My Victim Impact Statement Following the Sentencing of my Stalker

My Victim Impact Statement Following the Sentencing of my Stalker

In July of 2025, Christopher Mulley was arrested and charged with criminal harassment for stalking me, and one other woman. Chris had been making unwanted contact with me since 2021, which included unwanted phone and message communication, locating me on social media, showing up uninvited to my door, and even trying to enter my apartment without my consent, inviting me on walks, dropping gifts and chocolate at my door, and following me on the street. I would ignore his advances and told him to stop contacting me repeatedly, but he did not respect my boundary. All of this has been well documented, and I turned a detailed timeline and the evidence into the detective and the Crown Attorney. Police told him to stop repeatedly, and he did not stop and was ultimately arrested. He was charged with one count of criminal harassment for stalking me and one count of criminal harassment for stalking another woman. I am aware of three other women who filed police reports against Chris for similar behaviour that he was not charged for. Those women’s stories are not mine to tell.

Chris pled guilty, and yesterday he was sentenced. I attended his sentencing hearing and read a victim impact statement, which I will share here. The system failed the victims of this case in many ways. Chris was given a lenient deal to obtain his guilty plea. Two of his additional charges- resisting arrest and assault of a police officer- were dropped. He was sentenced to 18 months of conditional probation. His conditions include standard orders such as no contact with the victims for the duration of probation. The Crown Attorney informed me that if Chris completes his probation without breaching it, he will not have a criminal record of his crimes. Because Chris’s behaviour targeted so many women, evidence that has been well documented with message logs, surveillance video footage, and eye witness accounts, I worry that he could re-offend, and if he does, the court will view him as a first-time offender, and he could again be granted leniency for doing irreparable damage to his victims. That is why I’m sharing my experience. During the trial process, I was advised not to discuss the case, but now I have my voice back.

I’ve been an advocate for reforming the systemic failures and societal biases regarding harm and violence against women. If you don’t like the culture you live in, change it. That’s what I often say, and I refuse to invest in the status quo. My silence doesn’t serve anyone except for my perpetrator and others like him, and those who are reluctant to sit in the discomfort of knowing there are millions of women with 'unpalatable for the algorithm' stories just like mine. Because the system was designed to fail us. Predatory, dangerous, and misogynistic men do not deserve the comfort and safety of anonymity.

My Victim Impact Statement

It would take a long time to fully explain how Christopher Mulley’s actions have affected my life over the past four years. The persistent pattern of stalking, harassment, and intimidation by a man who lived directly below me is not something that is easily captured in bullet points.

Since 2021, I have lived in fear inside my own home. The places that should have been safe, my hallway, the laundry room, the lobby, even my balcony, became places of anxiety. I avoided doing my laundry for weeks because I was afraid of encountering him, and the dirty clothes and sheets piled up. I would wait until I could arrange a buddy system with another neighbour to do laundry. I filmed myself walking through the common areas of my building just so there would be a record if something happened. This put me on constant edge, just another alteration to my life that I needed to do in preparation. I let friends know every time I leave my apartment. I stopped using my balcony, which had once been my favourite place to relax. But his balcony was directly beneath mine, and the stress was not worth enjoying the sunset. I changed my routine constantly, took alternate routes in my neighbourhood, and sometimes waited outside until he passed by so I wouldn’t have to cross paths with him. This disrupted my dog’s life too, because her routine for walks was inconsistent.

This has also affected my relationships. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to have to explain to friends, family, and especially the owners and management at my workplace what was happening to me. Although I knew I had done nothing wrong, it was humiliating to be forced into that position simply to protect my own safety. I stopped pursuing romantic relationships because it no longer felt safe to open my life to anyone while I was dealing with him.

This situation has harmed my work and my ability to function professionally. I lost several hours of work, and during the week when he escalated and was ultimately arrested, I lost several full days of work. This doesn’t just impact my income; it causes unneeded stress playing catch-up on tasks I had to abandon. I struggled to focus and couldn’t perform to my full potential. A project I was excited about this year, something that would have advanced my career, had to be abandoned completely because I was too overwhelmed and preoccupied by the stress of dealing with him. This stress loomed over every workday because I work from home. For a full month, I moved out of my home and lived with my mother two hours away because I no longer felt safe in my own apartment. Although I had community, this experience has felt very isolating. For many years, I felt very alone in this.

His behaviour has had a significant negative impact on my mental and physical well-being. I went on antidepressants for the first time in my life because of the anxiety and fear this caused. I struggled with sleep. After incidents with him, I would often cry from the stress and exhaustion. It is emotionally draining to constantly manage your behaviour around someone who is stalking you. This is not talked about enough: the physical cost of the emotional labour. I live with ongoing stress, hypervigilance, and anger, anger that I have to write this statement, anger that I was put through years of fear simply for existing in my home. I’m angry to the core of my womanhood that a man would feel entitled to my space. That anger seeps out into my personal life, no matter how hard I try to prevent it.

I cannot share how this impacted me as a victim without sharing how this impacted me as a woman. There is a specific trauma I experienced as a woman being victimized in this way, going through the reporting process, and advocating for myself in the justice system. Fearing I won’t be believed, or that I will be victim-blamed. As a woman, the fear created by this kind of behaviour is not abstract. It is rooted in the reality that women are disproportionately targeted with stalking behaviour. This gendered trauma is intrinsically tied to my identity, and it reopens the feeling of shame tied to being a woman. It is a loss of autonomy that has a profound impact on my well-being. It is the knowledge that I am at a clear physical disadvantage. It is carrying the shame of my faun trauma response because I know that men who behave like this can be unpredictable. For four years, I have been constantly looking over my shoulder, always preparing, never relaxed, never comfortable in my own home. And the entire time, I couldn’t help but think, “This wouldn’t be happening to me if I were a man.” I was not just afraid of him as an individual; I was afraid in the very specific way that women learn to fear men who do not stop when told to stop.

I am disabled, and one of my symptoms is that I stim. Some of my stims can be very harmful to myself. When I was stressed due to Chris’s actions, my stimming would become difficult to control. I neglected self-care and even my hygiene at times, and I neglected my home. I purposefully attempted to make myself look less attractive, hoping that would deter him, and when I look back at photos of myself in 2020 and 2021, and compare them to photos of myself now, the version of me looking back over the past few years is unrecognizable. The self-protective measures, both conscious and subconscious, are not all invisible. I wear some of them for all to see.

His actions have also caused financial harm. I lost income from missed work and from projects I was unable to complete. I spent money on additional locks to secure my home, on software to download and preserve the messages he sent me, and on medication and therapy to manage the mental health impact of what I was experiencing. I’ll never be able to calculate the unseen cost of the emotional labour in a ledger. My work, which is production-based and only I am responsible for, suffered in quality. I missed opportunities. I was late on deadlines. I had to cut networking events short because my emotional battery always felt depleted. I’m in what should be the prime of my career, and this has interrupted that trajectory.

I do not feel safe when Chris is in the building. I will never feel safe if he lives here. I can’t stress enough how impactful this has been on me because he lived directly below me. I have endured a baseline level of fear that rises significantly when he makes contact or when I know he is nearby. I am also deeply concerned for the safety of the many women in my building whom I consider friends. Given his pattern of behaviour, I worry about them. I’m afraid of any retaliatory behaviour if he is granted access to the building again.

`I have endured four years of fear, disruption, emotional turmoil, and loss because of Chris’s deliberate choices. His actions were persistent, intrusive, and completely disregarded my clear boundaries, warnings from police, and the basic expectation that every person should feel safe in their own home. 

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