Caso Lever S01E07: Meet The Cyberbullies

In the latter part of 2019 Carmen Solares de Lever made use of a dedicated Instagram account (@carmenvsb) to blare out to the whole world just how much she detests us. 

As the days went by, some of them featuring a little sequence of new posts of a spiteful nature usually backed up by some truly perverse hashtags, I became the principal target of this torrent. 

I supposed at the time that this was an attempt to get a rise out of me and that the best approach would be to simply ignore. Pissing into the wind and all that. 

And yet there can be no denying that aspects of this cyber-grudge were genuinely unsettling. Someone I had barely exchanged words with was engaged in an obsessive, abhorrent and actually quite feverish smear campaign against me and my family.  

And bear in mind that at this stage I had forgiven Mrs Lever for reporting me to the police for attacking her when I was not even in the country, and had every reasonable expectation that she would understand what a near miss that had been for her, and would thus do everything possible to avoid further conflict. 

And yet, just to be sure, the judge had made her sign a conciliation agreement in which she promised to maintain peaceful relations in future and rein in her husband and staff as well. 

Here are some of the key take outs from this stream of social media malice...

• I have no talent; neither as a photographer nor as a writer. (Subjective, that one, I know.)
• My clothes — and hat in particular — smell, and I do not bathe. (Less so.)
• I am a 'fake entrepreneur'; indeed my whole life is one big fraud (We sold our company for a small fortune over two decades ago. I am no longer really any sort of entrepreneur, fake or otherwise. Anyway, under whose criteria?) 
• I have no genitals, a negative sperm count and am otherwise infertile: ‘Microphallus Rosbif’. (Objectively false.)
• If I could have children, they'd be inbred retards, and so the universe has done the gene pool a big favour. (Intelligence, or the lack of it, is up to 73% heritable.)
• I am married to a "psycho hose beast" (Just horrid.)
• The pair of us resemble a couple of concupiscent apes (Ditto, and could easily be deemed racist.)
  
• I suffer from penis envy (In fact I have never really envied any other human being for any reason, let alone for the size of their sexual organs.)
• I am a homosexual. (And this would bother her why, exactly?) 
• I am a nerd. (Are we still in secondary school?) 
• I am a sociopath
  
• I have very British teeth (That one, at least, is broadly true. Ever since I have had any gnashers at all, they have been looked after by the same dentist as HM The Queen and most of the rest of the Royal Family.) *
• I am a bitter old man that nobody will miss when he’s dead (We shall have to see, won't we?)
  

Context is everything. That last gem was posted around the time her husband made an explicit death threat against me. 

In one month alone there were 45 individual put downs of this nature. There was no other content at all on this feed. I have archived every post. 

Who really has the time in their life for so much hate? 

There was clearly a quantity of online research involved. 

On some levels it's truly pathetic, yet on others extremely disturbing.

I suppose there are many of us that post something on social media at some point that we later regret, perhaps because we were a bit tipsy or just not in a particularly good place at the time, but two or three times a day, and for months?  

Much of it could be characterised as on the bleeding edge of racial and gender abuse, along with other forms of discrimination (relating to my own nationality, for example). In short, a cacophony of belittlement geared to demean and destroy, and not just psychologically.

This pathological nastiness went on until the very day that Lever himself received his denuncia for gender abuse against V. That put a cork in it. 

At first only two specific posts which might further incriminate Lever were removed, almost certainly because their content tallied rather inconveniently with the declarations already made by my wife at the Fiscalía de Mujeres and INACIF and detailed in the denuncia he had received. 

For example, the text alongside one of these posts almost perfectly matched the account given of the demeaning misogynistic poem that Jason Wade Lever had recited to my wife on March 5, 2018 and which she had detailed to investigators. (Third one down, below.)

A bit later on Carmen Violeta Solares de Lever deactivated her entire Instagram account.

We always suspected that they were both behind this ciberacoso for several reasons, such as the fact that the content was in English and made use of certain modismos that Lever himself would be more likely to use, the original profile picture showed the happy couple together, smirking, and the hashtags reflected some very male sexual obsessions, a notion that was later supported by the psychologist who later interviewed me on this very topic at the MP.

Deleting the account definitively might have given them a degree of deniability — the old 'I woz hacked' ploy — but it was subsequently resurrected not long afterwards as the social media front end of Roadkill Grill, the Levers' erstwhile business here in La Antigua — complete with all the followers that had been acquired almost entirely on the back of degrading content directed at us. (The clue here was that the indexation on Google was identical and META later confirmed the ruse to me.)

It was at that moment in November 2019 that I made contact with META regarding a formal complaint. I had ignored the daily drivel as it was delivered, but there was something about the notion of their use of a platform carefully nurtured via hateful content to promote a shabby restaurant that really — and I mean, really — irked me.

Whatever one thinks of this, there are few things lower than an attempt to profit on the back of defamation and hate. 

I do have to hand it to them though, this first example below is doing some fairly heavy lifting in as much that it manages to insult both of us, simultaneously and yet with a degree of differentiation. 

* Though I have not seen my dentist since my last visit to the UK, so my teeth could well be going a bit Prince Andrew. 

Reductive Reasoning

I am currently re-reading my second favourite science book — The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch* — and in many ways getting even more out of it than I did the first time way back in the early noughties. 

The first chapter,entitled The Theory of Everything, is a stand-alone tour de force which contains one of the most elegant take downs of the reductionist approach to explanation one is ever likely to come across. 

I have chopped it up a little bit here...

Another mistaken view of the nature of science, held disapprovingly by many critics of science and (alas) approvingly by many scientists, namely that science is essentially reductionist. That is to say, science allegedly explains things reductively - by analysing them into components...

A reductionist thinks that science is about analysing things into components. An instrumentalist thinks that it is about predicting things. To either of them, the existence of high-level sciences is merely a matter of convenience.

Thus to reductionists and instrumentalists, who disregard both the real structure and the real purpose of scientific knowledge, the base of the predictive hierarchy of physics is by definition the 'theory of everything'. But to everyone else scientific knowledge consists of explanations, and the structure of scientific explanation does not reflect the reductionist hierarchy. 

There are explanations at every level of the hierarchy. Many of them are autonomous, referring only to concepts at that particular level (for instance, 'the bear ate the honey because it was hungry'). Many involve deductions in the opposite direction to that of reductive explanation. That is, they explain things not by analysing them into smaller, simpler things but by regarding them as components of larger, more complex things - about which we nevertheless have explanatory theories.

For example, consider one particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in London. Let me try to explain why that copper atom is there**. It is because Churchill served as prime minister in the House of Commons nearby; and because his ideas and leadership contributed to the Allied victory in the Second World War... 

 

But even if you had the superhuman capacity to follow such lengthy predictions of the copper atom's being there, you would still not be able to say, 'Ah yes, now I understand why it is there.' You would merely know that its arrival there in that way was inevitable (or likely, or whatever), given all the atoms' initial configurations and the laws of physics. 

In the reductionist world-view, the laws governing subatomic particle interactions are of paramount importance, as they are the base of the hierarchy of all knowledge. But in the real structure of scientific knowledge, and in the structure of our knowledge generally, such laws have a much more humble role...

I must mention another way in which reductionism misrepresents the structure of scientific knowledge. Not only does it assume that explanation always consists of analysing a system into smaller, simpler systems, it also assumes that all explanation is of later events in terms of earlier events; in other words, that the only way of explaining something is to state its causes. 

And this implies that the earlier the events in terms of which we explain something, the better the explanation, so that ultimately the best explanations of all are in terms of the initial state of the universe

The laws of biology, say, are high-level, emergent consequences of the laws of physics. But logically, some of the laws of physics are then 'emergent' consequences of the laws of biology. It could even be that, between them, the laws governing biological and other emergent phenomena would entirely determine the laws of fundamental physics. But in any case, when two theories are logically related, logic does not dictate which of them we ought to regard as determining, wholly or partly, the other.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy - but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

Yet Deutsch later also clarifies that...

Holism - the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism. What do holists expect us to do? Cease our search for the molecular origin of diseases? Deny that human beings are made of subatomic particles? Where reductive explanations exist, they are just as desirable as any other explanations. Where whole sciences are reducible to lower-level sciences, it is just as incumbent upon us as scientists to find those reductions as it is to discover any other knowledge.

* Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford.

** No, it is not a racist copper atom. 

Stopping Time

I spotted this captivating item earlier on the Instagram feed of @historiante_

A Roman face cream complete with ancient fingermarks. Dating to around 150 AD it might be said to have long out-survived the face that it was intended to soothe or rejuvenate. 

It was found in London at the site of a temple dedicated to the now rather topical Mars. 

The principal ingredients were animal fat, tin oxide and starch. The latter is still occasionally used here in Guatemala as a treatment for teenage acne. 

I Care A Lot (2020)

Undoubtedly entertaining, largely as a result of the mischievous central performance from Rosamund Pike, playing a professional guardian whose grift is to legally kidnap ageing wards and then asset strip them at her own leisure. 

Around her however, the action becomes tonally indeterminate, not quite functioning properly as either a dark satire or as a thriller. Some of this is inevitable in a story that has no good guys to root for. 

J Blakeson doesn't do quite enough to get over the fact that Marla is just plain nasty. (And not always 'deliciously' so.) 

He equips her with a cod version of the philosophy outlined by Thraysmachus in Book I of Plato's Republic. He provides her with a pretty girlfriend that she obviously cares about. He makes her brave and defiant and puts her in a whole load of very tricky situations involving chaps from the Russian mob and their lackeys. 

Yet these other villains are often more silly than scary and, in a way, this prevents a proper thaw of the hoarfrost that had earlier settled on our sympathies for her character. 

And the developing plot ultimately distracts from the really terrifying hazard here, the possibility being shanghai'd by the state. 

So, in the end I'm not sure I did care a lot. 

"London Airport"

Makes me chuckle a bit now to think how my parents used to dress up, just for check-in at 'London Airport'. 

The outfits and and the vehicle typically selected might have made it look like they were off to a wedding these days...though weddings today can also turn out a bit like the bottom part of this pic.

Staying Safe

 

La Belle Époque (2019)

The premise here is a bit like a low tech version of Michael Crichton's Westworld, in which the seriously loaded can book themselves a fully immersive historical experience. Sans robots. 

Around it we get a sort of European farce with frenetic, self-consciously smart repartee, old people sex, and all the usual accoutrements. 

A lot of it is un peu annoying, frankly. But there are some rather charming parts and almost all of these feature Daniel Auteuil as Victor, who paces and pitches his performance slightly differently to everyone else around him. 

Caso Lever S01E06: The Witch Hunt

The first time Lever was recorded calling my wife a witch to her face was on July 25, 2018: "Un bruja, una bruja fea".

He continued the witch hunt around a month earlier on June 11, when he passed with his wife passed in front of our house and, gesturing at its main gate, duly declaimed to their son, 'There once was an evil witch...'

I suppose, at a stretch, one could say that deliberately terrifying a toddler regarding the metaphysical status of a neighbour is a form of child abuse. 

Yet the use of this particular stigma is more generally associated with misogyny and an age-old stream of European folk persecution directed, in the main, at women — in particular those women who were otherwise socially vulnerable, husbandless or childless, or in some way refusing to conform to prevailing norms. 

During the so-called witch craze in early modern Europe, said to have been stoked by the publication of one of history's most seminal texts of gender oppression, the Malleus Malleficarum, at least 45,000 individuals met their ends following some sort of witchcraft trial. 

Yet a bit later on in Puritan New England, for example, it was recorded that most of the supposed victims of witchcraft doing all the finger-pointing, were also women. 

To name someone in your community as a witch is more than a mere insult, it is a social stigma, especially in imperfectly-modern, Catholic countries like Guatemala, where there is a significant residue of superstition. 

You can call a woman many unpleasant and demeaning names, but 'witch' is one of them that will afford her a particular set of social hazards. 

I'm sure that the Levers did not simply stumble upon the use of this term; they have used it deliberately and systematically as a way of causing greater mischief.

They have encouraged its use in their social circle and we happen to know that a member of their household staff has been going around the village informing some of its more impressionable residents that my wife is a witch.

And so on one occasion when we emerged out of our gate, a neighbour was passing and on spotting us immediately crossed herself before speeding up, whispering, as if to hurry away from any malign effluvia that we might have been giving off!

Jason Wade Lever himself, whose principal tactic for delaying criminal proceedings against him appears to have been to claim he doesn't speak much Spanish, nevertheless seems entirely un-averse to insulting my wife in that very language...

In the above clip one can observe how Lever goes up to a group of men working in the street and encourages them to join him in harassing and demeaning a local resident, at that moment the only female in the vicinity. 'Es una bruja...una bruja fea'. 

He then shouts across at my wife in English "And I definitely don't have respect for YOU". This had long been clear. 

This is surely gender abuse, pure and simple. 

In the following video, the entire Lever family passes in front of our gate. This was the night of the Quema del Diablo, 2019.  

They had earlier appeared with a pair of piñatas, one of which had beeb very obviously fashioned to look like a bruja, pointy sombrero and so on. They held these piñatas very deliberately up to our cameras and laughed theatrically. 

Having in effect burned us in effigy in the local parque, a scene witnessed by some of our family members, they then came back, and this time Mrs Lever was at the rear of the group with her son. 

She sets the scene thus: The witch is around...

Niño: Is this the witch's gate?

Mrs Lever: This is the witch's gate...yeah!'

And in this next clip Mrs Lever, having just returned home in her white Mazda and thus spotting us conversing outside with my cuñado, appears to encourage her son to toddle outside just so that he too can publicly stigmatise my wife again as 'the witch', and in an entirely unprovoked fashion... 

 

By way of confirmation, his mother adds 'That's the witch...'

You can tell from the audio that my wife had a strong sense in advance what was about to occur, for this was no isolated incident.

The pattern was being repeated online. The Levers had been using a personal Instagram account — @carmenvsb — to mount a rather frenetic hate campaign which included numerous examples of witchcraft imagery. 

I was eventually to lodge a formal cyberbullying complaint with the US tech giant META about this, requesting a full backup of the original set of files for legal purposes.

Somewhat ironically, Facebook was today accused by a UK minister of being a 'schoolyard bully'.

 

This was one of a pair of images I was informed had been immediately removed the very evening that Lever received his denuncia for violence against women. 

On this ignominious stream the hashtags were usually highly eye-catching as a result of the twisted and sexual nature of their scorn. 

With #penisenvy came the insinuation that my wife must have acquired a lasting attachment to the penis she alleged Lever had gratuitously shown off to her on March 7 the previous year. 

It would be worth reminding readers at this point that when someone behaves badly and is recorded in the act, it is never the person who made that recording that is to blame for this content snowballing online, but the 'Karen' that was the subject of the media. 

UPDATE

 

On October 12, 2023, after a legal battle lasting over four years, Lever was finally convicted - specifically for the misogynistic verbal assault of Friday, July 26, 2019 and its aftermath.

During the course of last year Lever's attempts to avoid facing his victim became ever more blatant and an arraigo was imposed. Faced by the consequences of his continued attempts to enter and leave the country in disregard of this judicial order, he finally presented himself at the Juzgado de Paz. He first tried to pay off his victim, then tried to turn his own trial into a reverse-prosecution, whereby my reports of the Levers' bad behaviour were presented as bad behaviour. Neither of these ruses prevented the imposition of justice in the end.

 

 

The Full Continental

The post-war European art of making something sparse appear luxurious.

There are several items here that always used to make my wife's blood boil on the other side of the pond.

Media toronja...huevo bien tibio...el jugo de dos sorbos. 

You can't see it here, but the little pot of jam is never sufficient either. 

There's a rather amusing piece by Rory Sutherland in The Spectator this week on hotels and desayuno, in which he observes...

It can’t have helped the pro-European cause that, in English, the word ‘continental’ is often used to mean ‘woefully inadequate’ — as in ‘continental breakfast’.

Silk Road (2021)

 A lot of fun, for an almost true story. 

One of those movies claiming to be a creative expansion of an investigative article - David Kushner's 2014 Rolling Stone piece on the fall of dark web 'kingpin' Ross Ulbricht. And the oddly parallel morality tale represented by the trajectory of one of the DEA agents tracking him. 

Ethically, the film seemed to be sitting on the fence for much of its running time, enough to get a sore bum, but in the end did seem to be making a bid for a braver kind of moral ambiguity, let down somewhat by characters still being permitted to spout platitudes like 'there's good and bad in the world'. 

I'm not sure if Ulbricht's girlfriend here was a real person or just a necessary character written into the script to a) include a fetching young lady on the side of the Millennials and b) avoid having to show Ulbricht talking to himself for much of the movie. (The only other significant female character was a bit of a piss artist, so generally that side of things was rather poor.)

Julia - the aforementioned girlfriend - begins her involvement with the creator of Silk Road with the line "Seriously, I've just fucked with a libertarian?". Perhaps she might have been fleshed out more as a character by giving her some well-briefed stuff to say about the potential flaws in her bloke's worldview later on. She'd have done him a major favour by carefully and lucidly enumerating the various ways in which this libertarian would end up fucking himself. 

He'd grown up in Costa Rica, more hippie than preppy for much of his formative years, but then his fixation with eastern philosophy was supplanted by another: markets and liberties. 

And so it was that he went about creating a marketplace for liberties, in effect an extreme embodiment — in code — of the some of the underlying political-philosophical anxieties that have been hooked up to the Internet since it went mainstream. For Ulbricht Silk Road was to be an 'economic simulation' designed to provide the experience of living in a society 'without the systemic use of force'.  

The movie is a little shy about the full inventory of goods and services listed on this ‘eBay of vice', preferring to focus on dope, which I suppose is a way of tapping into some of its audience's inherent sense of how the world and their own preferences and ideals might occasionally appear at variance, without making the point more explicitly, or indeed asking if Ulbricht was any more to blame for the unwholesome stuff on his platform than say Facebook might be.

Yet if I were to write a screenplay about the way social media spreads extremism, I might be at least as interested in the extremists themselves as I would be in Mark Zuckerberg and his great honeycomb hive of perspective silos. The dealers and the deep web 'community' are oddly missing from this tale. 

It has been calculated that 20% of US drug consumers made a purchase on Ulbricht's site. He made $420m in commissions and earmarked $730k of these earnings for hits on seven supposed enemies (rather more than we see in the movie).

It ends with another flash of white text, which indirectly perhaps poses a more substantial ethical/legal conundrum that anything that came before. Does it really matter that when Ulbricht ordered hits on a people he'd never met, via encrypted chats, nobody actually died? 

Minari (2021)

 

Minari is less a story than a depiction of a situation populated by highly authentic individuals and their collective interactions; the life of a family. 

Director Lee Isaac Chung grew up in a similar situation and one presumes that the sincerity of his observations originates in a direct experience of such an ensemble.

The synopsis on IMDB tells us what his movie is supposedly about: "A Korean family starts a farm in 80s Arkansas".

Yet I'm sure that if you had asked any number of Korean Americans or even non-Korean Americans to produce a script based on that same premise, specifically to imagine the characters involved, you would not have ended up with anything that feels as truthful as this. 

The scenario is almost begging for archetypes and their respective archetypal moments, yet Chung is very sparing with them and always careful to lens everything very personally.

Steven Yeun is playing a role reminiscent of Jean de Florette — shorn of all the melodrama — thereby demonstrating that the essential domestic drama need not depend on it for its poignancy.  

Not quite a masterpiece, but extraordinary nonetheless. A little uneven in terms of its forward impetus perhaps. 

PS: Only recently I mentioned how, with age, contemporary movies set in the period of one's childhood start to appear less and less accurate. 

Now, I was over 40 before I visited Arkansas (on ground level at least), but I can see that this movie takes special care with the details of 80s life, which of course feature some leftovers from the previous decade. 

The first music reproduction device I possessed looked almost exactly like this, though mine bore the Phillips brand..

Corredor Piroclástico

 

Possibly not the ideal weekend for Antigua to be (finally) experimenting with al fresco dining.

Corredor can also translate as someone running...away. 

That said, a big cloud of volcanic ash is the perfect excuse for doing bugger all on a Sunday. 

Wrong Turn (2021)

Our second outing into the wicked wilderness this week, Wrong Turn was just enough of a piss take to contrast pleasingly with the generally darker, tenser (and only marginally satirical) Red Dot. 

It's a remake or possibly reboot of an original I am unfamiliar with, dubbed at the time as hicksploitation, which adds a fairly drôle layer of hipstersploitation to this tale of youngsters on — and then rather unfortunately, off — the Appalachian trail in West Virginia. (It was in fact shot in Ohio.) 

The title at least brought back memories of Oliver Stone's U Turn (1997) starring Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Billy Bawb Thornton, J Lo and John Voight — a cult classic in our household.

The Black Coral

The venue for my 21st birthday celebrations, not at the time a Chinese minimart, I hasten to add, but Caye Caulker’s premier (and then possibly only) nightspot, the Black Coral of fond memories...

The island was a rather different place back then with a more rum-bunctious nocturnal atmosphere fed by occasionally overspilling tensions between the fishermen of largely Yucatec origin (descendants of Caste War outcasts) and the Rastas of perhaps less disciplined occupation. 

Tourists of the standard sort were very thin on the ground. The non-Belizeans one came across tended to be British Armed Forces, archaeologists, volunteers (Peace Corps or VSO), spooks, scuba bores, Etonians...or some combination thereof. 

Towards the end of that sultry April evening a pretty brunette English teacher from York led me to a tiny inlet and we swam and flirted amidst a swarm of phosphorescent plankton, a scene that was uncannily reproduced just over a decade later in Danny Boyle’s adaptation of The Beach by Alex Garland. 

The clapboard building that housed first the dance floor then the shelves of victuals has now gone for good. This pic, 2012. 

Ditto this one of Tom's Hotel, my lodgings for that personal milestone. (I have a feeling that this structure was also made of wood at the time, but couldn't swear to it.) 

The evening after my birthday the whole of Caye Caulker was completely overrun by fairly large arterial-red crabs. There was almost nowhere to safely deposit a foot on the pathways and we found the door to our room partially blocked by a small tower of perhaps half a dozen of them piled one on top of the other. 

Throughout the night I was maintained largely in REM sleep by the persistent sound of their scratching all around. 

I have never seen (nor indeed heard) of a crustacean migration of such proportions again in Belize, but something similar appears to occur on Christmas Island on a regular basis.

Caso Lever S01E05: Echo and Narcissus

 

During Lever's first court appearance on October 28, 2019, it turned out that a key part of the INACIF report into his abusive behaviour — the final page with the conclusion — had mysteriously gone astray at the Juzgado. 

And prior to subsequent hearings in both 2020 and 2021 the entire document duly de-materialised and had to be recompiled and re-presented from the copy that our lawyers have. 

There are undoubtedly only two possible explanations for this — incompetence or corruption — and it seems that the only way to put a definitive end to these shenanigans is to make formal complaints on both counts to the competent (one hopes) authorities in the capital. 

The main text of the INACIF report featured the English word gaslighting. We downloaded the classic 1944 movie with Bergman and Boyer after we first received it.

Gaslighting has become a more fashionable term of late and perhaps covers a greater range of vengeful and manipulative behaviours than it ever used to. 

At base it's a truly heady mix of unpleasant tactics which involve a dishonest attempt to align others against a victim or victims, whilst at the same time psychologically abusing them to the extent that they could end up questioning their own grasp of events. 

The INACIF investigator detected this in Lever's alleged actions late in 2019, but in truth he had barely started back then. 

One of the key practices of the gaslighter is projection — accusing the victim of precisely the sort of behaviours that they themselves are engaged in. And over time they will often come to believe that it is they who are really being persecuted. 

This mentality also goes by the name of ego-syntonic and, as anyone that has been on the wrong end of this kind of manipulation can usually attest to, it is particularly hard to defend oneself against. 

If you are acquainted with an individual blessed with it, you will also know that whenever they launch into a tirade of criticisms of others, they are in effect providing a verbal portrait of themselves.  

We have witnessed both the Levers projecting onto both of us. Some telling examples...

1) They have consistently accused us of being problematic neighbours in an un-self-consciously self-righteous manner. All we have really ever done is try to protect ourselves against their encroachments and the resulting damage to our property. They claim we have harassed other neighbours, which is untrue, yet Lever himself has reportedly been seen at the local school complaining aggressively.

And yet, although it is true that I have made enquiries at the Muni about the way Lever has installed his own stuff on my walls, inside and outside — painted them even — I have never lodged a formal complaint there.

He may think I dobbed him in about his construction of a bodega, but that was not me and you will not find my name on any record of any complaint at the Muni.

 

His wife however, has repeatedly been to visit the Ayuntamiento, in order to file complaints about our own supposed violations, which in each case have absolutely nothing to do with her, and these depositions have been frivolous in the extreme, such as a complaint when we repainted our front gate and the red lining we painted on the pavement outside, something we had done in consultation with the local cocode.

They have also been made after she signed an acuerdo de paz in front of a judge promising to maintain the peace between our households. 

Sometimes it feels like she spends her days and nights dreaming up new ways to cause us petty inconveniences. On one occasion in 2019 she returned home in an vehicle and on spotting us outside in the little park in front with our dogs, quickly persuaded the driver to turn his headlights on us full blast. 

I have umpteen clips of her driving around and around that little polygon with her mobile phone extended out of the car window, apparently attempting to record activity on our front terrace for reasons best known to herself. She has even put up some of her friends to walk up and down in front of our house and do the same.

On numerous occasions she has kerb-crawled me around the village, passing slowly and deliberately close alongside any pavement she finds me walking along, usually with one of my dogs. In the main she has at the time been at the wheel of her white Mazda SUV, but was once in another vehicle accompanied by a female friend. In each case there was an apparent crude intention to intimidate, and perhaps to ridicule. (Several of these mobile aggressions have been captured by security cams, and not just our own, but those of our friends and neighbours.)

And then this, the most recent piece of acoso on January 20, served up by Lever himself, aiming his cellphone camera up at our terrace and grinning up at my wife like a fool. 

Problematic neighbours? This is all pretty textbook stuff.  

2) The Levers themselves rarely conform to the basic norms that property owners in this country are obliged to abide by. When, last month, I asked the planning department at the Muni for details of any construction licence associated with Jason Lever's name on file, the only one they could find was for an obra menor in 2016 (that bodega, I believe) and this was registered to our address, 3-G.

When he fabricated a kind of piscina in his garden back in 2016/17, the then alcalde auxiliar was soon banging on our door complaining that we had constructed a swimming pool illegally, and we had to let him inside to examine our garden and show him an image via Google Maps, so that he might be reassured that it had most definitely not been us. 

We were thus presented with yet another example of how Lever consistently tries to camouflage his own infringements beneath the legal footprint of our own property rights.

And this is genuinely worrying because we may not be aware of the full extent of this and he has never shown any willingness to revert to the original numeration.

3) In the key video evidence of Lever's misogynistic molestation around the side of our house on Friday July 26, 2019 he is seen initiating this intrusion by accusing my wife of being an inveterate trouble maker. To quote: "Excellent, just causing trouble, can't help yourself, you need to get laid more..."

Yet for connoisseurs of maximum irony it can be noted that she was at that precise moment attempting to be helpful to a third party, and certainly the very last thing she was doing was actively seeking an uninvited interruption from this sort of man.

Yet this individual brought out his own phone to record events before Lever had opened his mouth, leaving us with the strong suspicion that he had invited V out into the street as part of a plan of entrapment. 

If we are correct in this suspicion, Lever himself was the one who couldn't help himself that morning.

4) I once overheard him telling a friend that I he considers me a voyeur. Aside from being an out and out calumnia this is especially rich coming from a man whose disturbing verbal 'director's commentary' has been captured repeatedly inside our home whenever we make private video or audio files. (And more recently Mrs Lever has alleged, absurdly, that my wife spends her whole life, 24-7 no less, snooping on her. Delusional.)

5) The Levers appear to recruit friends and associates as surrogate projectors. There are many examples of this to draw from, some utterly shameless, but perhaps the one that stands out by a mile was served up by their lawyer during the first hearing at the juzgado on October 28, 2019. 

In an instant when the courtroom microphones were seemingly not switched on she informed the judge that we had previously made a pernicious and dishonest denuncia against her clients, the poor, set-upon Levers. Again the idea that WE are the troublemakers, the ones who rush off to complain or sue at any provocation.

 

This was of course the absolute opposite of the truth. I know we now largely have to cope with a post-factual world but, really?

6) The very same abogada — Claudia Paniagua — would later make the absurd assertion last October that Carmen Solares de Lever could not help herself but lie to the police as a result of us repeatedly playing — for 20 hours non-stop no less — a widely popular reggeton track that apparently messes with her insecurities. 

The merest suggestion that this might be true is itself a form of character assassination, and yet again the Levers' apparent hypocrisy is stupefying. 

Around dusk on March 5, 2018 I was pruning the bougainvillea that clings to the first floor balcony of our original house in the village. My wife was standing below in the middle of the street, maybe 30m closer to the parque, conversing with an old schoolmate, now an established dentist in Antigua. 

I spotted Lever on his moto approaching from the south, initially quite fast, but upon noticing her, roughly as he drew level with the Italika taller, he slowed down and began a bizarre pageant. 

Passing deliberately and dangerously close to the pair of friends, waving his arms around like a fervent evangelical, he began singing I Believe In Love by Don Williams in a manner the dentist himself described as 'desquiciado'. 

During the course of the week to ten days after this incident, he had the same Don Williams ditty on endless repeat, at full volume, night and day. (I have kept the audio files in case I ever needed to demonstrate this.)

Almost every time the second stanza came along Lever would deliver a loud karaoke performance of his own...

But I believe in love
I believe in babies
I believe in mom and dad
And I believe in you...

After the initial incident with the dentist back on the fifth, he had returned some time later the same evening and this time pulled up right alongside my wife, by then at the edge of a group which included me, my sister and brother-in-law, plus an American citizen who rents from the latter, and duly recited some sort of demented poem about how our childlessness had to be the universe's vengeance upon us. 

So, one can safely assume that Lever had by then concluded that the surest way to be an utter nuisance was to imply — viciously — that my wife was somehow less of a woman by virtue of not being a mother. 

He has absolutely no reason to know why we chose not to have children. More importantly, he had no reason at the time to even know at all that we do not have kids. The matter had never been raised and we are adults in our fifties. So in order to be in a position to demean us so publicly he has to have had a prior and extremely morbid interest in our personal affairs.

The INACIF report provided to my wife concluded that Lever was guilty of emotional violence, and everything that has happened since — the evasiveness, the crookedness, the cooked-up allegations, the projection, the pattern of lewd and aggressive intimidation — has simply compounded the original offence. 

And no matter how hard he tries to downplay or downgrade it, he needs to answer for it in a court. He knows this and this is surely why he has been generating procedural delays unbecoming of an 'innocent man'.

 

UPDATE

 

On October 12, 2023, after a legal battle lasting over four years, Lever was finally convicted - specifically for the misogynistic verbal assault of Friday July 26, 2019 and its aftermath.

During the course of last year Lever's attempts to avoid facing his victim became ever more blatant and an arraigo was imposed. Faced by the consequences of his continued attempts to enter and leave the country in disregard of this judicial order, he finally presented himself at the Juzgado de Paz. He first tried to pay off his victim, then tried to turn his own trial into a reverse-prosecution, whereby my reports of the Levers' bad behaviour were presented as bad behaviour. Neither of these ruses prevented the imposition of justice in the end.

 

Suddenlyitis in London, 1632

 

. 

Compound accidents do appear unfortunate. 

Ditto cancer and wolf, rather like headache and shark.

Rising of the Lights?!

2 cases of inoperable huevonería. 

10,000 fatal outcomes overall and only 7 ascribed to murder. Who says these were especially violent times? 

Sounds almost like a society in need of a really good war...

HAS already had it...

France's Haute Autorité de Santé has recommended that people who have previously been infected with the novel coronavirus should only get one shot of vaccine. 

Clever tactic or preemptive tacañeria?

I guess a bit of both. But the cleverness would have to be nuanced by ensuring that the decisions are taken on a patient-by-patient basis.

It is known that many covid patients who are subsequently vaccinated experience heightened immediate side effects or at least a short-lived sensation of being severely under the weather.

This is because they already possess an immune response to the virus and the vaccine in effect boosts this to the point that it is sensible.

Yet the data on this appears to vary by age and sex. Some men and older people in general do not experience this booster effect, and so it seems to me that these individuals should still get both shots.

Are we to distinguish in any way between those who have been infected asymptomatically and those who have suffered mild or even severe symptoms?

And what of people that have had covid twice? I know one here in Antigua. He was most likely infected on both occasions by a health worker residing in his home. Are we to presume he now has a comparatively strong immune defence or a comparatively weak one?

In my view, health workers should always get the double dose.

The apparently growing presence of mutations in the mix should also inform policy. If AZ and the like adapt their vaccines and release new versions in the autumn, would one dose of these be the equivalent of a second dose of the older version?

Red Dot (2021)

As dark as winter in Lappland, Alan Darborg's twisty Swedish thriller is one of those movies that ultimately works as a two for one. 

The first film, lasting until roughly just beyond the midpoint, is about a mixed race couple from Stockholm who set off to the mountains in the hope that the northern lights will re-illuminate their path. 

Soon, all the familiar Hollywood wilderness horror boxes are being ticked. The 'meet cute' at a gas station, racist rednecks, unoccupied cabins in the woods, a pet dog you know is doomed from the moment it first appears etc. 

And then, without spoiling the switch entirely, I can add that things suddenly take a very different turn, and from that point onwards pretty much all the tropes are ruthlessly subverted. 

This second movie feels somehow more intelligent, and yet I was left with an odd sense of nostalgia for the dumb one that had been cut rather short. 

Santa Trinità

 

My mother once tried to wangle a table at a very fashionable Italian restaurant in London named after the first member of this trinity by claiming that she was a personal friend of Cacio and Pepe...