Without Feathers | Blog | 4.02.04: Dear Audrey Seiler

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.
Clare Booth Luce

Dear Audrey Seiler

4.02.04

I’m pissed at you. I really am. Why? Because you give 20-year-old girls a bad name, making us look like flighty, attention-seeking airheads. Because you wasted my money as a taxpayer, and my time as a television viewer and news reader. I’m pissed because I actually sat and watched that entire police manhunt that took up the whole of Wednesday afternoon, and I worried that there was some nutcase on the loose around a college campus. And you know why I’m really pissed? I was happy to hear you were alive and well. I felt happy that you had been found alive and unharmed, when in actuality you’d just been having a laugh at everyone’s expense.

So you’re back, alive and well. You had the entire Midwest freaking out, you had search parties looking for you, your case had around-the-clock news coverage and national attention. Everyone you’d ever known came out of the woodwork to tell the media what a good person you were, what a great student, what a decent individual, what a fighter, what a survivor. Is that what you wanted? If so, you got it.

I was surprised—yes, and pleased—when I heard you’d been found alive. I was even more surprised when I heard you hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Pardon my cynicism, but what adult male kidnaps a young woman for no apparent reason and doesn’t sexually assault her in some way? Unless your “abductor” was wrangling for a ransom, and there was no hint of that. Add that to your account of your attack in February, when you were knocked unconscious from behind by an unknown assailant, whose face you didn’t see, who didn’t rob or assault you. How lucky are you, to have come unscathed through two incidents in less than a month? That’s when I started to think, Hmm. This sounds a little bit fishy.

And now I hear that everything you said was a lie. So what’s your motive? Why did you do this? Don’t tell me it was because you needed to “be alone.” Hell, every college student who lives in a dorm could use some time alone, but most of them manage to get some downtime without pulling a disappearing act. If you had reappeared and told the truth, told everyone that you’d just needed to get away from it all, you’d get a lot more sympathy and a lot less anger. But no, you had to go and lie, just to get your name in the papers, and now the entire nation is pissed at you. Good going, Audrey.

If this was meant to be a prank, it was a damn stupid one. A prank is cotton-stuffed chocolate candy. A prank is having everyone in the class slam their books shut at the exact same time, just to freak out the teacher. A prank is covering a friend’s entire apartment with tinfoil. A prank is funny, goofy, sometimes a little mean, but all meant in good humor. This was not funny. This was not meant in good humor. And you’d have to be incredibly cruel to do this to your friends and family. This prank wasted the valuable time and resources of the police, who have better things to do than deal with stupid college girls who think it’s fun to pretend some guy whisked them away at knifepoint. As far as I’m concerned, everyone in Wisconsin has a right to sue you, because you wasted their money as taxpayers.

But what really makes me angry is that you took attention away from the real victims. Every day, someone in this country is kidnapped for real. Every day, police are swamped with genuine Missing Persons cases, cases that have few leads and are often never solved. Every day, some family is crying because the person they love is gone. And every time a new abduction is reported, women everywhere have one more thing to be afraid of. Whether the latest psycho is after our kids or ourselves, we have to live in fear. We have to stay off the streets at night, we have to lock our doors, we have to tell our kids not to talk to strangers, we have to watch everyone, everything, everywhere, because everyone is a potential attacker now. And every time we hear of a new abduction, we lose a little more freedom. Don’t we have enough problems with kidnappings and missing people already? Why did you have to go and dump this shit on us?

As a woman, I’m pissed. As a 20-year-old, I’m pissed. As a taxpayer, I’m pissed. And as a human being, I am pissed. You remind me of Susan Smith, and you make me almost as mad. I’m just glad no one died in this case.

I hope your plan came off the way you wanted it to. If you realized during the planning stages that you’d frighten and sicken your family and friends, piss off the police force by making them waste their time and money on you, anger the nation, and pretty much ruin your future, then your plan worked brilliantly. If you wanted to earn the disgust of everyone on campus, you’ve pretty much done that, too. Good thing for you that I didn’t go to the U of W at Madison like I had originally planned, because I’d have no problem marching right up to you and saying all this to your face. But then, I might not even have seen you after this stunt—I’d be surprised if you didn’t end up expelled.

April Fool, Audrey. But I think you’ll find that the joke, in the end, is on you.