How do I love thee? Let me count the texts
The camera moves in for a close-up of a shackled ankle. As if the orange jail jumpsuit hasn’t already set the dateline.
Then back to the woman’s face. A pretty face, though scrubbed now of the gaudy makeup — scarlet lips and thick eyeliner — as seen on selfies that Jacqueline Ades posted on Instagram.
A tour through her social media portfolio also shows Ades sitting on an ornate chair, wearing a push-up corset, long naked legs and stiletto-heeled f--k-me pumps.
The commentary babble speaks of her obsession with the number “3” — the age of Jesus Christ at crucifixion (believed to be roughly 33), the year Hitler came to power (1933), the geographic coordinates of Atlantis and a Walt Disney club apparently called “33.”
Some of this we’ll have to take on faith.
But the jailhouse video is deeply disturbing. Because it must have been approved and arranged by authorities in Phoenix, propping up Ades in front of microphones for a Q&A session with journalists.
It’s a wildly different country, America. Such a thing would never be countenanced in Canadian jails. (Although photos of Roberto Osuna, in his cell bunk upon arrest on an assault charge, were recently leaked to some Toronto media. Yeah, there’s a “get” to be proud of, huh?)
Still, as a general rule, we don’t do this — except for the occasional perp walk, for the cameras, and that rarely happens anymore.
Jacqueline Ades appears to be a mentally disturbed individual. There’s nothing entertaining about that, nor particularly informative from a public perspective. But the footage was broadcast on national networks and went viral on the usual ubiquitous platforms.
She’s 31 years old and her belt doesn’t go through all of the loops.
Met a man on Luxy, a “millionaire” matchup app, allegedly had one date with him — she claims two, except the second was a three-day affair — and then inundated her love interest with some 65,000 texts, up to 500 a day since last summer, that frequently veered towards the bizarre, the antiSemitic, and the threatening. “Oh, what I would do w ur blood!” she purportedly once wrote. “I’d wanna bathe in it.”
To reporters in her jailhouse interview last week: “I felt like I met my soulmate. I thought we would just do what everybody else did, and we would get married, and everything would be fine. But that’s not what happened.”
What happened is that the target of her raging fixation contacted police.
On the first occasion when police were called, in early April, the man was actually outside the country. But security footage reportedly captured Ades taking a bath in the man’s home outside Phoenix after apparently breaking in. Cops found her there and recovered a large butcher knife on the passenger seat of her car, according to the arrest report. Charged with criminal trespass and released.
Ades pooh-poohed those details. “I never had a butcher knife. I had a little flippy knife, on my road trip.” She’d driven from her home in Florida to Arizona. “People tried to hurt me. I’m a single girl.” And laughs.
Looking for love, she insists, drawn to the man after their brief hookup — when, she claims, he took her for Shabbat dinner at his parents’ house.
On April 30, the man, completely unnerved, contacted police again, this time showing investigators threatening messages he’d recently received.
“Don’t ever try to leave me … I’ll kill you … I don’t want to be a murderer!” she wrote, according to the police report.
And: “I hope you die … rotten filthy Jew … lololol I’m like the new Hitler … man was a genius.”
(Ades is also the daughter of an Egyptian-born Jew. She says.)
And: “I’d wear ur fascia n the top of your skull n ur hands n feet.”
She showed up at the man’s workplace, claiming to be his wife, and was escorted off the premises.
It’s not so rare, these fatal attraction obsessions, albeit with celebrities more frequently the draw, deranged fans stalking them, breaking into their houses. Anne Murray was famously stalked in the ’80s by a Saskatchewan farmer — he even sent her an engagement ring in the mail — who was diagnosed with erotomania, a delusion in which a person believes a stranger or a boldface celeb is in love with them. Shania Twain experienced the same terror a few years ago. Actress Sandra Bullock came face-to-face with her stalker outside her bedroom one night, locking herself in a closet and calling 911. He would later commit suicide following an hours-long standoff with a SWAT team.
So no, not funny, not amusing, not the stuff of Entertainment Tonight jollies.
When it happens to quoteunquote ordinary people, we almost never hear of it.
What makes a person so gaga infatuated and predatory? Your guess is as good as any shrink’s. Some are actually in real relationships and go off the deep end when a lover breaks it off, like the NASA astronaut who drove almost 1,000 miles (wearing a diaper designed for use in space) to confront her rival in a threeway love triangle. Or the Dutch woman who claimed, when arrested, that there was absolutely nothing unusual about making 65,000 phone calls to her ex-boyfriend.
You know, we’ve all been there, a little bit. A friend of mine cut up all her erstwhile two-timing lover’s suits. Another dumped feces into a man’s mailbox.
It’s the stuff of rom-com movies and Shakespearean tragedies.
Sometimes, it’s a pathological sickness.
With journalists, Ades refused to answer questions about the criminal charges, dismissing one of the reporters as hostile and full of “negative energy.”
“I only want to talk about nice things.”
“You want me to tell weird things about him? He put a GPS on my car, I think. He put something on my phone so I couldn’t use it.”
In that session, Ades rambles, is short of breath, plays both coy and aggrieved.
“We’re soulmates,” she declares of the man. “There’s one boy and one girl. There’s one boy and one girl thing and it equals 3.3.”
But was it not excessive, her futile chase of an uninterested man? “Love is an excessive thing.” Would you ever really hurt him? “No! I love him.” “The point of love is to keep giving it.
“If he doesn’t want to be with me, then he’s not the one for me. But he’s still the light. Like the Holy Grail. I found that in him.”
Are you a crazy person? she was bluntly asked.
“No. I’m the person who discovered love.”
App-propos of nothing.