Split Personality
About eight years ago I discovered my wife’s sister’s reddit account accidentally. It was a variation of a username she’d used for AIM before, but with different numbers and no underscore (the numbers were a significant date to her though).
There were too many coincidences in her posts for it not to be her. She was posting on the relationship advice subreddit. When I saw her posts, it broke my heart.
Her (now ex-) husband was abusive. We’d known something was off about him but couldn’t really put our finger on it.
I created another account that I only accessed from incognito mode to send her encouragement to leave, and to ask her family or friends (but kinda steered her towards us) for help.
She didn’t want to impose or be a burden on any of them (we’d just had a kid, and I make a bunch of money but we live well within our means so you wouldn’t think this based on appearances, so it was an understandable concern).
I slowly, over several weeks and several different posts she made, convinced her that it’s possible her family realizes something isn’t quite right and would not consider it a burden to help her out. After their divorce, I deleted that account.
Nobody will ever know that the random internet stranger who was weirdly persistent in encouraging my sister-in-law to reach out to her family for help and leave her abusive marriage was actually me. Story credit: Reddit