#and then has to cope with the knowledge that Chris can’t even bear to look at him

[exposeacreep-blog]

Milo Moran is a child molester, manipulator and general scumbag

I met Milo when I was in year 7 (11 years old) at school. At the time, he was in year 11 (around 15). My English mistress had given us a creative writing task: to write the backstory of Edgar Allen Poe's poem "The Raven". Milo was in her form in year eleven, and he, along with his friends, were pretty friendly with her, so she would sometimes chat with them about her other classes during morning and afternoon registration. Apparently, my name came up in one of these chats, because one day in what must have been around October 2014, when my English class were leaving the classroom after a sixth period lesson and her year eleven form were coming in for afternoon register, my teacher pointed me out to him and said "that's the girl who wrote that Raven story you liked". He smiled at me, and told me how much he'd liked it.

Now, me being a fucking dumb, pubescent, hormonal little girl I was for some reason extremely receptive and innocently excited by older male attention at the time, no matter how much of an absolute minger they were, meaning that the fact that somebody as senior as Milo had so much as offered me a second glance I was a bit smitten with him.

After school had finished, I went to get the bus home only to find that apparently Milo was on the same bus route home. I didn't say anything to him that day, I was too busy being the epitome of preteen angst so I just plugged myself into my Panic! At The Disco and stared blankly out of the window, but then a couple of weeks later I ran into him with my mum while at Waitrose. We said hi to each other, and when she asked I told my mum who he was. She said that he seemed nice, and that it was good that I was friendly with people outside my own year.

We had very little interaction for the next couple of months until after the Christmas break, when two new kids, twins, joined my year group. I quickly became joined at the hip to one of them, we rarely spoke to anyone else and then wondered why we didn't really have any other friends. So when we saw a poster for the English magazine club at lunchtime, we figured it was a great opportunity to socialise. We went, and lo and behold who's the editor of the magazine? Milo, overseen by another English mistress. That was absolutely fine by me, he was an older boy who gave me special attention because, at least I assumed at the time, he liked my writing.

Not long after that, we began to talk and videocall fairly infrequently on Google Hangouts, where he mentioned a physical similarity in our respective appearances, and said it might be funny if we pretended to be siblings to confuse people. I fail to see now how this is in any way entertaining, but I suppose at the time my ape brain said "ooga booga male attention must maintain", so I went along with it.

Then there's a bit of a gap in my memory between the end of year 7 and the beginning of year 8, but somewhere in that gap my friend Vincent (who was the same friend I'd joined magazine club with) convinced me to take up the guitar so I could go to the lunchtime guitar group with him. I joined the group, and guess who the bassist is? Milo McNonce. I'll get back to that a little later.

So while he was still at school, he worked at a pub in the town where I live called The Fleece, and to get from there to his bus stop he had to walk past my house. By pure chance one day I spotted him out of my bedroom window and called out to him, and we began talking with him down on the pavement looking up at me through my open window. This same thing went on for ages until one day my parents got fed up of what they dubbed the "Romeo and Juliet" routine and invited him in.

Around this time I inexplicably developed massive crushes on two of Milo's friends, Chris and George. I told Milo, and he basically agreed to stalk them for me, even going so far as to write little stories wherein I had rough, kinky sex with his 17 year old for me to get my little 12 year old rocks off to. I, being a total and utter fucking moron, didn't find that weird in the slightest. Until fairly recently, I still had some of these stories screenshotted on my phone gallery but rather stupidly deleted them last year out of shame and fear that somebody would find them.

Then about halfway through year 8, when I was helping him with packing up after guitar group, he started hugging me out of nowhere and kissed me on the forehead. Ape brain struck again and said "Oh worm? Guess this is happening now, that's calm."

Nothing else of particular note happened in year 8 on that front, although it all continued as a regular thing.

So then began year 9, and the *real* shitstorm reared its head.

Remember how I said that eventually my parents had invited him in? That was the point that he began to *really* cosy up to my mum, like really sucking up to her. He didn't manage to have quite the same effect on my dad because he was usually at work, but since my mum is a goldsmith she works from home. It was also around that time when he rather conveniently decided that he was gay, at least that's what he told my mum, which meant that for the next roughly six months she felt unthreatened by the fact that her 12 year old daughter was having private conversations in her bedroom with a 17 year old boy with the door closed (bearing in mind I live in the UK, where the age of consent is 16).

Then, in March, it was my school's annual Pump Room Concert. At the rehearsal on the day of the concert we were in the big room upstairs where all the instruments are kept in-between the rehearsal and the concert itself, when he hugged me tightly and began to stare into my eyes. We were interrupted by a teacher coming in to put his own instrument there, but Milo later told me a couple of nights later that had the teacher *not* come in when he did he'd have kissed me. Ape brain liked this very much.

That was something of a turning point I think, because after that I can only remember our conversations in my room ending with him on top of me, tongue down my throat and hand down my knickers. At that point I had just turned 13, and he was no younger than 18.

He started to tell me about his mental health issues, he'd been orphaned at a young age but old enough to remember his parents dying, which had understandably messed him up a bit. The last I heard of this he was being treated for bipolar disorder.

That was when my friends at the time began to smell a rather large rat, and told me about the stench of said rat, which I stubbornly ignored. This ended in me having a massive row with my friendship group, which promptly divided down the middle into two factions: one relentlessly took the piss and tried to rile me up about the whole thing (I'm not friends with them anymore), and the other kept telling me that they thought he was dangerous and that I should stay away from him (I'm still friends with them). I ended up ignoring both, which caused me to become more distant from them and spend more time with Milo, spurred on by the fact that he'd told me that I was helping him cope with his depression.

This routine kept up until the end of year 9, when he fucked up all his A Levels and managed to get a place at Cardiff University by pure good luck. I spent the next two to three months convinced that *I* was the reason he'd done so badly, and thinking that the time he spent molesting me (what I interpreted at the time as me "distracting" him) he could have spent studying.

After he moved to Wales our communication gradually petered out, and I eventually realised that I was not his taboo seductress or whatever the fuck I thought our relationship dynamic was, but that I had in fact been sexually manipulated and exploited and tried to cut ties with him.

He still came over during the holidays, but far less frequently and I never let him touch me again.

I got a proper boyfriend, and thought things were looking up, when a month before my GCSEs started, he messaged me out of the blue asking if I wanted to see him again while I had the chance because he was going to kill himself. I spent the entire day sobbing on the phone to him and trying to talk him down because as much as I resented him and wanted him gone from my life, I couldn't have responsibility for his death on my conscience during my exams. I still haven't quite figured out if he was serious about it or whether he just wanted to illicit some kind of emotional response from me, but that was pretty much the final straw.

To be honest? If I could go back and redo that whole day with the knowledge of what he's done since then (namely having been in the national papers for narrowly avoided jail time over revenge-porning his ex girlfriend), I'm not entirely sure I'd have expended that much time and energy into trying to stop him. I know it sounds horrible, but at this point, when I feel dirty and ashamed in my own bed and I can't even watch Catch 22 on Channel 4 and say "Damn, Milo's cute" without getting a jarring intrusive thought of that paedophilic creep sucking on my neck and palming my fanny, I don't think I really care.

So that's where we are. If you meet him, stay the fuck away from him, for all his slime he's a charismatic bugger and knows how to get into your head until you're trapped in a web of manipulation that you just can't escape.

I've since opened up to a very close friend, still not my parents though, who said that she could see what I was going through and feeling as it was happening, and the only reason that she didn't report it was that I begged her and made her swear not to. Despite this, she went to our school nurse to ask for anonymous advice and that's mostly what's helped me get to grips with how to handle this now, and for that I cannot be more grateful. Her support has made it easier to tell the truth to a couple of other people, and to contact this account. Will it get to the point where I feel I can tell my parents or the police? I'm not sure, but I hope so.

[salmonshirtsforeverprod]

The X-Files: Squeeze review

(Warning: this review contains spoilers for the episode Squeeze.)

Squeeze continues The X-Files' early run of strong episodes that ably define what to expect from the show on a weekly basis. The Pilot gives us our first contribution to the series' long, twisted mythology. Deep Throat gives us the first of what I call "witness" episodes, stories in which Mulder and Scully bear witness to events they're ultimately unable to thwart or change. Squeeze gives us our first true "monster of the week" and our first true character-centric episode, effectively finalizing our introduction to the series. Squeeze is also our introduction to writing team Glen Morgan and James Wong, and their vision of The X-Files as a quasi-anthology series driven by genre homage and visceral body horror. Finally, Squeeze establishes Morgan and Wong's powerful push/pull dynamic with series creator with Chris Carter. Their willingness to prod the foundations of Carter's work, question his assumptions and explore his implications, is the core of one of the most fascinating working relationships in television history.

If Chris Carter's early work on the series is defined by his encyclopedic knowledge of UFO and conspiracy lore, Morgan and Wong's work is defined by pop-cultural pastiche. The two create tightly structured riffs on popular media, while always keeping their attention to character in sharp focus. In this case they primarily draw inspiration from Dan Curtis' 1973 film The Night Strangler and Stephen King's 1986 novel It. King gets a shout-out right from the jump as the teaser begins with a man walking into an office building, unaware he's being watched by a yellow-eyed man in a nearby storm drain. The dim lighting and slow truck-in make for an extremely creepy image, one of the best of the episode. The intruder sneaks into the building through the elevator shaft, and uses the ventilation system to reach his target's office. He unscrews the air conditioning grate from the inside, kills the man, and leaves the way he came. Cue opening credits. Just like that, we're off to the races. It's a fascinating teaser, challenging our expectations and presenting us with a delightful, X-Filesy twist on the locked room mystery.

The first act begins as Scully has lunch with Tom Colton, a former classmate at the FBI Academy. It's really a brilliant scene. Colton is a remarkably catty careerist, played with slimy zeal by a young Donal Logue, and each seemingly friendly exchange drips discomfort and venom. He's as contemptuous of those above him as those below, and he fully expects Scully to participate in the backbiting. When he turns his withering attention to Mulder and the X-Files, Scully defends her partner and asks if he really views her work with such disrespect. He defers, but bristles at her objection, angry and unwilling to meet her eye. It turns out he actually brought Scully to lunch in order to ask for help, he's just physically incapable of displaying even a modicum of decency or respect. He's been assigned what's seemingly a serial murder case, three men murdered and their livers removed by hand, the teaser being the last of the three. Even more confounding, none of the crime scenes have any identifiable entry points. Scully picks up that Colton is really asking for Mulder's insight. Colton confirms, careful to frame it as a favor he's granting Mulder in order to protect his own ego. He also suggests Scully's assistance on this investigation could be her ticket out of the X-Files by saying she won't have to be "Mrs. Spooky" anymore, leaving Scully to ask herself what she's looking for long-term.

Scully brings the offer to Mulder, who acts offended Colton wouldn't approach him, but really he's having a powerful reaction to the thought of losing her. He still accompanies her to the crime scene, where he immediately begins antagonizing Colton. He leans hard into his spooky reputation, spouting off-the-cuff nonsense about the importance of liver consumption to extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system. It's another example of Mulder using sarcasm to cope with the animus over his tattered reputation, and it's humorous just how hard Colton bites on the obvious bait. Scully is understandably uncomfortable with the dick measuring going on in front of her, and has no tolerance for it. When they actually start looking around the scene, Mulder notices the ventilation grate and understands it could be a possible point of entry for the killer. In another of his patented intuitive leaps, Mulder dusts the grate and lifts a ten inch long print, much to Colton's chagrin.

Mulder takes the print back to the basement office, confirming its similarity to elongated prints lifted by police during two separate murder sprees, one in 1963 and one in 1933. This is another callback to The Night Strangler and It, both of which center around multiple sets of murders occurring decades apart. Since the earlier sprees contained five murders each, he tells Scully to expect two more. She's angry at first, tired of Mulder jumping to the conclusion of extraterrestrial activity with every case they work. He confirms he was only teasing Colton at the crime scene, and doesn't actually see any evidence of extraterrestrial activity in this case. Something else is happening here, and though the exchange is a little obvious it's important to signal to the audience not to expect aliens in every episode. Scully then decides to play ball in Mulder's old court, and tries her hand at building a profile. She follows sound technique, treating it like a mundane investigation, though the creepy fingerprint weighs on her mind.

She presents her profile to Colton and his team the next day. After a few gratuitous jabs at Mulder the team accepts the profile, Colton even stares at her with a discomfiting mixture of envy and sexual attraction while she reads it. Central to her profile is the idea the killer will return to the scene of previous crimes, so she organizes a stakeout of the three crime scenes.

Mulder joins her but doesn't take the stakeout, or her profile, very seriously. He views the perpetrator as a master B&E artist, driven more by the thrill of entry than the murder, and won't bother to return to a puzzle he's already cracked. This casual condescension will become a staple of Mulder's character going forward. Despite his radical ability to assume other points of view and his insistence on broadening the horizon of investigative theory, once he personally decides on something his mind is made up; he doesn't have much consideration for other possibilities or viewpoints. Scully's profile is quickly proven accurate, however, when they discover a man in a duct, emerging backward as if being defecated from the bowels of the building.

The man they apprehended is a young animal control officer named Eugene Victor Tooms, played perfectly by veteran character actor Doug Hutchison with only the barest hint of personality and a stare somehow both vacant and predatory. He passes a polygraph test but does get flustered when asked, at Mulder's insistence, questions referencing the murders in '63 and '33. These questions are poorly received by Colton and the rest of the team, and Mulder gets dressed down by the agent in charge. His excitement over Tooms' response is dashed, and he's clearly wounded by his ideas being dismissed.

Scully asks why he'd pursue his theory so overtly in front of the other agents and Mulder cracks an evasive joke about his desire to mess with people's heads outweighing "the millstone of humiliation." Scully sees through this and, despite some trepidation, asks why he's been so territorial. It's a great moment, with Scully trying to frame the question in a way that won't offend him then immediately turning away to downplay her discomfort. Mulder responds intimately and honestly, gently touching her necklace to keep her from turning away. He tells her how much her respect means to him and that he'd understand if she wanted to move on from the X-Files. He recognizes and treasures her talent, insight, and potential. This plaintive honesty stands in sharp contrast to Colton's sneering mendacity, and this is what wins Scully over.

Tooms is released with an apology, and he immediately sets out to commit another murder. He stalks a man home, deciding to enter through the chimney. We finally see Tooms' abilities firsthand, as his arms stretch and his joints pop out of place to fit inside. Meanwhile, the target goes about his evening, putting things away and going to light his fireplace. This gives us an inkling of hope, hoping he'll light it in time to smoke Tooms out. It's a good, tense sequence, reminiscent of Hitchcock with it's cross-cutting, misdirection, and use of color. Unfortunately it ends in tragedy: the guy is too late, Tooms is already inside. The scene ends with Tooms awkwardly grabbing the guy in slow-motion, kind of a lame way to pay off a good sequence.

Mulder and Scully visit the new crime scene. Mulder can't help himself and needles Colton yet again, who threatens to have them removed. Scully doesn't stand for this, reminding them they're here to find justice for the victim. It's another great Scully beat, showing that though she's sided with Mulder personally and professionally, she still has no time or interest in their schoolyard antics. They lift more elongated fingerprints and find a small object missing from the mantle. After leaving the crime scene they struggle to turn up any significant documentation on Tooms, so they decide to visit Frank Briggs, a detective who investigated the previous two sets of murders. Briggs is old now, living in a retirement home, but he's still haunted by the case, counting the days until someone calls about these new murders. Briggs sees Tooms as the human embodiment of mankind's potential for evil, comparing the murders to the Bosnian genocide and other atrocities. He produces a scrapbook with photographs proving Tooms hasn't aged since 1933, and directs the Agents to Tooms' old address: 66 Exeter Street. The conversation with Briggs is a weird scene that doesn't quite work. The exposition, at least, is intriguing. It's at once clarifying and elusive, building up to that ominously poetic address, 66 Exeter Street. Otherwise, it's a mess. Mulder vacillates between childlike interest in Briggs' grim story and quiet objection to his characterization of Tooms as a monster. Actor Henry Beckman does the best he can with the material, but Morgan and Wong just haven't really rooted the possibility that Tooms is the human manifestation of evil in the story. This could be another shoutout to It, where the titular villain's evil affects the mood and prejudices of an entire community.

Mulder and Scully go to Tooms' now condemned apartment complex. It's a creepy, well-lit sequence, culminating in the iconic image of Mulder and Scully walking into his apartment, a shot immortalized in the opening credits. They poke around, considering the possibility that Tooms sustains his youth by consuming human livers. This is another reference to The Night Strangler, in this case the film's villain Dr. Richard Malcolm.

The Agents soon make a gruesome discovery. They find an odd nest, constructed by Tooms out of newspaper and an odd, brownish-yellow adhesive. Mulder reaches out to touch it, rubbing the liquid between his fingers before Scully realizes it's bile. Mulder is disgusted, and makes a classic joke about how to get it off his fingers without betraying his calm exterior. This will be the first of many times Mulder instinctively reaches out to touch something gross, and it's a good example of Morgan and Wong's penchant for picking up on an aspect of a previous episode (in this case Mulder's imprudent excursion into the Ellens Air Force Base in Deep Throat) and running with it. The Agents also find the missing trophies from the previous murders. They decide to put the apartment under surveillance but not before Tooms, hiding in the rafters, snags Scully's necklace, suggesting he's found his fifth victim.

Colton goes behind Scully's back and calls the surveillance off in an effort to ingratiate himself to his superiors. When Scully objects to this Colton's mask finally slips, and he treats her with the same venomous contempt he's already spit at everybody else. Scully leaves him to his empty careerism and heads home. She gets home, runs herself a bath, and a huge drop of bile drops from the ceiling, landing on her hand. Tooms has broken in. Gillian Anderson's horrified gasp at this disgusting violation is a great little moment, one of my favorites in the episode. Mulder, meanwhile, heads to 66 Exeter Street, surprised to find the surveillance detail is gone. He finds Scully's necklace among the trophies Tooms took from his other victims, and races to her house. Now it's Scully's inaugural turn as damsel, except when Mulder gets there he really only acts as a diversion long enough to give Scully a chance to jump into action as well. The agents ultimately apprehend Tooms together, Scully handcuffing him to the tub while Mulder trains a gun on him. It's an effective sequence, ending with Tooms cuffed to the tub, jerking around like a cornered animal before relaxing, realizing he's caught, while Scully catches her breath against the window.

We have a few more quick scenes: one with Detective Briggs reading about Bosnian war crimes before seeing a headline about Tooms' apprehension, and crying in relief. We then move to Tooms in his cell, creating a new nest. Mulder and Scully watch him build, and have a conversation about the inability of society to find true security, and how the presence of anomalies like Tooms in the world undermines our conception of what it means to be safe. The conversation is a little heavy-handed, though these capstone conversations will become a regular feature to lend closure to subject matter that inherently resists it. They will improve as the show goes on. Sure enough, the episode ends with Tooms grinning at the realization that his cell door has a food slot. Even our most secure institutions are unprepared for a creature like him.

And there you have it. Squeeze is another solid early episode, introducing us to several more long-running narrative and thematic elements of the series. We're introduced to Glen Morgan and James Wong and their willingness to question Chris Carter's assumptions and test his foundations. We get our first outright horror episode, and our first classic villain. Tooms is a fascinating creation, beautifully realized by Doug Hutchison. He's a tangle of predatory urges, almost totally devoid of humanity, and he's constantly associated with the body: his excretion of bile, his sweaty skin, his consumption of liver, he's even introduced in a visual metaphor for a bowel movement. Seeing him onscreen is almost a tactile experience, reminiscent of the bracing somatic filmmaking of Gaspar Noe. Squeeze is definitely flawed. It isn't as scary as it could have been, probably due to the infamous behind the scenes issues with episode director Harry Longstreet. Longstreet didn't even make an attempt to shoot a piece of horror (perhaps indicative of how unthinkable horror on tv was in 1993), which resulted in his removal and significant last-minute reshoots directed by Morgan and Wong. Squeeze still has a strong story, however, exploring why Scully would continue to work with Mulder despite their disagreements. It shades in their character dynamic immensely, adding several aspects to Mulder and Scully that will become baked into the premise going forward. It also does a great job defining Mulder and Scully's relation to the FBI in general, not just shady arbiters of conspiracy like the Cigarette Smoking Man. It's also the first episode to be character-centric, rather than focusing on narrative or thematic exploration like the Pilot and Deep Throat. This episode essentially acts as the finale of a three-part pilot, completing the pitch of what The X-Files can be.