanted to use this opportunity to write a final message to some of the people involved in this over the past few years.
To Keri Smith,
Keri, I am not your abusive mother.
I have absolutely no idea what I did to make you believe I’m your abusive mother.
I have no idea why it’s so important to you to spend so much of your energy smearing me on the internet.
We have spoken fewer times than I can count on one hand.
I don’t believe I’m the first person you’ve done this to.
I don’t believe I’ll be the last person you do this to.
You need to go to therapy.
Having written this entire book, and seeing the full breadth of your disorder for the first time, I feel sorrow for you.
It is sad that someone could spend this much energy trying to destroy another human being that they don’t even know.
I looked up to you, Keri. Your perspective helped me a lot when I was red pilling. For that work, I will always be grateful.
But now, I look down on you. Because I know that you’re just that scared child that was beaten by her mother and never got the help she needed to move on and is now working out her mommy issues on a stranger on the internet.
Your childhood was a sad thing, Keri, but that does not entitle you to take it out on someone else on the internet for over two years.
Whether or not this book continues is entirely and exclusively up to you. But if you keep up these games, I will keep writing chapters to document them. And you have nowhere to hide now, and no ability to say “I never talk about her!”
I’ve got over 1,000 screenshots of you not talking about me.
Move on with your life. Get therapy. Leave me alone. If you really think that I’m the narcissist you claim I am, then HG Tudor told you the very best thing you could do to hurt me was to go no contact.
Take his advice, Keri. Go no contact.
To Keri’s pastor, Bradley J Helgerson of the Church on the Square in Georgetown Texas,
You, sir, are one of two things: You’re either a coward or a hypocrite.
You claim to be a man of God. And yet, you know what Keri is doing. You have been begged for help. And you’ve done nothing.
It’s either because you’re scared of Keri, and are therefore a coward, or because you don’t care, which makes you a hypocrite.
I don’t know which it is and, to be frank, I really don’t care.
But if I had to bet, I’d rather bet that you’re a coward.
You know what Keri will do to you if you question her, and you don’t want to make yourself a target.
I know that God will forgive you, Bradley. Because the God I know loves everyone unconditionally.
The question I have is if you can watch this play out right in front of you, perpetrated by someone you are in charge of guiding, and still forgive yourself for your failures.
I know that I would have trouble forgiving myself if I knew I was in a position to have stopped this much suffering but was too much of a coward to do it.
To both Keri Smith and Bradley J Helgerson,
The offer of sitting down for a conversation with me and my spiritual advisor is open. And as I said in chapter 9, I won’t yell or shout or even swear (even though I think many people in my position would) because I would never disrespect the wishes of my spiritual advisor like that.
I’m offering this because I will do whatever is required to end this.
And maybe, just maybe, seeing what happened presented this way will give you pause to reconsider your actions.
If this doesn’t happen, it’s because you refused, not because I didn’t offer you a clear opportunity.
To Mike Harlow,
You are a walking piece of STD-ridden human garbage, and I suspect you will spend the rest of your life as an abject failure in almost every way.
To Kieran,
You and I are the only two people in the world who know what happened in those 6-10 hours a day we spent on zoom, every day for six months.
We both know what the truth is.
And we both know the stories that you have spread on the internet bear no resemblance to what actually happened at all.
When you try to destroy other people, you only end up destroying yourself.
I never tried to destroy you, Kieran. I gave you every single opportunity I could to choose a different path.
It was you who decided on destruction.
It never had to be this way, and you could be doing so much more than you are. I hope one day you realize that, and I hope you don’t do too much damage to yourself before you do.
To Aaron,
There are no words to express how sorry I am.
I should have known better. I really just never thought they would go this far, or be this vindictive. It didn’t occur to me. I’ve never seen human beings sink this low. I’ve seen a new depth of evil in all of this, and you didn’t deserve to be caught up in it.
I believe I was meant to marry my husband in this lifetime. There is no doubt in my mind. He is a good man, my rock, the person I needed by my side to do the things I came here to do.
But in another life, we may have ended up together. I will never forget how you made me feel from the moment we met in college, on every single phone call, in every letter, every time I visited you in prison, every time we saw each other after you got out, to even the last time we spoke. It wasn’t always rosy, that’s true. But there is no one that has had a greater impact on me than you.
There are some things that are greater than one lifetime.
What they did to you is one of the few major regrets that I’ve experienced, and I will carry around the guilt of it for the rest of my life.
I am so, so, so sorry.
I hope you can forgive me, and I hope in our next lifetime together we can take that vacation.
