One of the more bizarre things that
happened to me because I wrote Affairs Valentino, was being accused
of kidnapping a child. Here is how that happened.
In the fall of 2011, we decided to
retreat to a friend's familiar place in Morocco for a few months.
Despite the distance, the daily attacks against me, my work, my
family continued everyday online and there was no escaping that even in Africa. For a while I did my best to respond but that would come
to an end. As I have mentioned in some of our podcast episodes, when
David Bret threatened to open a blog against my ex-husband, I
panicked and closed my blog. This is the blog Tracy Terhune has run
ever since to divert web traffic and inspire hatred and scorn about
me and my husband.
Now in the fall of 2011, it seemed
David Bret was involved in another online furor. This was the
disappearance of the British child Madeleine McCann. I knew next to
nothing then about the case but as Bret was involved in an aggressive
assault on me and also heavily engaged with the McCann situation, it
was not long before some of them contacted me. I am still not sure of
the details of that mess but I believe Bret was against the child's
parents saying they were involved in her disappearance. In any case,
it was a heated battle about a tragic situation and one I wished to have no involvement with at all.
I made a post expressing my dismay that
Bret would have anything to do with missing children because the
nature of what he was posting about me then was highly sexual and
twisted beyond belief. This said my blog, before I closed it, was
soon being read by Bret's McCann enemies as they were all hoping for
some way to shut him up.
At one point I did begin to check their
sites and blogs to see what was going on. And it was then I read a
post one morning which reported how Scotland Yard had been contacted
because apparently the author of that blog had some form of tracker
on it to see who was reading. They went on to say that they believed
the McCann child had been taken to Morroco and since I was logging on
from my home in Morroco, they called authorities and gave them my IP
address. I guess they believed the kidnappers were reading their
blogs.
I remember looking at my laptop reading
that... thinking it was some sort of homing device and I was about to
be arrested by Interpol for the abduction of Madeleine McCann. I sent
an urgent message to the blog administrator and waited to hear back.
It was a long 24 hours before this was remedied.
Shortly after that I was forced into
closing the blog and went offline for almost one year hoping this
would stop the attacks. It did not and in fact made them worse.
I will add on this McCann subject that
David Bret has accused me of having his blog shut down then when he
was running some kind of petition; and I still have no idea what
the purpose of that was. I never had any of his blogs shut
down, although god knows I sure tried.
I think David Bret underestimated the
force and fury of his McCann enemies and over the next couple of
years they continued sporadically to contact me, send me images and
screenshots and keep me updated. I sent them a minimal response
and had little involvement with them because honestly I felt the case was one for the
authorities and not to be debated in some hysterical online battle.
Both sides in my opinion should have shut up.
I also add that at that time the
attacks against me from Bret were so vicious and unstoppable I was
trying anything I could for help. Some things I did were naive and
some frantic, desperate... but there was no manual as to how to deal
with such a thing. I did the best I could at the time and all in all
to no avail.
The McCann people faded away and I have
not heard from them in many years. They used to call me the
“Valentino Woman” and for a while we had something in common. And
for a little while they accused me of kidnapping.
In November of 2011, Renato and I
sailed home on the Grandi Navi Veloci and it was cold... see below:
