Brian O'Shea's Birthday

The Hottest Man in America Turns 49

I still have a broken shoulder, and still can’t drive, so I am unable to do most of the surprising things I usually can do to celebrate Brian’s, my husband’s, birthdays. But I can type, so as he is in the other room, working on his camera, I can sit a room away writing this birthday letter, that will surprise this very unusual Aries in his inbox — and introduce him to you all a bit more.

For those of you who follow my work, I feel you should be part of this family celebration today, if you wish to be. Nothing I do now would be possible without the safety, security, stunning intel, and overall support this completely original personality has offered to me, and to my mission, from Day One.

Brian is like a Graham Greene character. If you wrote him up in a novel format, your editor would say that the persona was too extreme — too novelistic, and therefore implausible. But it is all true.

I met him when I was a terrified single mother, living in lower Manhattan. I had been championing human rights in Palestine — and in Israel —- during the hostilities of 2014. I was using crowdsourced Facebook reporting from Gaza as well as from the border towns of Israel, to reveal the horrors of conflict when civilians — women and children — were in the crosshairs. My message was this radical one, spoken to both “sides”: “Don’t bring civilians into the conflict.”

I do not know why, but simultaneously, I was receiving very specific online threats of violence. This happens from time to time; but these were unusually precise and relentless. My colleague advised me to talk to Brian’s company — which specialized in dealing with threats such as this, and what he calls “counter-stalking”, a word which I had never heard before but which in my vulnerable, frightened state, sounded just fine to me.

He met me in the West Village, at a cafe that has since closed. I remember thinking: “Oh, there you are!” As if this was someone I had known forever and recognized. There is a photograph of us right outside that cafe, and we both look overjoyed, even though it was nominally a stressful work meeting.

Brian, though, was absolutely professional throughout the ordeal of getting rid of my stalker. As he assessed my case, I felt better immediately. He obviously knew what he was doing, from a deep and specialized experience base. He, and his equally reassuring colleague, “J.T.,” swept my apartment for bugs, checked the security of my electronic devices, and gently scolded me for leaving my passwords out on a bulletin board. Brian asked me detailed questions about my route every day, my “pattern of life”, and about my work. He had done this thousands of times before — with thousands of similar victims, a fact which made me feel less uniquely victimized.

Brian’s work usually involves protecting people from physical threats; the way he approached my cyberstalker, purely online, was rare.

But, within a few days, the threats were gone. Later he explained to me that he has an online persona whom he has composited, who is the “perfect woman” to a certain kind of man. I won’t give away her name as I am sure she is still needed from time to time, but she is the image of a gorgeous 23-year-old woman vaguely from a Middle Eastern country, whose hobbies include “video gamer,” “Computer-Assisted Knife Design,” and “looking pretty.”

Of course such a woman does not exist, but “she,” or the Catfish version of her, whom I will call “Serena,” has a near-perfect track record in engaging in passionate conversation the kinds of men who need to be taken off the online harassment chess board.

Later still —- after all my harassers and would-be intimidators (while I don’t discuss this, any public figure doing the work we do, has plenty) had quieted — Brian explained to me what he had done with the specific stalker for whom I had hired him. He had reached out to this man in the guise of his fictitious female avatar, who had completely seduced my stalker into falling in love with “Serena.” My stalker turned out to be a twenty-something man in the Philippines — not involved at all in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict personally.

I was puzzled, but Brian explained that the work of harassing or threatening public figures is often contracted (or even subcontracted) out on the “dark web” to bad actors around the world.

This man was so besotted with “Serena” — that he completely lost interest in me.

“Serena,” via Brian, kept making dates with my stalker in the city where he lived in the southern Philippines — a town with which Brian was familiar from his won military past. Then “Serena” would stand him up. Distraught, my stalker would besiege “Serena” with Facebook messages. “Serena” would flirt with him, and distract him again by drawing him back in.

In one exchange, my stalker said to Brian/ “Serena”: “You are as beautiful as the Jolo Islands”, a range of islands in the Philippines. Brian/ “Serena” responded, trying to channel a beautiful and frustrating 23 year old woman: “Why would you say something like that?”.

Brian then fell asleep — there is a 12 hour time difference — and awoke to a string of frantic messages from my stalker: “Was it something I said??”

Point is, my stalker never contacted me again. Brian gets desperate, lovelorn messages from him — to this day.

And, though Brian and my relationship remained strictly professional for six months, eventually it didn’t.

Pretty soon I was saying things like, “I am going to a poetry reading where Penguin Books is going to honor Toni Morrison.”

And Brian was responding, “That sounds really dangerous. I’d better go with you.”

Reader, of course, I married him.

There is so much more I could describe, about how crazy and fun it is to wake up with this improbable, hilarious, and ultra-courageous character every day. Having spent 12 years in military intelligence and assigned to Special Forces as an intelligence team leader, his skill set alone is fascinating. He served in the many conflict areas that are not called proper wars, but he defended Special Forces teams and their indigenous colleagues against many threats.

I never thought I would have conversations over breakfast about how you can if you must blow up the interior of an adversary’s home by rigging the phone wire with a plastic baggie of gasoline. (Me: “You are a sociopath.” Him: “No, just highly trained.”). I never thought I would have a husband would craft a gun out of a plastic tube that shoots chunks of potatoes — in the event of a political apocalypse in which all the guns have been confiscated — that can stop and drop an adversary within 50 feet. A lifelong pacifist, I never thought I would hear anyone about whom I cared, talk about the peace a soldier in a combat area feels when all his enemies are dead. I never thought I would feel moved to hear about how a soldier will go through anything at all, face any danger and overcome it, to get back home, and that as a result, our adversaries try to disorient and destroy the idea of, and the values of, home.

All this being said, if every day I understand how this particular war we fight, is waged, I learned about battle from Brian O’Shea.

Though I am a survivor of violence in childhood, and Brian met me when I was in a state of abject fear, Brian, who has turned many female as well as male survivors of violence into aggressive warriors, redirected my fear and trauma outward. He taught me to stop an aggressor with a “command voice” (I use this now with bullies and it is magically effective); he taught me to shoot a gun — (“Go for the area that includes the head and chest, called the Combat Stopping Zone.” ) He taught me that there is nothing wrong with defending yourself, even if it hurts someone else who means to harm you. This message (and training) has been absolutely liberatory to me as a female survivor, and it certainly helps me to be completely unafraid in battles that are merely professional or digital.

When I complain that I am tired, or disheartened, it is Brian who gives me a stern look and says, “The Revolutionary War lasted for years.”

And if every day I am fighting for liberty, I am free to do so without fear, because Brian has, as he put it, “secured the castle.”

And if every day I am positive and even happy in the fight, it is because this wild Irishman — whom his young relatives describe as bringing “crazy happiness” with him on his visits — is, with his absurdist, relentless, totally politically incorrect Irish wit, making me laugh.