Whenever I mention Renato and I lived in hiding for years as a result of my writing and his publishing my biography of Rudolph Valentino I titled, Affairs Valentino, I am routinely mocked and dismissed as insane by the cult. Even the most innocuous reaction inevitably involves plenty of eye rolling.
I offer the following response:
Imagine if someone, let's say a neighbor... was posting about you online every day for years on end... and their posts were threatening, detailed gory and salacious descriptions of your death. Imagine if those posts, online for the world to see, were brutal attacks on your family members and friends with all of your personal information wielded as enticement for others to do you harm. Imagine the worst possible content and you might be close to the horrifying reality.
Imagine if the content read like these excerpts I read from actual posts Renato captured:
“Get this into your thick skull, bitch. Unless you close that blog you will be hurt. And if you cause any of, we three, more trouble your punishment will be considerably worse. The choice is entirely yours....Remove the blog and retain the use of your legs...”
or imagine they read something like this...
“...tonight I pray more fervently that I have ever for anything in my entire life. I will pray that you Evelyn Zumaya get cancer which will provide you with a long, lingering and painful death. I pray for you to suffer, for your evil body to rot from inside....Die, slowly, you old hag... that you might end up in a ditch covered in fleas and maggots without the dignity of a grave. Die, Evelyn Zumaya, Die, so that we might die laughing.”
Imagine if your fake obituary was posted online with accompanying lengthy articles about your death and all illustrated with images of coffins, skeletons, nooses and general deathly decrepitude.
Imagine if you were being obsessively tracked and your every move online monitored. And imagine if you will that the person initially dispatching the content was not acting alone but had friends who were gleefully sharing and linking to the diabolical death posts online and everywhere they possibly could as fast as they could.
I could go on with my analogy…but I think I made my point...
About the last thing you would do if this were happening to you... would be to invite these people over for tea. You would no doubt make sure they never knew your location.
You would do all you could to protect yourself and your family and get very clever in that regard. And when law enforcement does nothing to help, yes you would go into hiding out of necessity.
This is exactly what Renato and I did. Better said were forced to do. While “they”, the Valentino Death Cult... were mocking us and accusing us of over reacting when we mentioned living in hiding, we established a sort of Valentino witness protection plan.
It was a gradual effort and in hindsight I believe we did not initially see it as hiding. But we quickly realized we were being tracked, trolled I guess the technical word for that is... and the enticements for the readers of the cult's posts to hate, hate, hate us and do us harm could not be ignored. Their furiously charged rhetoric inspires high levels of hatred towards us and being able to post our actual location would have put us in the cross hairs.
Renato subscribed to a proxy service to ensure our location was not revealed by anyone with tracking on their sites. He captured “the bastards” posts every day and made sure his IP address was never where we actually were. If our computer appeared to be in London, we were in Italy, etc.
We began using the physical address of our lawyer in Turin.
Our location features on our phones and tablets were all set on “off” and any accounts we established online were configured in the same manner. Still their posts' content had way to many references to where we were. Because I wrote Affairs Valentino, why should my home address be of any interest to them?
“They”, the cultists, eagerly shared a lot of personal information they discovered about us which was primarily found on People Search engines. (Down to my mother's donation to a charity and their friend's name) We consulted a lawyer specializing in cyber attacks to find out just what information could be shared on those sites.
We were told the search engines gathered personal information such as addresses primarily from utilities and driver's license and voter registration information. The driver's license was a matter of checking a box to not have your information shared and we ensured our utility accounts under the name of family members. But the voter registration information was not so easy to hide.
In order to have your physical address unreported on a voter registration form, I had to agree to a six month review of my request and receive all of my mail through a designated mail box. I opted to not to register to vote.
The cult's spies, as I mentioned previously on this account, were always interested in our location. In fact this was usually my first tip off that they were spies. They would befriend me with flattery and before very long ask questions about our travel plans, etc.
I think Renato and I could have been even more cautious because the length of time the attacks had been going on, in itself, revealed how seriously unstable people these people were and are.
Our family members worried as we worked to protect ourselves and them. The threats were also attempts to extort me into silence by posting about my loved one's and friend's lives with emphasis on their employers... in several cases they tried to get them fired by contacting their employers. If anyone did openly support us, they came under fast attack. We saved ample evidence of that statement.
When I successfully sued one of the cultists, the Italian court recognized the threat posed and agreed not to make my physical location public.
Renato was calculating and meticulous and spent a great deal of time documenting the attacks by taking screen shots of them every day and organizing them under different categories. I was more emotional, becoming anxious and trusting no one outside of my family and closest friends.
We were vigilant and the instances of this were seemingly endless over the years and still are.
One example of this viligance:
One morning we had breakfast with a friend in Burbank and he began to post a picture of us in the restaurant on his Facebook page. I told him no.
We also told people at any family gathering to not post pictures of us online. When we did post pictures they would be of a previous vacation; somewhere we were not!
From about 2010 to the present day this has been our, and now, my reality.
There have been and still are heroes in this saga. People who, although I knew and know use aliases, share information from the cult forums and report to us when they find something they think I should be aware of.
But it has been fourteen years and counting and I still remain cautious.
I recently found a piece I wrote in 2015 which I titled, Valentino Fugitive; only five years into this nightmare and four years after Affairs Valentino was first published.
I wrote:
“This story is already old and it is not so difficult to read all the sordid details online. I stopped counting somewhere around four years into it and now just move into the future the best I can under the circumstances.
Suffice to say I am a mature woman of a certain age, not prone to create drama frivolously. In fact I would say the opposite is the case. I am rather anti-social by nature, avoiding conflict in every instance and definitely preferring to remain private in all things.
This has all been challenged lamentably as the result of my publishing my book, Affairs Valentino. Now, I find myself living my life in the shadows. They made it so. In no way do I feel I must defend my statements or feel the victim. Yet, suffice to say that no one could be subjected to such an enormous amount of death laden rhetoric targeting them and not realize the serious threat.
No one could suffer the images posted about them; from their being heaved into Satan's Lake of Fire to enticements of suicide, with links to nooses, stools and other frightening accoutrement of death. No one could endure the constant encouragement to commit suicide and the ruination by defamation of friends and family without moving deep into a territory where the predators could never find them; both physically and psychologically.
They will not find me. I will see to that. For there were too many threats, for too long, too many perverse, violent images and aggressive campaigns to find me, ruin me on every level and yes the posting of my phone number and other personal information with the blatant intent to incite someone to kill me.
All of this is documented and all of this happened. Years of bullying in its worst form; raging unchecked, with my receiving no help to stop it from neither police or online servers. The truth is; the internet is still a dangerous and lawless land.
Their instability and malicious intent is all too real and the silence from their overlord and puppet master is deafening. It took me a while to connect their dots but I finally did. I guess that would be the only upside of online bullying; the trail.
Somewhere over the Alps, they believe I am. Am I? I will say that I am home for a moment..."home"... being a subjective concept at best these days.
The lies about me online are still everywhere, people still believe what they read. It is a mess that is nearly infinite in scope and virtually impossible to sweep clean. They must delight in that. But meanwhile I will not walk silently into the wastelands they created for me. I will not. From these shadows I still have a voice and some measure of justice is being handed down.
For now I turn to the mountains and plan my next move. Old age has taught me some things.”
When people log in to the cult's two Facebook forums, I wonder if they realize the price Renato and I paid at the hands of those sites' cult loyalist “adminions”. And all for having presented research we conducted on the new, new and true story of Rudolph Valentino.
Anyone doubting the seriousness and truthfulness of this audio note is welcome to request screenshots of which I have thousands. Some can be reviewed online at
https://www.zumayawinslawsuit.com/
One day I will complete that website because as it turned out things got way worse... incredibly so. I intend to make sure the entire story with its documentation is available online and forever.
If that is the only justice for Renato and I then so be it...
For today... as Renato used to say... Fiat justicia Ruat Caelum and to the good guys...Arrevederci!
Hiding From the Cult