I was psychologically tortured in Exurb1a’s ‘Experiment A’
I was abused, stalked, bullied, threatened, framed, harassed and defamed by a man who did an inhumane experiment on me.
I am Experiment A.
Since January 2021 I’ve allowed YouTuber BulletBarry to investigate the details of what I went through in 2016 (suggested reading material before reading this article). This investigation - which Barry has been doing with the help of journalists Mathilda Mallinson and Kat Tenbarge - has been a difficult process for me to go through, because I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Barry and I had to go through old chat-logs, recorded audio messages and videos for months, before he saw enough and felt confident to publicly address influencer Alexander McKechnie in the videos ‘Dear Exurb1a’ and ‘The Exurb1a Criminal Case Explained’, below. In the videos, Barry made public he’s working on a documentary about what happened to me. The series (yes, multiple episodes) will be titled ‘Experiment A’. (For more info, you can also watch the livestream Barry and I did where we discuss the project).
In short: I was a ‘subject’ in an inhumane pseudoscientific experiment that was manipulated - without my knowledge - by the man who lured me into partaking in it.
In 2016 I participated in this experiment, but it happened without informed consent. It was proposed by my then co-worker (youtuber Exurb1a) whom I’ll refer to as the Proposer. He called this project ‘Experiment A’. It revolved around capturing and researching synchronicity; circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection. In other words, ‘strange coincidences’.
An example of a bizarre ‘synchronicity’ would be if you were watching a movie about a clown and next, when you open your door, you find a clown standing in front of it.
Another bizarre synchronicity would be if you dreamt about receiving a package containing a clown mask and the very next day you received a package with that very same mask you dreamt about, while you didn’t order it.
You can probably imagine if ‘synchronicities’ like this happen a lot to you, it might start to scare you and eventually even make you unstable.
Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity and was fascinated by meaningful coincidences. In 2016, the Proposer and I were as well, due to a strange coincidence that happened between us when we met in March 2016. So he proposed ‘Experiment A’: to capture ‘synchronicity’ everywhere, in ‘everything we notice’. This included capturing dreams and deja-vu’s (something he claimed to have a lot). He said we were ‘duty-bound to keep journals of every time this shit turns up’ which I then started doing, among others in an online document I gave him access to so he could evaluate my ‘synchronicities’.
Carl Jung termed the coin ‘synchronicity’.
The Proposer used suggestion in the beginning to subconsciously plant a seed in my mind: that synchronicity potentially was a force that was ‘loving and kind’ (since he had “never found it to be otherwise”). Suggestion is the psychological process by which a person guides the thoughts, feelings, or behaviour of another person.
I participated in this experiment while I was under the impression that I could trust the Proposer and we were doing research. In hindsight, the Proposer started manipulating synchronicity during this experiment. He orchestrated strange coincidences, to make me feel ‘synchronicities’ between us were ‘increasing’. Eventually I ‘fell in love’ with him, after we started collaborating on this experiment and other creative projects.
After months of ‘exploding synchronicity’, I eventually became terrified of these synchronicities and started having nightmares, panic attacks and went through states of derealisation (the feeling that you’re not real). The Proposer of Experiment A was aware of this when my mental health started declining, but still: he kept the experiment going. He didn’t inform me of the lies he had told me and how he had been manipulating me. However, he left clues of what he was doing, in the shape of metaphors in his poetry to me, and even in scripts he wrote for ‘potential films’ we could make that I was supposed to ‘direct’. This all will be featured in the documentary BulletBarry is working on.
A moment in the summer of 2016 I will never forget was when the Proposer told me in person: ‘One day you will see through the pattern, and when you do, I know you can’t love me anymore’. I didn’t understand what he meant when he told me this originally. Now, I do see the pattern.
A little over 6 months into Experiment A, the Proposer started bringing up suicide and death to me very regularly. On September 1 (2016) for example, the Proposer compared us to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (a couple who were both poets), and said he hoped we would be ‘great’ like them, before Plath ‘killed herself’. This conversation I showed at the end of ‘Dear Soren’; a conceptual video which I made to show the reality of PTSD.
Poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
The Proposer would push nihilism and determinism on me, the idea that the universe is a simulation and that I wasn’t real. He did this while still manufacturing ‘synchronicities’.
It’s a strange thing when you aren’t consciously aware of how a person is manipulating you and forcing your mind into a dark direction, but that subconsciously your mind can be aware something is terribly wrong and it tries to warn you. Psychology students and those working in the field, may find a dream I had around this time interesting: one I wrote to the Proposer as part of Experiment A. In the dream, a friend of mine (and the daughter of a couple of artists) fell down a cliff and I had to save her. While I did save her, my ‘philosopher’s stone’ (a mythical alchemical substance that is considered the elixer of life) fell though, and the Proposer stole it while he resembled Voldemort; the villain in the Harry Potter series.
After the Proposer compared himself and me to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath before she ‘killed herself’, his view on synchronicity potentially being a ‘loving, kind’ force changed. He started to try to convince me “synchronicities are the foreshadowing of a future event”. He also claimed he could “think of several ways to prove it”.
The Proposer would slip the topic of suicide in conversations regularly around this point, while he knew I wasn’t doing well. Most of this happened during Skype calls which obviously weren’t recorded, but luckily there’s text evidence of it too. For example, a little over three weeks after the Hughes/Plath comment, days after I told the Proposer about a severe depressive episode I was going through, he sent me a video titled ‘24 & ready to die’, about a person who wanted to end their own life and have euthanasia.
The Proposer would also talk about his own future suicide to me because he was sure his life ‘would end that way’. Meanwhile, he didn’t stop creating these ‘fake synchronicities’ around me. Eventually due to these ‘orchestrated synchronicities’ and the ideas he put in my mind, I started to feel like I had no control over my life anymore, no free will, that everything was ‘determined’ and something bad was going on. The man put me through an existential crisis. I started to feel like the (in hindsight fake) synchronicities that were happening were my own fault and destiny essentially, and that I was a slave to a plan that had already been set out for me and that I couldn’t escape. It made me feel like I wasn’t real. It made me feel like I had to kill myself to stop the pain.
It took a long time before I found out what the Proposer had been doing to me. I found out not long after he sexually abused me the first time. He abused me weeks after he found out on October 12 (2016), that I would potentially kill myself if life would ‘throw more shit my way’.
Once you compare the date of the conversation between the Proposer and myself about suicide, to the date (October 20, 2016) mentioned by one of the shock witnesses about the first rape, little is left to the imagination as to how sick it is to sexually abuse the person you claim you love, while they are going through a depressive episode.
In November 2016, I was committed on a psychiatric ward at Zuyderland hospital, for being suicidal as a result of the Proposer did to me. I was hospitalised for a period of 7 months. The mental health care I received just from December 2016 - December 2017 already, cost over 51200 euros (roughly 60769 dollar). At this point after 4 years, the care I received has cost over 80000 euros.
While I was hospitalised, the Proposer tried to stop me from speaking to my health care professionals about things he had told me. He bullied me and tried to make me feel guilty about speaking to my doctors, which I told him I was trying to do so they could help analyse his behaviour to see if he was manipulating me. He said I violated his trust with it because I had promised to never talk about specific things he told me. He said because I had violated his trust by speaking to medical professionals about him, I was a ‘liar’. This has all been captured in messages between us that will be featured in the documentary.
After he found out I tried asking for help from the people who were supposed to protect me and that I was planning to file a criminal complaint, the Proposer used threats and blackmail to coerce me to meet him, while I was still hospitalised. He said he would frame me publicly as someone who had been blackmailing him. He said this while I was suicidal.
This escalated into him luring me out of the hospital this way (while I was still committed). Outside the hospital he threatened and sexually abused me again, while I was unable to defend myself due to doctor’s administered medication I was prescribed at the time. One of the medications I was taking from the hospital had been Xanax (Alprazolam); a medicine known as a ‘date-rape’ drug, just to give you an idea of the effects it causes.
This might seem like a sexual abuse case alone, unless you know about Experiment A and are aware of all the nightmares I had written to the Proposer during this experiment, as part of the experiment. Once you find out specific nightmares I wrote to him (that have not been made public yet) and that he basically played them out in reality, you will start to understand why this isn’t a ‘simple’ sexual abuse case alone, but far darker, and you will probably start to understand why I became so suicidal and unstable at the time. It was easier for me initially to accept that ‘everything was determined’ due to the ‘synchronicities’ that happened, than to accept that a person I loved who claimed he loved me, did the things he did to me, maliciously. The idea I had been but a Subject in a manipulated experiment invented by a sociopath, was unbearable.
After what this man did, a criminal case followed that became a scandal in my country due to the botched police investigation into the case, the non-investigation into my case, the discrimination I faced as a result of becoming a psychiatric patient due to what the Proposer did to me, and due to the fact that I had to trace him myself because police couldn’t find him.
Details about Experiment A were kept out of the media to protect my family and me. Four long years I had to stay silent about it.
Until this day, the majority of evidence in the case (and specifically Experiment A) has not been looked at by the authorities and it’s become a legal (and expensive) hell to just have the most basic things investigated. Even more so because I’ve become a whistleblower; I testified against my own government and their neglect to investigate complex criminal cases like mine, and frankly, they don’t like me a lot due to it. I’ve been intimidated by government officials to stay silent about details concerning the case, to the point where I feel it’s dangerous for me to not make them public. So I decided to stop staying silent about some of those details.
Until this day, funny ‘coincidences’ that happen to me trigger my fight, flight or freeze response as a result of PTSD. I link them to danger now, which is not a hoot given funny coincidences are just a part of life. I’m still surviving. If you follow me on Twitter, you might occasionally catch me Tweeting during a PTSD episode (I get quite ‘expressive’ when I go through one), after which I usually temporarily go offline to protect myself. When strange coincidences increase in my life, it feels like the ‘2016 blueprint’ of what the Proposer did to me is ‘activated’, and I get suicidal thoughts and the feeling that I have no control, everything is determined, and I have no free will. This is the result of the inhumane experiment he did on me. ‘Normal’ things have become dangerous for me because they activate things in my brain which cause my autonomic nervous system to respond in a way it’s not supposed to respond.
It’s a cruel thing to make an autistic person hyperfocus and search for ‘meaningful coincidences’, to only then actively create those ‘meaningful coincidences’ to mess with their mind, without telling them you’re doing it. It’s even more cruel if you keep doing that while you already know they are suicidal, and meanwhile talk about death to them almost constantly.
What the Proposer did to me was create a radar in my brain for frequency illusion. Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency (a form of selection bias). Through ‘sophisticated’ psychological torture in combination with sexual abuse, the Proposer instilled my post-traumatic stress disorder. The past 4 years through medication and therapy I’ve been trying to undo this ‘blueprint’, but it’s proven not easy to ‘reset’ a brain damaged by trauma.
The documentary in the making has been quite the exposure therapy for me (exposure to triggers is recommended for PTSD patients). A nicer side effect of the documentary is that it’s helped put me back in the creative process. After a creative hiatus since 2017, I’ve gone back to making spoken word videos again, as a form of therapy to see if it can help me cope.
Example of a spoken word video. If you look closely you will find 2016 notes about Experiment A in the video.
Seeing how my own experiences have inspired my recent creative work, I’ve been thinking a lot about why Experiment A happened in the first place, why me, and where the inspiration came from.
From things he told me in the past about his interests, I personally would not be surprised the Proposer was among others inspired by his ‘fetish’ for women with mental health issues which I’ve previously disclosed, as well as by the experiments Ted Kaczynski supposedly was subjected to. Some people believe these experiments messed Kaczynski up and partially explain the terrorist attacks he later caused.
Ted Kaczynski.
Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, was a domestic terrorist who between 1978 and 1995 killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide ‘bombing campaign’. He committed his crimes after being subjected to an abusive psychological experiment at Harvard university, where after he wrote an essay about his worldview and personal philosophy, his ideals and beliefs were ‘attacked’ by a research team. The goal of the experiment was to explore the effects of stress on the human psyche and to assess the value of interrogation techniques used by law enforcement and national security agents in the field.
My personal philosophy in 2016 was that free will existed and nothing is determined and we always have a choice. These ideas the Proposer started attacking throughout the year due to his mind games, resulting in me starting to question my own sanity and whether I was real or not. How severe this got, and how the Proposer kept abusing me while he was aware I was in this disturbed mindset he caused, will all be shown in the upcoming documentary.
We suspect that the Proposer learned some of his ‘tricks’ (which he later used on me in a malicious way), in the Reddit community called Seduction. This is a misogynistic pick-up artist community he used to be active in and where he recommended people books about manipulation; specifically on how to manipulate women.
Due to the upcoming doc Experiment A, the Reddit community Seduction was investigated among others, and deleted posts from there. The Proposer posted himself in this community, in March 2012. It turns out that a month later, in April 2012, someone in this community made a post about using ‘synchronicity’ to make women feel like ‘they can read your mind’ (in order to create attraction).
Exurb1a posting in March 2012 in the ‘Seduction’ community on Reddit. Read his original post here.
An unknown user posting in the Seduction community in April 2012. Read the original post here.
In this ‘synchronicity’ post, someone in de Seduction community said “having weird synchronicity type moments definitely make girls swoon and feel more connected to you”. An example is given on how to do it: when a girl mentions something, say “that’s weird, because I was just thinking of…”
I think there’s a big chance the Proposer saw this post at the time, since he had been active in that community. Maybe he even posted it himself? So far we’ve not been able to uncover the original user who created it. If you compare the suggestion in this Seduction post (“that’s weird!”) to things the Proposer wrote me (“fun/interesting coincidence!”) in 2016, you can definitely see a similarity.
Using synchronicity to manipulate people, hasn’t only been discussed in the Seduction subreddit.
In 2013, in a Reddit community called NoSleep, a story was posted about ‘The voices of /X/’: a 4chan journal that ‘sent people insane’. Youtuber SomeOrdinaryGamers actually discussed this post in a video in March 2021.
The NoSleep post mentioned in 2013 that “Some time last year a group of anons on the 4chan paranormal board '/x/' randomly decided to start a journal recording their experiences of 'synchronicity”. It goes on stating these anons “wanted to try and get the bottom” of what synchronicity could possibly mean. The journal was called ‘Voices of /x/’ (VOX) and “encouraged people to record any events which they thought were out of the usual or even would make them seem crazy”. According to the post, what happened was that the more these anons recorded synchronicities, “the more they started to notice dark patterns within the events (…). Instead of reaching some great summit of enlightenment as they were hoping, they found instead that the imbued meaning seemed to point to some altogether dark or demonic force at work. For instance repeated incidents involve the words 'hell' or 'rape'.”
The NoSleep post mentions keeping the synchronicity journal “severely took its toll on the members who participated. Some felt that they were turning schizophrenic or that they had perhaps become possessed by demons or dark alien forces of some variety.” The author also mentions that the original creator of the journal got ‘so worn down by it all’ they had to spend some time in a psych ward.
A Reddit post in 2013 in the NoSleep community mentioning ‘The voices of X’.
Interestingly, the Proposer - using his Reddit account ‘exurbia’ - was active in this NoSleep Reddit community where the “4chan journal that sent people insane” post was shared in October 2013. In February 2015 the Proposer shared a story (mirror) in that same community; one about a girl named Alice who tortured her sister with a scalpel in front of their disabled father.
It’s not hard to imagine the Proposer might have seen the ‘synchronicity’ post in the NoSleep community in October 2013 before he posted there himself in February 2015, since he had already been active on Reddit in March 2013, when he posted in the Seduction community. When you compare details in the ‘Voices of X’ story (someone ending up on a psych ward due to keeping a synchronicity journal) to what happened to me, the similarities are striking. For the Proposer - someone who has a fetish for ‘mentally ill women’ who also enjoys manipulating people - the ‘Voices of X’ story might be a challenge: to see if he can instil mental illness in the woman he ‘loves’, by making her keep a similar synchronicity journal.
It’s a terrifying idea that communities such as the Seduction and NoSleep on Reddit are potentially used to draw inspiration from to conduct actual experiments on people, and that the ideas one can pick up there might fester for years before they’re turned into something actually malicious.
A deleted Reddit comment from the Proposer shows something particularly interesting given what he discussed with me in 2016 about consciousness and synchronicity.
In the RationalPsychonaut community, the Proposer mentioned (December 13, 2013) strange coincidences. In the comment, he said he had “extremely unsettling déjà vu episodes” throughout his life which in the past he tried to understand and find an answer to. He said “the current "physicalist" models weren't very satisfying (slightly delayed signals in the optic nerve, etc) so I started to think about what would happen if the moment really had been lived before. Could it be possible that consciousness could send moments in time back to itself, so the moment would seem familiar? The picture got more and more elaborate until I had a theory of retrocausality that I started trying to apply to everything from particle physics to odd coincidences in my life. It was all very sincere at the time and it felt incredibly reasonable.” He ends the comment by stating “Looking back (…) I can see I was a few fries short of a happy meal. It's left me with quite a sobering lesson I won't soon forget: if you rely on the feeling of an experience, you're going on extremely shaky evidence. This is empiricism 101 but we rarely apply it in our own lives. It's quite a fun episode to think back on now though. You live and learn.”
So in short, in 2013, the Proposer recognised his hyperfocus on strange coincidences and déjà vu’s and his theory relating to it that “consciousness could send moments in time back to itself”, was “a few fries short of a Happy Meal”; unintelligent and of questionable mental capacity.
If the Proposer recognised his hyperfocus and ideas such as “consciousness could send moments in time back to itself” in the past were crazy, then why on earth would he 3 years later in 2016 encourage an autistic individual (me) to keep a synchronicity diary, and months later tell that same autistic individual when they are going through a depressive episode those same ideas? That he felt synchronicities are the foreshadowing of a future event and that he suspected it had “something to do with consciousness interacting with itself from its own future”?
Why would the Proposer make an autistic person hyperfocus on strange coincidences and the like, ask her to keep a diary, while he himself already said in 2013 that when he looked into this topic too much, looking back, he was a “few fries short of a happy meal?”
I think the answer is easy: he didn’t seriously believe those ideas he had, as he already said in 2013. He just pushed them on me because he knew they made him close to crazy himself in the past and he probably suspected it would derail my mind further too, which was already derailing at the time when he told me these ideas. Go figure. He did this to someone he claimed he loved.
I hope that through Experiment A the documentary, I can help warn others about what our ‘loved ones’ might be capable of.
A big fear I’ve had is that through this documentary (that will be freely available), malicious people might be inspired to do the same thing the Proposer did to me, to someone else. However, I’ve realised that I can’t allow my life to be ruled by fear. I want it to revolve around hope: that through knowledge we can learn to protect ourselves better, and create a more empathetic society for all of us. I hope by sharing my experiences, I can attribute to that.
If you would like to support me on this journey, you’re more than welcome to become my Patron.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope this post helps answer some questions for those who’ve been messaging Barry and myself about the documentary. We ask you to please stay patient for the time being, as a documentary of this proportion takes a lot of time since we’ve asked journalists to help investigate as much evidence as possible to give you the confidence that what will be shown and told, is based on facts that have been verified.
Much love,
Pie
This article is part of a series. Please see The Dark Side of Justice for more information.
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