'Psych war': How a childhood 'evil neighbor' readied woman for life under Trump

Reporter Elle Reeve, known for her deep dive into issues of white supremacy for Vice and CNN, wrote in a new article Monday that her childhood experience with a stalker armed her to handle fascists in today's political climate.

Reeve's article for Slate detailed how she learned to handle "evil" after years of dealing with her next-door neighbor, an angry man who stalked and harassed her family for years.

"I spent my entire teenage years at war," she wrote. "Not a real war, but a psychological war, followed by a legal one. It did not have a happy ending. At the time, when explaining it to my high school friends, I referred to the situation as “my evil neighbor.” Decades later, I understand what happened: My family had a stalker."

When her family reported how the neighbor burned obscenities into their lawn with weed killer or stared her down as she walked to the school bus each day, the police advised them, “If you don’t get it on video, we can’t do nothing about it.”

That tip, plus learning how to remain calm and cool in the face of cruelty, served her reporting well, she said.

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Reeve said she's able to interview such figures as white nationalist Richard Spencer not because her blonde hair appealed to their racist predilections.

"After my reporting in Charlottesville in 2017, I heard one comment over and over," she wrote. "The only reason I had gotten interviews with white nationalists was because I was a blond woman and those guys wanted to make Aryan babies with me. I know that’s not what everyone thinks, but I heard it a lot, and it p---ed me off, so I wanted to tell the story my way.

"The reason I was able to do it was not my hair. It was because I was forced to learn at a very young age that most bullies are cowards, that confrontation is necessary, that you must get it all on tape," Reeve wrote.

"When I was surrounded by hostile armed lunatics in Charlottesville — and Oregon, and Michigan, and the United States Capitol — I didn’t tap into my years of experience with shampoo and conditioner. What got me into those crowds, and what got me through them, was spending my adolescence preparing for confrontation with this kind of man."

Read the Slate article here