“Something was off, and I didn’t want to be around him. Fast forward a year, I saw that he had been arrested...”

I'm Claudia, an NYC-based editor on the Tasty team covering all things food, whether it's a viral recipe, the latest food drama, or politicians awkwardly standing in a Steak 'N Shake.

Note: This post contains mentions of sexual assault and murder.

"Kiddo had an awful migraine-like headache, so I decided to take him to his pediatrician to have a blood sugar run. I expressed my concerns, and the doc pooh-poohed me, spending a lot of time congratulating my son on his weight loss. 

She was resistant to running a blood sugar, but I insisted – sure enough, type 1 diabetes with a dangerous blood sugar of nearly 500. Sometimes, moms just know. Also, fuck that doc."

"A month later, it started going off; he'd been indicted, assets frozen, fled in his private jet, and eventually got picked up at a cheap motel in Canada. 

A year or so after that, I got interviewed by the FBI, mostly questions to establish who of his 'employees' I met and about his lifestyle (presumably to try to make a tax fraud case, although they ended up just getting him on Ponzi charges)."

"It was so strange. They brought him out in handcuffs with no audible discussion, and they were gone as quickly as they arrived.

Months later, we found out from the news that he owned a few rental properties and was accused of sexually assaulting one of his tenants. He also had cameras set up in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his rentals and filmed his tenants. 

Apparently, the reason for the response was that he sent messages from his work computer threatening to kill the tenant he assaulted."

"After two days of walking and talking with her friends, one of her girlfriends finally snaps and yells, 'Why are you talking so quietly? What the hell is wrong with you? No one can hear you!! You never talked under your breath before! What the hell?'

She looked at me and knew her ass was busted. So, for years and years, it was just a petty way to put one over on me, I guess. This was a 30-year-old grown-ass woman. I'll never understand it. "

"We then talked about how we'd discuss my career plans for the upcoming year next time. I can't emphasize enough that when we talked about this, it felt like it would not happen.

Fast-forward a week, and I get an invite from my boss's boss. It was a Zoom meeting with our VP of engineering to lay me off."

"The moment I saw her pay structure, I knew she was making money off the company in other ways. There was NO WAY she was settling for that salary after being there for so many years and for the work she did. I just knew. 

Fast-forward a few years, and it turns out she'd been embezzling significant amounts of money from the company. She submitted false expense reports to pay for everything from groceries to gas to food delivery to vacations, and no one caught it because she was the head of the department. 

It all came to light when a new junior employee saw a suspicious Amazon expense and brought it to the COO. An investigation revealed tens of thousands of dollars in embezzled funds. I quit soon after the discovery, but I hear they're pressing criminal charges against her. Somehow, I just knew!"

"His baby mama blew him up at one point, and I overheard her say something along the lines of, 'This is a betrayal of trust.' When questioned about it, he tried saying it was just because he texted a female friend, consoling her because she lost her mom. My alarm bells were going off. 

Why is your baby mama upset about that? Why is that considered a betrayal of trust? There's no way this is just her 'being crazy' because this woman was perfectly fine with us dating and has been nothing but a sweetheart to me, but suddenly, she was up in arms over him doing something as innocent as consoling a friend who lost her mom.

Anyway, I finally asked him if things were really okay between him and me. He tells me that he just thinks things aren't stable enough for him to have a relationship at the moment and that he doesn't have the mental energy to give me the attention I deserve. Fine. We leave it amicable and go our separate ways.

I still had a feeling in my stomach. Something wasn't right. Right before he started acting weird, he told me that he had wanted to be with me for a very long time,  that he thought we were perfect together, and that he loved me. If you love someone and you're that serious about them, I'd think that even if you're going through tough times, you'd lean on them or want them around, right?

Less than a month later, guess what? I found out that the girl he was consoling was indeed his new girlfriend."

"I figured it was SARS and told my husband he needed to think about ways to teach from home because the shit would hit the fan if/when it made it to the US. He never once doubted my prediction because one of my hobbies is studying past epidemics and pandemics (SARS, Ebola, Marburg, smallpox, influenza).

I knew it was going to be bad, whatever it was, but I had no clue just how bad COVID-19 would be. My cat lived, so that's nice."

"I called my sister and asked if she took my dress. She said that the dress was very ugly, she hadn't taken it, and didn't need it anymore since I was a 'bitch,' and she'd bought her own, which was a lot nicer. I said, 'Okie, dokie. Well, where is mine then? The exact one you wanted to borrow is missing now.' 

She became irate and furious that I was accusing her of stealing. We had another argument, this time about the dress missing. She was adamant that I was extremely rude in accusing her of stealing. I was angry because she had slinked into my parents' house unbeknownst to any of us and taken it. 

Anyway, she went to the wedding and posted a photo of her outfit, and indeed, it wasn't the dress that was missing. One week later, we sorted out our differences, and she demanded an apology for the accusations of stealing. We sorted things out, and I apologized. 

I went to her house after work. At this time, I was working in hospitality, so the usual routine was to come over to her to hang out, but I changed into some pants and another of her shirts to be comfortable. It was normal for me to grab something out of her closet. 

This time, she flew into her room and pushed me out of the way, and it dawned on me: it's my dress. Her then-boyfriend was lying in bed and said, "The gig is up; just give it to her."

I pulled her out of the way and flung her cupboard doors open, and there it was: my dress. She really had snuck into the back door of my parent's house and taken it when I was right down the other end of the house, snuck out again, and went home with it. 

I looked back at her and said, 'I fucking knew it.'"

"My friends thought I was jealous of him, but I knew something wasn't right about his rise in such a short time.

Then, he bought multiple luxury cars and flats, spent millions on parties, and flexed his wealth. No one believed me. This year, he was arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. 

Now, he is in jail, and all his assets have been seized by authorities. Everyone in my circle was like, 'Holy fuck, you were right.'"

"A year into their faculty position, their former postdoc lab, upon being unable to repeat any experiments or build on the data, figured out that the person had fabricated or fudged at least 60% of results that had been published in top-tier journals. 

We're talking outright fabrication, not just a slightly too contrast-enhanced micrograph or blot. They reported this to the funding agencies, and there was a full investigation. They lost their grants, and the university fired them.

It turns out a similar thing happened when I talked to someone in the person's PhD lab. Some really questionable Western blots had been overly processed and cropped in ways that were definitely misleading. At least one Master's student burned a year trying to build on that work and got nowhere.

It turns out that one of the golden children of my PhD program and someone who was featured by funding agencies as the next big thing had built their scientific career mostly on lies, and it took 10 years for anyone to really catch on.

There are some really great scientists who just happen to land on fruitful projects, but no one is that productive and lucky all the time."

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here. 

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.