This afternoon I happened to stumble across blogger and freelance writer Raincoaster's story about her brush with Canadian pig farming serial killer Robert "Willy" Pickton.  One of the fascinating things about Raincoaster's story is that she knew this guy was Bad News about five minutes into their first conversation.  

We talk about "instinct" and "gut feelings," and those terms are a useful (if vague) way to describe it.  And at the time, it can feel like a sudden flash of insight, the warning bells go off in your head and you don't really understand why.

In this case, that moment is easy for the audience to pinpoint.  Pickton said that he would phone her when his photographs had been developed, and asked for her number.  Something about this unsettled her, so she refused to give him her number, and asked for his instead.  He refused, and then effectively sealed his Creep Certificate by hounding her for her number.

"That morning, my mother had been telling me to get out more, meet more men, say yes more, take more chances. I looked at Willy and thought "you are not the chance my mother would want me to take." "

Asking a woman for her phone number in a business-ish context doesn't necessarily raise warning flags.  But when she says "I'd rather not," the normal response would be to apologize, back off from the request, and offer your own number instead, or come to a different arrangement.  

If you know what you're looking for, you have already seen it.  Pickton 1) refuses to take "No" for an answer, and 2) not only fails to respect Raincoaster's boundaries, but takes them as a personal affront and challenge.  Those two things?  Red flags.  Big ones.  

And yet - and this is part of the fascination of her story - Raincoaster doesn't fully heed her own warnings.  She weights the opinions of strangers (like Old Hippie) above her own instincts.  And even so, she doesn't weight them highly enough to abandon Pickton altogether, although she shows admirable skills by setting it up so that their second meeting involves a collection of safeguards.

Safeguards which, it must be said, prevent her from ending up dead on a pig farm.  So don't let anyone tell you you're being silly by insisting on safeguards.  That is why they call them "safeguards."

The second thing that I noticed about this story is that it has a handful of very vocal detractors, who attack Raincoaster for having told her story. I know, right?!

I personally like to pretend that there is one person who spends his entire life patrolling the internet for inaccuracies.  When he encounters them, no matter how small, he posts a comment correcting the inaccuracy.  I call him The Fact Checker, and he posts comments under a legion of names.  

But his aim is always the same: to discredit the whole by nitpicking the miniscule.  As if an incorrect fact were not just an affront to the heavens, but a loose thread which, once plucked, unravels the whole.

I don't know why The Fact Checker is so vehemently against open communication on the internet, since that's what it's FOR.  But his work is intended to have a chilling effect, to silence the voices which speak up to share their stories.  I assume that The Fact Checker strikes the blogs of men as well as women, although it seems to me that The Fact Checker only attacks women's speech.  (But I'm sure that if I say that, The Fact Checker will quickly set me right!)