Weddings have a magnetic pull for absentee parents. You can go fifteen years without a birthday card, but the second you set a date and put down a deposit on a venue, suddenly the parent who abandoned you wants front-row seats and their name on the invitation. One Reddit user decided that simply blocking these sudden bursts of “parental love” wasn’t sending a clear enough message, so he deployed a nuclear option that involved lingerie photos and the dark side of the internet.
The OP, a twenty-seven-year-old man, was abandoned by his mother when he was just eleven. She cheated on his father and then vanished, leaving the dad to raise him solo. She didn’t want custody, didn’t visit, and didn’t call. For nearly two decades, she was a ghost. But now that the OP is getting married, she has decided she “deserves another chance” and wants to play the role of the doting mother.
The OP was actually generous enough to invite her as a guest, which is more than she deserved. But that wasn’t enough for her ego. She demanded to be listed on the formal invitation and involved in the planning. When the OP gave her a hard “no,” she began a harassment campaign, spamming his phone with pleas for forgiveness. When he blocked her, she didn’t stop. She just started borrowing phones from other family members to bypass the block.
This is where the “flying monkeys” come in. For those who don’t know the term, it refers to people who act on behalf of a narcissist or toxic person to harass a victim. The OP’s uncle and other relatives let the mom use their phones to continue the bombardment. The OP blocked them one by one, but the messages kept coming. He realized that blocking wasn’t teaching them a lesson; it was just a minor inconvenience. He needed a deterrent that would make his phone number radioactive to them.
In a move that is equal parts genius and terrifying, the OP grabbed his camera. With his fiancée’s enthusiastic permission, he took some “tasteful but s£xy” photos of her. He then took the phone numbers of every family member who had allowed the mom to use their device and Photoshopped those digits right onto the images. Then, he uploaded them to “unsavory subs” on Reddit.
The effect was instantaneous. The uncle, who had previously claimed he was “only trying to help,” found his phone blowing up with texts from strangers looking for a good time. The “perverts” of the internet did the OP’s dirty work for him. The uncle was horrified, blaming the Reddit community for being “classless,” completely missing the point that he had violated his nephew’s boundaries first.
It is fascinating to watch how quickly “family obligation” evaporates when it starts inconvenienting the enablers. The moment the uncle had to deal with unwanted attention—something the OP had been dealing with for weeks—the “help” for the mom stopped immediately. They learned that lending their phone to the mom came with a very specific, very awkward price tag.
The OP admits that he went “scorched earth,” and honestly, he isn’t wrong. Doxing your own family members on fetish forums is a level of petty that most of us can only dream of. But when you look at the alternative—indefinite harassment from a woman who abandoned her child—it starts to look less like cruelty and more like effective boundary enforcement. He warned them with blocks, and when they bypassed the digital wall, he built a new wall out of chaos.
The family is now terrified to let the mom near their phones because they know there are consequences they can’t handle. The OP has effectively trained his relatives like Pavlov’s dogs: help the mom, get the perverts. It is a harsh lesson, but it worked. The silence on his end is proof that sometimes you have to be the villain in their story to be the hero of your own peace of mind.
So, is the OP the ahole? In the eyes of the law, maybe. In the eyes of anyone who has ever dealt with relentless family harassment, he is a legend. He protected his peace and his wedding by making sure the cost of bothering him was higher than anyone was willing to pay.
If you are thinking about harassing an estranged relative on their wedding day, maybe check their Reddit history first. You never know if your phone number is about to become public property in a very NSFW way.
What would you do if your family refused to stop harassing you? Would you change your number, or would you unleash the internet on them like this groom did? Let us know in the comments if this was brilliant or way over the line!