From meager beginnings...and I mean meager. I just thought to myself how this whole project of online informing came about and I have to tell you...with almost 10,000 hits this month...there were times when I never thought I'd even reach 100. Now it's up to all of you. Spread the word about this crime in Palm Springs, California so that we can all spread the word around the world. I have to be honest about how this started and how proud I am of each and every attempt to learn more from all of you.
When I started the original blog "HateLisa" it was really something I was doing to try to communicate with Christopher Monti when he got out of the same rehab I'd sent him to. Lori Jean Marie LaFond, was spying on the two of us and everyone else in our community. I was at an all time low and I really just wanted to talk to Christopher. We were already informants but it was going to be at least two months or more before he was better and back in Palm Springs. I knew that Lori would never allow our phone numbers to connect so I had to come up with an idea that would let Christopher know that I was okay and where he could find me if he needed to. I tried calling his mother, but Lori already disallowed those calls to go through.
I can remember that Lori had changed her name from "Jessica" on this system to "Lisa" and everyone that she'd victimized told me, "I hate Lisa!" It was common enough that I wrote the first blog "HateLisa" based on the character that Lori Jean LaFond plays on the microphone. It's a bit like "I hate Cruella Deville" not "I hate Emma Stone" but the character she plays. Lori jumped on that and told everyone how misogynist I sounded for the name of the blog but the victims recognized it immediately.
A blog, which I knew nothing about making, would stand as a website kiosk for this crime. If I could keep Lori from logging into it, I could keep it up so people would know the truth about my experience with electronic harassment and could find out about what they are experiencing. Lori has a way of taking over websites using phone number portability. There are more problems with that later...
I then learned how to blog. Not that hard. I use Blogger; a Google app that I absolutely recommend. It is push button blogging and really quite easy. The first blog "HateLisa" was a total mess but it did to one thing. It told people that someone knows about this crime and they weren't the only people going through it. Most of the victims being gay, I started to put up flyers all over the gay area of town. That, in Palm Springs, California, is the Warm Sands section. This is the area that Lori first moved to out of high school. So she went from being a homophobic bully in high school right into the heartbeat of the gay community in Palm Springs. Similarly, her AIDS virus went with her...and boy did she spread it around, intentionally, just like she wrote about in her diary.
I digress.
So with Christopher at "The Ranch"; the best rehab I've ever heard of, I began writing the first blog. I would write as much as I could and I understood very little about how this Blogger program worked so it was formatted weird. All I wanted to do was get the word out that I also was a victim of this crime and I wanted to know more. I called up a few Assistant U.S. Attorneys that I knew from San Diego and told them that something weird was going on in Palm Springs. There were a few attorneys too. I was directed to the Western District of California in Riverside where I had another friend working. So I dropped off some information for my friend at the court to give to the U.S. Attorney in Riverside, California.
In the meantime I had to advertise the "HateLisa" blog. So I printed up hundreds maybe a thousand flyers, grabbed some rolls of masking tape, made some posters, and headed out to Warm Sands. I must have put up a million flyers, but it was basically everywhere I thought that Christopher would look. I wanted him to know that I was looking for him and that I was worried about his safety. They were taped everywhere. Lori, of course, called the police and had me talked to by an officer. I wasn't going to stop. Someone else started putting up stickers then I started going to every single crosswalk in the city. That's where people walk, that's where I wanted a sign. Slowly but surely, the word got out and I started meeting up with victims that I'd never heard of. I would let them tell me their story only after they would fill out a questionnaire. Lori went after them too. One she threatened, "If you talk to Kevin Bond, I will put you in jail." He told me that. It was like a week later he was picked up for a DUI...only he didn't have anything but a half glass of wine. Lori cackled about how powerful she was. Really it was just a matter of Lori lying to the police.
I got really lucky one day while I was out putting up flyers. I saw Christopher! He was being nice to me but cautious. Apparently the entire time I was waiting for Christopher to get out of rehab, Lori was calling the rehab lying about me there. He was cautious but I gave him a flyer so he knew the web address of the HateLisa blog.
It was a slow start but it did help to launch this project. I wanted my friends to stop dying or Lori putting them in jail. I knew how she was and eventually she put both Christopher and Anthony in jail. Jonathan she made look dead online in an obituary. Then Lori sent me a letter in the mail detailing his death. I was really hurt. The blog was getting something like a hundred hits a month and people would ask me questions about the crime, but it needed fire!
We were averaging about a thousand hits a month a few weeks ago...which I was still proud of, but this is what the numbers look like as of right now:
As of 5:16am, these are our numbers...
Here's what the all time graph looks like...whew...that's a jump!!!
