Eden was a psychopath. As a married woman with four children, and a fifth on the way, she hid it very well by masquerading in white picket fence normalcy. However, she was just as malignant and dangerous as any incarcerated male psychopath. In fact, when she was eventually diagnosed, she scored higher on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist1 than most of them.
Until recently, medical professionals believed that psychopaths were predominantly male, with a 7:1 ratio between men and women. However, recent studies suggested that female psychopaths are undercounted because their manipulative behaviors are less likely to be recognized as psychopathic traits. The revised ratio is almost 1:1.2 Dr. Clive Boddy, a professor specializing in corporate psychopathy, stated, “Where women differ, is that they rely on words (e.g. manipulation) rather than action (e.g. violence) to achieve their goals. As a result, they tend to fly under the radar.”3
Eden didn’t just fly under the radar. She soared on the wings of her manipulation and deception to con almost everyone into believing she was a wonderful, religious person of great character. The destruction Eden caused to families and people’s lives could fill several volumes of text books as a case study in psychopathy. This article will focus on just one aspect of that destruction. Her targeted data mining and how she used it defraud and destroy one man … her husband.
Setting the Stage
Eden was a divorced, single mother of four children when her future husband met her. She was a devout Christian in appearance. A Baptist who eschewed drinking, promiscuity, cursing and anything non-traditional. She was the picture-perfect home maker and traditional woman. At least that is how she presented herself to Jason … because she knew that is exactly what Jason wanted. How did she discover this? Through the classic psychopath tactic of data mining.
Initial Reconnaissance
She discovered Jason through his mother and then stalked him online, reading all his comments and building a psychological profile of him. His desires, his views, and most importantly, his weaknesses. She correctly concluded that he was conservative, very wary of gold diggers, hurt by women in the past, a non-churchgoer seeking spirituality, hard-working, loyal, a part-time author, lover of psychology, and very into self-improvement. She tailored the person she would portray herself as to complement all those things when she met him.
She did exactly that. A traditional, spiritual, intelligent, loving woman with family values. Jason swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker. Why? Because it was his dream come true, specially tailored for him. Little did he know that dream would become his worst nightmare.
Love Bombing
Eden was an over-the-top romantic with Jason. She played the traditional woman who wanted chivalry to the hilt. There was no hint of the amoral man-hater she really was. She implanted fun and romantic ideas into his head that he was more than willing to act on. Fun dates, fancy dinners, getaways, and more. She even lavished him with thoughtful gifts carefully tailored to what he loved. His military career, his technology bent, games he enjoyed, and more. She would tell him repeatedly, “This is what real love looks like.” She was her own best promoter. She pretended to be exactly like him … kind, misunderstood, and of good character. She pretended to be a deep person, because Jason like that, but used the deepness to probe him for information.
She also feigned great interest in his life story and his writing. The only real interest she had was to mine these for data she could use to later manipulate, control and even destroy him. She claimed to have an education in psychology and could help Jason with past trauma. What she really did was make a catalog of all of Jason’s weaknesses, to later use against him. She urged him to tell her about all his enemies and how they had hurt him, feigning empathy and concern the entire time. What she really did was make a list of all those enemies and what they had against Jason. She then tracked them down behind his back and got their contact information for later use.
Lastly, she became sexual very fast, despite her façade of purity. She spun it as being so attracted to him that she couldn’t help herself. Jason was very flattered and disregarded the obvious contradiction between her words and actions. That’s exactly what she was counting on. Intimacy creates a bond, even for a man. That bond opens up a person to trust and thereby more easily used and exploited.
Pressure Mining
Slowly over time, Eden’s care and concern transformed into accusations and pressure. She began to depict Jason as being flawed and wicked. She picked at every little thing to gaslight him into believing it. She used religion to give her authority in her determinations. If he glanced at a woman for a half-second, she declared him a cheater. When he denied it, she told him that he was so far gone that he didn’t even realize he was doing it. She would pick fights with him at random, stating a variety of reasons, all of which pointed back to Jason’s selfishness and evil. She used her children as tools to further gaslight Jason and break him down. She pushed the kid’s buttons to make them act out, then blamed Jason for not being a good father, calling him a weak man. However, whenever Jason tried to hold the children accountable, she called him cruel and abusive. Jason never did anything physical, or even raised his voice at them.
As part of all this pressure, she pushed for Jason to reveal even more personal things about himself and his past. Every little thing. Every little fear. Every little questionable action in his past. She stated that there was no way Jason could be fixed, no way God would forgive him, unless he confess all. All of this was recorded in her mind for later use too. She would set up double binds, scenarios in which whatever choice Jason made would be wrong and for which he would be condemned.
She also began isolating Jason from his friends and family, claiming they were all godless and would send him to hell. She repeatedly stated that if Jason met any of his needs outside the marriage, even conversation or activities, that was considered cheating. Within two years, Jason had absolutely no one to turn to except her. She made liberal use of misquoted Bible verses or just outright religious lies to use and control Jason. One of these was the dogma that, since God made women the “weaker vessel,” Jason had to put up with her verbal and physical abuse because God commanded husbands to do that. Complete lie.
Fracking
She gaslighted Jason into believing he was a deeply broken man and a predator. This is when she started pushing for him to confess to things he had never done. She would use techniques police use to get false confessions. Isolation, long interrogations, sleep deprivation, lying about evidence and more. She was notorious even with the children that they would confess to anything rather than be subjected to her brutal interrogations which lasted for hours, or even days.
She began pushing her oldest teenage daughter towards Jason, encouraging her to touch him and sit on his lap. Jason was very uncomfortable with this and told her. She responded that Jason was a horrible step-father because he refused to give love to the girl. She stated, “Just because your parents never loved you, you are trying to do the same thing to her.” She then accused Jason of having inappropriate sexual thoughts about the girl and that was why he felt uncomfortable. This was followed up by more intense interrogation sessions about Jason’s “inappropriate thoughts.”
After one particularly long and brutal weekend interrogation session … after keeping him awake until the wee hours of the morning before a work day with yelling, hysterics and accusations … Jason told her what she wanted to hear. He said he’d had inappropriate thoughts about the girl. It wasn’t true, but Jason desperately wanted a few hours sleep before his work day began. Eden, the stay-at-home mother, could sleep all day, every day.
The Slam Dunk
A week later, Jason returned home on a Friday afternoon to find Eden and the children gone. She texted him to say she was visiting her sister, who was having problems with her husband (another lie). The next Monday morning at work, Jason received a telephone call from a police officer who asked if he could come into talk about some problems with Eden’s children. Jason agreed, but went home first. What he found shocked and chilled him to the core. The house was ransacked and many of his valuables were missing, including a large amount of gold that he had converted his retirement funds into due to pressure from Eden. A large knife was stuck into the wall of his bedroom, fastening several sheets of paper. The “note” consisted of Eden condemning and vilifying him for sexually assaulting the oldest girl, saying that she had filed charges against him for it.
Jason immediately called a lawyer, who ended up being of almost no help. Read more about that here. Jason was arrested a few days later and formally charged. He paid a huge amount of money to make bail, and even more money over the course of the next two years in legal defense fees. He had to sell his house to pay for it all, since Eden had drained all his accounts and taken almost everything of value. The judge ordered an ankle monitor placed on him because Eden said he had friends in Mexico and often spoke of fleeing there if he had any problems with the law. It was a lie. Jason knew nobody in Mexico and never spoke of going there. The judge never bothered to check. Jason would wear the ankle monitor for the next two years and pay a fee for it every week or go to jail. A general protective order prevented Jason from even seeing his own biological child, who had nothing to do with the case.
Eden had mobilized Jason’s enemies against him. She contacted every one of them and lied to them about what Jason had done, then urged them to help put him away in prison. If they were female, she urged them to falsely accuse Jason as well. One did, but later recanted. Eden effectively manipulated Jason’s own adult son to turn against him by talking with his wife, a radical feminist whose head exploded at Eden’s false tales of Jason’s abuse of and liberties with an underage girl. The son agreed to help put Jason in prison however he could. He refused to speak with Jason ever again, but offered his services to the county district attorney.
Jason languished for two years, unable to travel or move, stuck in the county with a possible 20-year prison sentence hanging over his head. Fearful of losing his job. Nobody could find the accuser. She had blown town with all of Jason’s money long ago to find her next mark. She even abandoned several of her children along the way. Nonetheless, the misandrist US legal system stretched out the time, unwilling to release a man as vile as Eden had painted him to be. Even with the blatant clarity of what she had actually done. The district attorney was a woman, which added further weight against Jason. Eden had planned expertly.
Charges were eventually dismissed over two years later.
Red Flags
Be very careful of love bombing. Be wary of people who approach you and try to get too close, too fast. Beware of people who ask you a lot of intimate questions. It might be flattering, but it is not a good idea to bare your soul to a stranger. Fast sexual intimacy is a huge red flag of a toxic person. Women are able to use this more effectively than men.
Her actions did not match her words. This is a sure sign of a toxic person. She portrayed herself as a traditional woman, yet had divorced her first husband. Researching her past revealed that she was very promiscuous, even having sex with adult men up to their 40s when she was still a teenager (below 18) in high school. She was already manipulating men at that young age.
Guard against isolation. Eden used the tried-and-true tactic of every psychopath and narcissist of separating Jason from anyone who might see her for who she was, or give him any kind of support against her. Cults do this. That is why a relationship with a psychopath is often called a “cult of one.”
She was a master liar. Psychopaths have no conscience and will lie brazenly, even to the authorities. Lying doesn’t even register in their nervous system. Their brains are wired differently from normal people. They can lie very convincingly and even defeat a lie detector. However, they are rarely good at coordinating their lies, so the “truth” changes over time. Don’t expect any police, judges or workplace leaders to realize this until long after the damage is done … if they ever realize it at all. The legal system is woefully unequipped to deal with these kinds of people.
Intermittent reinforcement. Flip-flopping between kindness and criticism, with criticism slowly growing to be the more prevalent of the two. Eventually, you will hang on and do almost anything to get the kindness back. This is an emotional version of the intermittent reward manipulation used in video games to keep you hooked. Leave at the first sign.
You don’t need permission to be you. Be very wary of someone who tries to change who you are, what you think, or what you do. They often start with small things. “I don’t like you hanging out with your friend so much.” Then, it grows progressively larger until they control your every waking moment. They sometimes use shaming to enforce it. “Real men don’t play video games.” If you are a law abiding, reasonably moral person, nobody has the right to tell you who you should be. Don’t associate with people who believe they have that right.
Conclusion
All psychopaths are dangerous. All of them use similar tactics and techniques. Female psychopaths however, are more subtle and harder to detect. They rely on others to do their damage for them, often men. They can easily portray themself as the victim to weaponize police and the legal system against others. This is particularly effective against men in Western society, due to #MeToo and “believe all women.” They will falsely accuse others without giving it a second thought and lie so convincingly that it succeeds. Even when they are the one doing wrong, they deftly deflect things to become the victim and make the real victim the accused.
Take some time to educate yourself on psychopaths and their tactics. Anywhere between 1-4% of the population are psychopaths. That sounds small, but it means that, even on the low end, there are about 100 psychopaths in a small town of 10,000. Do you want to face those odds with someone who has both the skill and desire to utterly destroy you on a whim, and get away with it? Three excellent educational resources are:
Without Conscience, by Dr. Robert Hare
The Sociopath Next Door, by Dr. Martha Stout
Snakes in Suits, by Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert Hare
References
1 – Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders, Hare Psychopathy Checklist, http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html
2 – NeuroscienceNews.com, Prevalence of Female Psychopaths: More Common than Believed (Feb 27,2024), https://neurosciencenews.com/female-psychopathy-psychology-25669/
3 – Psychiatrist.com, Study Reveals Unique Trait Among Female Psychopaths (May 14, 2024), https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/study-reveals-unique-trait-among-female-psychopaths