Well, Shit.

Today, I received an email attachment from the Department of Community Justice informing me that there is a “significant change in the offender’s sentence.” The man convicted of stalking me is being granted early release from his three-year post-prison supervision—cutting his supervision in half after just eighteen months.

Under Oregon’s Earned Discharge (eDIS) laws, a person on supervision can have their sentence cut by up to 50 percent simply by reaching the halfway mark without documented violations. On paper, it is framed as a reward for compliance. In reality, it is a system designed entirely around the offender, with no human being attached to the harm he has done.

The law does not require the court to weigh his prior record. It does not seek a victim impact statement. It does not even guarantee notification unless his victim has navigated the arduous process of registering across multiple state and county systems. I only know this is happening because I jumped through every one of those hoops, which is not easy to do in a way that keeps my current address hidden.

Here is the reality the system is choosing to ignore:

I did not know this man personally. When I first encountered him, I was serving as Chair of my 55+ community’s HOA board, working to enforce basic bylaws that he and his mother were violating—violations that threatened the health and safety of our neighbors. At that exact time, he was nearing the end of a five-year probation sentence for violating a permanent stalking protective order obtained by another woman. He was already in violation of that probation, had failed to report to his probation officer for a year, and had two active arrest warrants out for him.

To keep me from holding him and his mother accountable—and to keep authorities from discovering his whereabouts—he targeted me. He made explicit threats to assault me and kill me and committed in-person acts knowingly and intentionally to put me in fear for my physical safety.

Despite overwhelming evidence and witnesses, he has never once taken responsibility for his crimes. Instead, he and his mother blamed me for his arrest, conviction, and prison sentence. For a long time, I fought their narrative. Today, I own my part in it—not as blame, but as truth. Without my relentless self-advocacy and full cooperation with law enforcement and the courts, he would never have been arrested, convicted, or imprisoned. After serving a shortened prison term—again, released early on “good behavior” without ever acknowledging the harm he caused—he was placed on three years of post-prison supervision. Now, at eighteen months, the state is letting him off the hook early.

The logic is completely upside down. If supervision was keeping a repeat offender compliant (at least as far as his parole officer was aware), that suggests the supervision was working. When someone has a documented history of ignoring court orders, absconding from probation, and stalking multiple women (at least three for whom there is a public record), you do not remove the guardrails halfway through the sentence. You keep them in place to reinforce accountability and protect the community.

Even within this broken framework, there are individual people doing their best to hold the human reality that the law ignores. Just thirty minutes after that notification arrived, a Victim and Survivor Services Advocate called me and spent nearly two hours on the phone with me. She answered my questions, explained the rules, and invited me to share more of my emotions and my story—a rare, compassionate gesture that few people ever extend. She validated my shock and dismay, noting that while most people understand sudden fear, few comprehend what it means to live with prolonged fear. “What you feel is happening is what’s happening,” she told me plainly.

Yet even she is bound by the same upside-down laws. As she explained, there is nothing she, her office, or I can do to stop this early dismissal. “Unfortunately, your work is more for the next person than for you,” she said. “All the work you did to get him arrested and convicted is still there. It’s documented. It will help the next woman. It should help you now, but it doesn’t as much as it should.”

I am grateful that the notification system worked, that the letter explicitly acknowledged the harm done to me, and that this advocate met me with genuine respect and empathy. I am also grateful that the permanent stalking protective order I fought so hard to obtain remains permanent and fully enforceable, regardless of his supervision status.

Still, an advocate’s compassion and a survivor’s own vigilance cannot substitute for a functioning law. Instead, the system washes its hands of him, pats itself on the back for a clean compliance checklist, and leaves me—the victim survivor—to absorb the shock, double-check my safety plan, and carry the vigilance alone.

Oregon’s eDIS rules measure success by an absence of paperwork. Until the law recognizes that real human lives are attached to these crimes, “earned discharge” will remain nothing more than an unearned gamble with survivors’ safety.

Composed on November 12, 2026, the day I was notified of my convicted stalker’s early release from his three-year post-prison supervision. The process of navigating the justice system in criminal court, civil court, and appeals court took four years of my life.