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    Dear Professor: A Woman's Letter to Her Stalker
    Dear Professor: A Woman's Letter to Her Stalker
    Dear Professor: A Woman's Letter to Her Stalker
    Audiobook48 minutes

    Dear Professor: A Woman's Letter to Her Stalker

    Written by Donna Freitas

    Narrated by Nan McNamara

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateApr 28, 2020
    ISBN9781094405001
    Author

    Donna Freitas

    Donna Freitas is a college professor whose research has focused on issues related to sex, romance, relationships and consent for over a decade. She has spoken about this work at schools across the country as well as on NPR, The Today Show, and many other radio and tv shows. She lives in Brooklyn.

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    Reviews for Dear Professor

    4/5

    157 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      this was very good, very real,i loved her writing, very entertaining as well
    • 4/5
      Well written and read.
      My just nature really wants this man brought to justice but I do understand why he isn't named.
      I really pray that you'll forgive him so you can be really free.
    • 1/5
      You never gave me a chance to read it it was taken away before I could listen what’s up with that?
    • 5/5
      Very good, enthralling. Wish they had her memoir as well.
    • 2/5
      Didn’t see the point of it in this vague version; I understand there’s an entire memoir on the subject and maybe that has more bite.
    • 4/5
      This is a strong letter! The authors courage is something to be admired and respected.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I felt so bonded to to this author. I too was abused by a professor and with no justice given in the end. I was in a study abroad program for the summer with my college. While I was away from my family, police, and any form of aid. My professor abused us in many ways while wearing a smile as he did it. To this day I’m still traumatized and my body is still damaged physically and mentally. It’s sad how I went to everyone I could but they said that I had no proof despite texts, witnesses and physical proof on my body from the physical trauma and starvation that I had gone through.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Love this so empowering, every one who has had a stalker should read this.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book will give u some real chills. Worth reading.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I truly enjoyed this book well done well withThank you for telling your story