If you’ve ever seen that look in someone’s eyes, that cold, reptilian gleam… You never, ever forget it. This piece is based on a Quora question and an AskReddit thread. Links on the last page.
When I was about 10, my mother started bringing this man home when my father was at work. She used to tell me that he was fixing something in her room and that I could not come in for safety reasons. As a kid with no idea what cheating was and no clue that my mother could stoop so low, I assumed she was telling the truth and went with it.
One night while I was brushing my teeth, my mother told me she was going to go see the man and that she would be back by morning. I went to my room where my father was waiting to massage my legs (he used to do that every night before bed since we were babies). After a while, we heard the garage door open, making my father jump to his feet and run downstairs. He called her several times, then told me to look after my sisters while he went and looked around the block.
Just after he left, my mother returned in panic, and when she saw that my father was not home she ran inside and filled four glasses with bleach and set them on the table. She then phoned the police and told them that he threatened to kill my children and me by feeding us bleach.
She then locked us all in the car, waiting for the police to arrive. When my father returned, she told him that she was finally free and that he had no control over her anymore. He started to cry, which made my heart hurt. When the police arrived they arrested my dad immediately.
They believed every word my mom said and accepted we children were simply brainwashed.
It was almost a year before we saw our dad again, and when we did, my baby sister did not recognize him.
My father, the best father alive, had quite literally coped with true evil for 10 long years and is now re-married and living happily. My siblings and I now live with him as well, after a long court battle against my mother.
Shantelle Chand
I was at court, waiting to arrest a man who came for a hearing.
A female plain clothes state trooper comes out of the holding area and I notice she is visibly upset. It’s hard to break the cool of a veteran cop. I asked her what was wrong. She tells me to stick my head back there and take a look.
I go back and nod hello to the deputies. Then I take a look. (continued…)
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There are about 7 guys in the orange jumpsuits, and they are gathered around one guy who had them rolling with laughter. He’s telling a story with animated flourishes of his chained hands. He spots me and stops. He laughs and tells me he used to live in my town, do I know so and so, and the corner bar is the best one in town, and so on. I turn and walk away while he is still talking to me.
I return to the trooper and she asks if he’s still going. I nod, and she asks me if I know who he is. I don’t. She says that man punted his six month old baby boy into a wall. Thankfully his wife called 911 and the boy lived.
The man showed zero remorse. Instead, he joked and talked to the arresting officers. He even joked that if it had happened on a field he would have punted his son into the end zone.
My boy was six months old at the time. I can’t accurately describe what I felt. Black rage. Overwhelming disgust. I pictured it happening to my own son and felt the urge to vomit. I couldn’t believe someone could care so little that they would nearly kill their own child and laugh about it.
If you ask me, evil looks like a smile.
Matrim Chambers
When I was 12, I had always been taught that a policeman was my friend. If ever I was in trouble or lost or threatened, I should run to a policeman for help. I still believe that is good advice for a child.
One night, my family was watching the news on television. Some ladies were trying to eat at the dime-store lunch counter, or ride on the bus or something. I can’t remember exactly, because I was a kid. There were several nights of similar news, and this was 60 years ago.
What I saw was shocking to me. The ladies – middle-aged and elderly – only wanted to have lunch, or get a ride home on the bus, or vote… something like that. Normal stuff. Harmless stuff. Just living their lives, like everyone else.
The part I remember vividly to this day was the sight of policemen hitting those ladies with clubs, having police dogs viciously bite the ladies, knocking them down with fire hoses. The ladies were crying, screaming, bleeding, but none were fighting back, trying to hit or kick the policemen. The police and people on the street were all yelling at the ladies, calling them ugly names.
I remember crying when I saw this. I asked my mother, “What did the ladies do that was so bad to be treated like that by big, strong men? (continued…)
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Nothing, she said. They just want to be free.
Mike Harvey
I write about the dark web – the hidden underbelly of the internet. That’s my job. So I’ve spent part of pretty much every day for the past 5 years digging around in there.
I’ve seen torture videos, had fake hitmen try to frighten me, and interacted with people in every online black market that exists. I don’t consider any of them evil per se.
But I finally found true evil when I encountered the man they call ‘Lux’ the most reviled person on the entire dark web. His infamy is a result of the fact that he remorselessly distributes illegal pornography all over the world.
The encounter wasn’t frightening because Lux himself was frightening – he was anything but. It was frightening because he looked so inoffensive and normal. In this case, evil looks like a pimply-faced kid.
Eileen Ormsby
The most evil person I ever met was the wife of one of my Dad’s friends. She cheated on him, then left him and took their kids. She harassed him endlessly, falsely accused him of abusing their kids, and badgered him into the most lopsided divorce/custody settlement I have ever seen.
She took him for everything he had, moved four hours away from him. She made him agree to do all transport for his visitation, then refused to let the kids leave with him once he’d travelled to see them. When he went to court to try and change the custody arrangements, she started harassing him again, calling his workplace endlessly, demanding more and more money from him.
A few months in he couldn’t take it anymore and tragically took his own life. When she found out that what little money he’d saved had been placed in trust for the kids so that she couldn’t access any of it, she dumped the kids on his elderly parents and never contacted them again.
KittikatB
I used to have this friend. He was a funny and entertaining guy, larger than life, and physically quite large actually. We were both about 18 years old at the time (1980), so we used to hang out together as part of a group, go drinking, chasing girls, that sort of thing.
He would often make off-color jokes about Black people, the disabled, LGBTQ. All the usual targets. At the time it seemed like it was just banter – it was more socially acceptable at that time, I’m sorry to say. It didn’t strike us as especially offensive. In our ignorance at the time, it seemed like just a lazy attempt to be funny.
Little did we know it was a lot more than that. (continued…)
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A few years later, he met this girl and they became an item. She had a young daughter from a previous relationship – I think she was about 18 months old when they met. Eventually they married and he became the girl’s stepfather.
She grew up a little bit and learned to walk and talk. One day, I was with him and his step-daughter. As we walked, a Black man passed us. The little girl spat on the ground in front of him and in her little toddler voice yelled a horrible racial slur!
I was absolutely shocked, but my friend was just laughing and looking at her proudly. Turned out this was something he’d taught her to do whenever she saw somebody who wasn’t white. I could simply could not believe it.
I got angry and said that surely he could see how teaching her that was completely wrong? In response, he got angry with me, and started telling me I should be ashamed of myself for sticking up for them. He exploded about how much he hated Black people, that they had somehow “ruined his life.”
I realized that he wasn’t joking – he was the real thing, an actual foaming-at-the-mouth racist, and had been all along. In fact I feared that he was going to beat me up because he was so filled with hatred and rage.
I just said sorry, we couldn’t be friends any more. I turned around and walked away, leaving them standing there. I never contacted him again.
“In hindsight, it became obvious that all his ‘jokes’ weren’t jokes at all – they were his actual beliefs. To me, teaching that little three-year-old to blindly hate in the way he did was evil, pure and simple. I often wonder how she turned out. I hope she got away from his influence.
Graham Cox
When I was in elementary school, there was a girl in my class that was pure evil. I’ll call her Debbie.
In first grade, when we were about 6, we had the nicest teacher. Everyone (not just my class) loved this lady. One day, the teacher came to class in a new beautiful dress.
One of the students asked the teacher about her dress and the teacher said she just bought it last weekend. All the students exclaimed how pretty it was and the teacher’s face just lit up with pride.
Debbie walked up to the teacher, reached out and touched her sleeve. We all thought that she just wanted to feel the fabric. Wrong. (continued…)
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Instead, Debbie grabbed hold of the sleeve and yanked it hard, tearing it. Everyone just gasped and stared. The teacher’s face turned red and she was visibly upset. Why would this little girl do this to such a sweet person for no reason?
Fast forward to third grade, we were about 8 years old now. This is a different teacher than the first grade teacher. The class was in the stairwell, going to another room. All of a sudden a fight breaks out in the stairwell.
It’s Debbie and a boy in our class. The kids start screaming and the teacher tries to break it up. Debbie grabs the teacher’s finger and breaks it. Yes, the little beast broke the teacher’s finger on purpose! I ran to another class to get a male teacher to come and break up the fight. The following day is when we, the class, found out that the teacher’s finger was actually broken. Debbie was expelled, and we never saw her again.
Cecilia Ranger
I used to work with an elderly woman who was, to your face, as sweet as pie. She trained me for a week on how to do my job and kindly informed me that I was doing it perfectly and that she was confident that I’d be successful. There was no documentation for how to perform the role, so I took it upon myself to write a quick guide for my reference. I asked her to give it a quick look at to make sure. She sent me an email back saying, “Looks good!”
About a month later, I was up for review. My boss told me that my work hadn’t been improving and that I was having an impact on colleagues who had to pick up the slack.
This absolutely floored me. I’d never been told that I’d been doing badly, and no one had flagged anything wrong with my work. After 5 minutes of to-ing and fro-ing, I asked my boss to follow me to my desk so I could show her the process I’d written and the email chain I had with the woman who trained me.
As we got to my desk, the older woman looked up, smiled, and said, “It’s such a shame to see you leave, but we really can’t be dealing with someone like you.” Her smile was nasty – pure malice.
I told her I wasn’t going yet and that I was showing our the document I’d written that she’d said was good. I brought it up, and my boss told me that steps X, Y and Z were all wrong. That was the reason I’d been written up.
I could see that my trainer was starting to panic at this point. I showed my boss the email where she told me I was on the right track. All I could do was hope that he would understand that this woman had set me up to fail. (continued…)
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My boss went a little unprofessional and asked, loudly, if my trainer had actually told me about the things I had gotten wrong and coached me to improve them. I said no. She said, “I was meaning to.”
Never has karma been as sweet as watching her being frogmarched out of the building a week before her retirement for gross misconduct.
AlbaDdraig
Where I work, the majority of employees are females. One day, during lunch hour, we were all watching one of those women’s talk shows. That day, the question the women on the show were discussing was “what do you look for in a man?” Here’s what they said:
Woman 1: I ask them whether they eat healthy food or not because junk food is cheap and healthy food is quite expensive. So that way, I get to know whether he is rich and if he knows how to cook!
Woman 2: I like gentlemen. The one who opens the door, pulls out the chair, surprises you, but sadly chivalry is dead.
Woman 3: I like a guy who has a nice car. If a guy asks you to pick him up for a date, dump him. You deserve to be pampered.
Woman 4: I want a masculine guy. I want to feel protected.
Suddenly all the people in the audience start applauding. The women around me started clapping too. I was sitting in between them and just wondering… are you all serious right now?
This is what you admire in a guy? Money, a car, physical attributes? None of them mentioned that he should be kind, loving, and have a generous heart.
That was the last day I sat with all those women. I stopped watching that show. I eat my lunch in a corner and keep my conversation with those the girls around to a minimum.
Just take two minutes and imagine what their response would have been if a guy had said on national television: “I need a woman who can cook well for me, work at the same time, owns a nice car, should be slim and busty so that she can satisfy me?
Varun