Notes On A Stalker

Or, "Why I never want to see Young Sheldon again in my life."

In early November 2023, inside the Live Nation building in Beverly Hills, I sat in one of the offices belonging to a big fancy music management company. It felt like there wasn't a square inch of the room that was not already covered in a plaque, award, or framed magazine cover celebrating the achievements of their two biggest clients - Pharrell and Ryan Tedder. Somebody may as well have tiled the ceiling with platinum records like that Whitney Houston Greatest Hits album cover where she's on a ladder, literally drilling them in. I know the meeting was pleasant, and I liked the people, but being unable to rest my eyes anywhere that didn't proudly display a shining reminder of someone else's uber-success threw me off my game and into my head. As a kid imagining stuff like this, I didn’t consider what being confronted so head-on with what you're aiming to live up to would feel like. Like every meeting I'd had this week, the expected verdict was, "We like you, we like the songs, it's nice to meet you. We can talk when you're someone." 

I was already someone to one person, at least. Someone good enough to want to be.

A Brazilian man who goes by the name Uriel Bromberg can be traced back online to 2017. He posted on forums for custom content creation for The Sims 4 or shared his graphic art on hosting platforms like Artstation, often without a face to the name. But some time in 2021, he adopted a new persona: me.

While watching my every move online, he took all my photos and reposted them as his own, eventually growing an Instagram following (an admittedly hilarious) 15x larger than mine. Uriel was a musician, producer, artist, graphic designer, and filmmaker. He had profiles on every social media platform, including Linkedin and WikiFeet. (I was flattered by how un-calloused and beautiful my fake feet were). Some of Uriel's music releases were old, terrible covers of St. Vincent and Brian Eno songs I had recorded with a MacBook mic as a precocious and or pretentious 15-year-old and left dormant on some Soundcloud profile I forgot I had; others were straight-up copyright infringement, but most were his creation—strange, off-kilter beats with mumbled nonsensical English lyrics through an accent.  

I came in time to learn that he had built this loyal following by posting in a members-only Brazilian pop music stan Facebook group called ÆM. Uriel had been spending months posting within this group, quickly building a reputation and following through his splashy and controversial posts ("I am more handsome than Justin Bieber!" one proclaimed). The suspicious ease with which he understood Portuguese and the group's in-jokes and memes helped. He built relationships with many members over Messenger, explaining that he was a music producer with connections to Dr. Luke. He had a wealthy family and many famous friends. He became a controversial and oft-discussed figure within the group itself. An anonymous person from ÆM first connected the dots and alerted me of this happening in November 2022, five months after Uriel had first sent me a suspicious email, and after years of occasional strange DMs I couldn’t make sense of. I would go on to expose Uriel within the group myself. A legion of comments, reactions, and new followers rushed to my social media in a way I'd never experienced. I got a little high off the rush of it all. It's hard not to, especially when it feels like revenge. 

I'll leave the how and why of everything that followed from that point to the two YouTube videos (out of three—one of which he managed to get taken down) that have been made about the situation. The amount of abuse and back-and-forth (perhaps misguided by me at many points, but dealing with a situation like this is far from straightforward, nor are you always thinking super rationally) is far more than can be surmised here.

You can check out a shorter video by the creator Pixels After Dark about the whole situation or a nearly two-hour deep dive with the creator Cult Coffin. You can also use Reddit archive tools to recover the posts I made on my account on the /RBI/ subreddit that connected me to these creators in the first place (Uriel eventually removed the content of these posts by enacting privacy violations - his weapon of choice). About a dozen other users also helped me uncover other details about this individual, including more alternate accounts than I can wrap my head around and the general region of Brazil he may reside in.

Along the way, I have actively tried to stop Uriel and actively tried to ignore him—neither has worked. I still get harassed. He always finds a new game to play. For example, some random eBay listings I had up were sold to strange Brazilian addresses. I cancelled out of paranoia, only to see him tweeting (X-ing?) about eBay nonsensically.

I have tried to go to the police (the first thing I did). I have made reports with the privacy teams of more social media websites than I can recount, either trying to get his accounts shut down or have mine reinstated (to varying degrees of success). I have submitted at least 10-15 cybercrime tip reports (including some the FBI themselves have set up), explaining to the best of my ability why I believe this person is a threat to children (more on that later). I have talked to lawyers who either patronize me or ask for a tremendous amount of money to go through the lengthy process of trying to press charges, which is sadly a difficult enough task when the stalking is happening physically in real life.

Give gay men a social media platform, and they will be narcissistic on it. I'm guilty. I can't deny that I never would've been a target for Uriel in the first place if I hadn't constantly been posting myself instead of anything I had made (which, for years, was nothing). Give gay men an unfiltered social media platform, and they will get as naked as they can on it. Twice guilty. The times in my life when I've offered myself up to be thirst retweeted on Gay Twitter were not the days I was ever feeling 100% excellent about myself, I assure you.

Still, gay sex is awesome. It feels really good. I don't know what to tell you. I'm lucky enough to have lived my life with little shame attached to my sexuality, and I'm lucky to have access to PrEP. I think about the bravery and courage it would've taken to live without shame as an LGBT person through the AIDS crisis and the many ways I have it real easy. I think about the lost gay bars of the 80s and the joy people found in them upon having somewhere to be exactly who they were, possibly for the first time. I think about the leather men of the famed Mineshaft NYC. I think about them a little bit longer…

I won't allow myself to be fundamentally shamed or embarrassed by my gay guy desires - certainly not by someone with actual debauched and illegal sexual desires themselves (again, more on that in a bit).

In my attempts to stop this, I have attempted to "go viral" to varying degrees of success. I have tried to shut my mouth and get on with it - not feed the beast. Those wondering if this is all some twisted self-promotion have given me a healthy bit of skepticism. It's not, but I would be lying if I said I didn't realize that my story finally getting the attention I seek to make the harassment be stopped will also be a trap that, in turn, opens myself and my intentions to criticism. Or, it inevitably gets me all viral and high off the algorithm - the exact kind of craving for shallow internet attention that has poisoned someone like Uriel's brain the first place. All I can do is try to be honest about this situation because I'm not lying.

I've been slouching towards becoming a professional pop songwriter since I was 15. Adopted many monikers along the way on various levels of cringe. Komadoro, Cardinal Lone, there might be more I'm forgetting. I settled on one, Jude Connors, around 2017. I released an EP I wrote, produced, and recorded in my parent's closet called Poshlost in 2018. It sounds like it was recorded by someone who didn't really know what they were doing because, indeed, they didn't, but I got some Spotify playlist and local radio station support, which felt significant. It can be the little things like that which keep you going.

I tried and failed for a long time to find a way into the industry until, in 2022, I got accepted into a program called LIMPI and moved from Toronto to Lillehammer, Norway. Founded in part by legendary Norwegian production duo Stargate, LIMPI is an intensive year-long program that acts more like a song factory. You get weekly assignments and groups and write up to three songs weekly in their studios. It aims to emulate how the modern songwriting industry generally works (at least for commercial music). It's intense, and it works. I got noticed, at points. I have begun to have songs I've been a part of writing come out. I started to write a lot more at writing camps in Scandinavia. I got a manager.

Like many full-time aspiring musicians today who can whisk themselves away from Canada to Norway to attend an elite pop music school, I have the means to do such things because of my parents. They are kind and generous enough to use it to help me while I pursue a ridiculous dream in an absurd industry. I'm a great co-writer. I love writing songs with people; it's the only thing that fulfills me. I am immensely fortunate and grateful for my position, where I even get to try to make this my career. (Zero nepotism, if that helps the internet go easy on me). 

I don't know when Uriel latched on to me in my internet history, but he did. Sometimes, I feel hysterical, blowing it out of proportion. Sometimes, I wonder if it's just a bit karmic, which I can accept. Truthfully, I wasn't acting much better than Uriel at some points regarding a particular relationship in my life, and that's why I guess I find it hard to feel wholly sorry for myself.

Sometimes I think I should let him do what he wants if he wants it so bad. I'm the one actually getting a shot at it, after all. Let him lie about major label deals and being friends with celebrities if he wants. I did that as a kid, too. Make up fake bands, draw the album art, and track list, get an empty CD case. Whoever Uriel is, they're someone with a dream in a position where they'll never get the chance to. Or they're just someone unwell who needs help. Besides, I was learning the hard way that all that glitters isn't gold when you're trying to make something of yourself in the big leagues. I think these things, but I cut off any empathy bubbling up when I remember why I believe the pursuit of this individual is valid, removed from my part in it, and regardless of how much of this you may decide plays into my vanity.

The only constant element across any of Uriel's internet presence was a fixation on the currently 15-year-old child actor Iain Armitage, known for his roles on Big Little Lies, and being the titular Young Sheldon. Uriel has claimed Iain is his cousin or son, most often. Footage and motifs of Armitage appear throughout Uriel's music releases. "Jimmy" and its disturbing video are entirely about Armitage - "I love you because you're my son," the end refrain of the song goes. I would later learn there was so much footage of Iain from a young age as he was discovered on YouTube in the first place at age 8.

Sometime around the last year Uriel's YouTube channel began to repost short-form videos of Armitage to YouTube's Shorts platform. Many of these garnered millions of views, and in turn, his YouTube channel has grown to 260k (and counting) subscribers. There are discoverable posts made in the Young Sheldon subreddit, in which he expresses sexual desires for the underaged actor. He directly links back to "Uriel Bromberg" in other comments on the same account. He is brazen. He's even been tweeting more of his real face, for once, just this week.

Uriel's YouTube channel could easily pass as Iain Armitage himself to someone not paying attention, msot likely by the actor's underaged fans who may interact with the account thinking it to be the actor himself. Uriel has expressed illegal sexual desires for children, out in the open, all while abusing and harassing me. Nobody has done a thing to stop this.

Two weeks ago, Armitage himself was made aware of this situation and posted these tweets about the YouTube channel. This has felt like a turning point, but Uriel's accounts remain active.

A couple of months ago, I decided it was time for "Jude Connors" to die. (Please not literally Uriel, thanks.) I spent a couple of months actually trying to introduce myself as Jude to people, cringing internally at myself, before later forgetting and just telling them to call me Connor anyway. (The real first name as the fake last name? Why?). 

I've spent a lot of my life running from being whoever the type of person you first imagine in your head with the name Connor Douglas Ferguson from Calgary, Alberta because I never felt like that person growing up. I think it's time to be myself. The thing we all fear most. I don't know if I'll make myself into someone. But if I do, I'll do it, not someone else. I am putting out music, both written for others and myself. If you want to follow my (I hate this word) JOURNEY, my social media is linked to this account. If not, that's also fine.

I would just like to stop being harassed, and I would like even more to expose and stop a child predator.