The battle of Upskirt hill

After 6 months of ceaseless taunting and jokes at my expense, I was finally going to nail this jerk. I was armed with my pepper spray and taser. I told myself I wasn’t going to use it but a part of me really wanted to.

You’d be amazed at the sheer amount of perverts in the world, and when you couple that with an audience, social media, and complete anonymity, you have a dangerous mixture.

You see I like to wear dresses, I feel as if I have to say that because women these days don’t as much as you’d think anymore. During black Friday some asshole managed to get a camera under my legs and film my panties. If there was anything good about this horrific ordeal at least they were clean.

To add insult to injury I got a message on Facebook from that rando. This guy secretly filmed me in the mall walking around from store to store making various purchases, complete with edits and zooms, his video had real production value too.

When the video ended he got shots of my panties. He wanted me to know, he wanted me to see what he had done, I didn’t know if it was for a reaction, or purely to troll me, but it did both. He even wrote me a creepy love letter.

Roses are red, violets are blue,

I put my nose in your panties,

so I can smell you.

I have never wanted to physically hurt someone more than I did then. I only told my closest friends about this creep because I didn’t want to risk it getting out and having to deal with the fallout from being judged by my friends and family, but like all dark secrets, it did in fact come out. I was the subject of ridicule and lust from the unknown perverts, and contempt from my friends and family. I hadn’t done anything, yet I felt like I was the one with the loose morals.

I became obsessed with this guy's page. He called himself the Panty Hunter. I read each of the comments, and got madder and madder with each one I saw. Most of these men made it seem as if I was begging for attention and somehow it was my fault, or made lewd little comments.

All superheroes have an origin story and if I were one this would be mine. I confronted this asshole online telling him off, but he’d only repost it and laugh about it. The rest of his pervert followers cheered him on with the exception of a few occasional social white knights that tried to jump to my aid only to later attempt to get my contact information so that we could meet up later. I have to say that the entire experience made me a little bit bitter about men in general.

I started taking self defense after the incident, not feeling safe in public anymore, then I made a fake account on facebook just to follow this sadistic creeper. I started pouring over the video’s like I was on C.S.I., watching them frame by frame, analyzing them to find patterns and clues. Most of these videos were at malls in the area, and most of them started outside of bathrooms.

I do not know how I managed to figure out this pattern, but I had to pat myself on the back when I did. This asshole was literally basing his captures around various clothing sales, and when the sale popped up so did he. He’d then pick the woman’s bathroom with the highest traffic, wait somewhere close, and film. Of all the other videos I watched, most of them started outside of the bathroom.

This guy was careful not to get too close, not at first, but he'd wait for moments of confusion or heavy crowds. He liked to make a show of the girl, portray himself as a stalker, a hunter type, but then again I’m not a psychologist, maybe he just wanted the sense of having a prior relationship with the woman in question.

I didn’t think it a wise idea to confront this pervert alone, but by the same note, I didn’t want anyone other than me catching him. At the time I may have justified my actions, but looking back it was a stupid risk just for a tiny chance to reclaim a small portion of my dignity back.

The first big sale of the season happened in the Chesterfield mall, and though I was annoyed that I couldn’t make the sale myself, I was so certain he’d be here that I redirected all my energies into revenge.

I set up two small cameras in the bushes that were about the size of cuff links. When I really thought about it, it was sorta amazing that things like this didn’t happen all the time. With the way technology worked everyone could be filming anybody at any time. So in the end maybe that was what made this guy stick out for me, he was trolling for the love of the game.

I sat at a nearby bench and monitored peoples comings and goings into the bathroom. I was on the lookout for some random pervert who was staring a little bit too hard. After an hour of watching excited women enjoy the sales that I longed to enjoy myself I noticed something out of the ordinary. I saw a woman sitting outside of the bathroom with a camera facing the door. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly because she may have been filming something else and happened to be pointing the camera that way, but after a good 2 minutes of pointing her camera low and at the door I had to investigate it.

I casually walked near the bench she was set up and glanced at her camera phone. Though she was holding it low and tilting the screen away from passersby I saw she was in fact filming. She stood up and followed a woman who was coming out of the bathroom, in a yellow sun dress and black covid mask. She put her camera in a tee shirt pocket so she could film.

The woman stayed on the move through the department store, and I stayed on her. I had never considered it could be another woman, but now that I think on it, who better. No one would see her coming.

My guess is that she sees her target outside of the woman’s bathroom, and that gives her time to set up her camera and follow her through the store. If she was a woman that’d mean no one would suspect her when she was in places that a man wouldn’t belong.

Panty Hunter followed me through the women’s sections of the store and no one raised an eyebrow. Even I might have been a little suspicious if I noticed the same man sitting in the woman’s lingerie section without a woman to at least serve as a smoke screen.

This woman was about my age, maybe in her 20’s and pretty good looking, not that I was noticing something like that. She stopped when her target stopped, who was also about our age, and a prime target for upskirting.

Though the level of threat in my mind decreased at the prospect of it being another woman, even with my taser and mace there was a level of danger. I watched this stalker watching another woman for a good 30 minutes and there was no doubt in my mind she was the one. It took a considerable amount of willpower on my part not to run over to her and blurt out obscenities. I could wait, I wanted the smoking gun, I wanted to catch her in the act. I pictured in my mind the sheer bliss of flagging down a cop and having him look at the video. Then subsequently slapping the cuffs on this trader to our gender.

A gentle commotion happened in the line and a mob of women all but went into a feeding frenzy when the clerk put out the sale kiosk for evening wear. My target bunched in with her eyes focused on the woman in the sun dress. I had to intercept, because this was when it would happen, this was when it happened to me. I rushed over to the pile up and before Panty Hunter could lower her camera to take a peek I intervened.

“What do you think you’re doing… I’ve been watching you film that woman for the past 3o minutes”, I said with a righteous indignation. I was loud and firm, but not hysterical. “No, it’s not like that”, she said. It was at this moment the mob abruptly shifted and we were both jostled wildly. Panty Hunter lunged at me.

I smiled, because I couldn’t wait to get the tasty prize of justifiable violence versus an internet troll. She all but grabbed me, but I side stepped it and pushed her down. She put up her hands and said, “No…”, but everyone saw her dive for me. I owed her pain for the 2 months of public shaming.

I executed what my M.m.a. teacher called a ground and pound. I rained down hammer fists on her. She had her arms up defensively yelling, “Wait wait", but that’s always what people said when they didn’t wanna get beat up.

After two good strikes I drew blood. I could no longer be in the right if I kept up my onslaught. I reached in my bag and pulled my taser, “I’m making a citizen's arrest”, I said. “Get off me, she’s getting away”, the woman I hit yelled with urgency. She sat up and pointed to the woman in the sun dress.

I whirled around and we both locked eyes with that woman in the mask. There was a measure of recognition in her eyes that was quite unmistakable. The woman dropped her bags and made a break for it. Though me and the lady I rained hammer fists on weren't allies, we both ran after the girl in the throes of a shaky truce.

The woman sprinted clear through the lingerie aisle, then up the escalator to hardware. Neither I nor the woman at my side had cardio that came close to our new targets, but we managed to stay a reasonable distance behind her. When we reached the second level, we saw the woman crying obvious crocodile tears to two mall cops.

She hastily pointed at us, and the rent a cops charged and barred our way. I was so upset that I tried to pull a juke move and slip by him, but he was unimpressed and grabbed my waist tight, locking me in place. I stopped struggling when the rent a cop threatened to put me in zip ties. I watched in horror as the woman turned to me, smirked, did a dismissive mocking salute, then casually trotted out of the store disappearing in the sea of faces.

Me and the other woman found ourselves in a shady back room of the department store. There were miscellaneous treasures on shelves, a desk teaming with clutter, and one angry mall cop sitting in front of us. “So who wants to go first?”, he said to us. A long moment of silence drug out between the two of us, but before we could answer someone knocked on his door and called him away leaving us to awkwardly sit with one another.

“Why did you tackle me?”, the woman said to me. “Why were you filming that woman?”. “For the same reason you did I’d assume, Panty Hunter got you didn’t she”. I looked away in defeat, it was a ridiculously obvious answer, yet in the moment I couldn’t conceive that anyone could have been as clever as I was.

“I’m sorry”, I said to the other woman. “It’s ok, I might have done the same thing. How did you get so close?”, she said. “I noticed that he… she... was popping up at malls and department stores after sales, then staking out the bathroom. How about you?”. “Same, and I noticed a reflection in one of the video’s of a female's leg”.

“So if I hadn’t hit you we could have got her?”, I said. “Maybe, but we know how she did it, and got a general idea of what she looks like. I doubt she’d get to do this again without thinking twice about it”. “I mean we got really close to getting her, I think we could do it if we worked together. Do you want to?”, I asked. The woman nodded with determination.

We shook hands as partners. I don’t mean to get dramatic, but Panty Hunter was still out there and it was going to take the both of us to find her.