UPDATE: [28f][28m][29m] GF’s childhood friend is showering her with expensive gifts to repay her former kindness. These gifts are making GF and me uncomfortable. How do we respond?

I posted on here about 3 months ago and my post had a lot of good feedback and advice on it. Here’s the original: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/zydury/28f28m29m_gfs_childhood_friend_is_showering_her/

TLDR: an old friend (Jay 28m) of my gf (Liz 28f) came back into town and had been showering her with expensive gifts. These gifts made us both uncomfortable. We were looking for advice in telling him to back off.

I’ve had a bunch of DMs asking for an update on this situation. Honestly, the whole thing got really weird and confusing. I was trying to wait until things became more clear and we had answers to what had happened but I’m not sure that will ever happen.

After posting, Liz told me that she had decided to give back Jay’s expensive Christmas gifts. She waited until he posted on Instagram about being out at an event at a local bar for a night, then drove over to his house with a friend, and they left the gifts by the front door with a note that said (paraphrased) “Jay, Thank you so much for thinking of me this Christmas. While all the gifts you’ve been giving me are generous, I feel bad taking them. It was my parents who took you in back when we were in school, I was just excited to online with my friend, they are the ones who took care of you. If you feel the need to give back, my parents have always supported [Local Charity], I’m sure they would be happy to know you gave the amount of these gifts in their honor”. She hoped this would end things and he’d get the picture. I was doubtful.

Around 2 am that night (presumably when he got home and saw the returned gifts), he started bombarding her with text messages. They were all some combination of:

1. He was such a good friend and she was lucky to have him.
2. He was going to give her the gifts back because it was false modesty that she was showing in not accepting them.
3. She should always expect gifts from him and that he would always protect her and be her hero.

It was really weird and creepy. We were already asleep and the messages came in so quickly and repeatedly that it woke us up. We agreed to try to go back to sleep and deal with it all in the morning.

Luckily, we were leaving early the next morning to see my family for the holidays. On the way there, we worked together to craft a final message to Jay. Liz told him in the text that it seems like he wants a deeper relationship than she does, that she was happy in her relationship with me, and that she was blocking him to give him time to sort out his feelings for her. 30 minutes after that, we got a notification from our doorbell. I’ll give you a guess who it was. He came back a few hours later to bring the gifts back. Then came back again the next morning and then again that evening. Friends started saying that Jay had reached out to ask where Liz was, saying that he was afraid for her safety. Luckily, we didn’t tell that many people about our trip, and those who knew also knew about Liz blocking Jay and all stonewalled him. Still saying it was a stressful situation is a major understatement. Honestly, the stress of it ruined our new years.

While in my hometown, we visited my cousin whose husband is a lawyer. We asked about protective orders. He told us that unfortunately, for our state, there have to be threats of harm or proof that he was stalking Liz. He told us that Jay’s actions to that point were not extreme enough but he encouraged us to save our video doorbell feed and to keep a record of every interaction in case things escalated.

My parents let us stay in my hometown an extra few days before going home but eventually we had to head back for a work event that Liz had to go to. We were pretty nervous the first few days at home and I installed 2 extra cameras outside our home with a wider view range than the doorbell could offer. Luckily, we didn’t hear anything from Jay.

After not hearing anything from or about him for about 2 weeks, we couldn’t tell if we had gotten lucky or if something else was going on. While our closest friends knew what was going on and had all blocked Jay when Liz had, we had some friends of friends that Liz knew were still close to him. We had a close friend reach out to one of Jay’s friends. This guy said that no one had heard or seen from Jay in about 3 weeks, he had missed 2 parties he said he would be at and hadn’t posted on socials for a while (Jay was the kind of guy who would post on Insta 3 to 4 times a week.

I should’ve left the whole thing go there, but my curiosity got the better of me. I reached out to a friend in the middle of February who works in the restaurant industry. I knew that they had been in conversations with Jay’s new company about becoming a client. This friend told me that they hadn’t heard from Jay in over a month but that there was a rumor going around that Jay’s business partner and I guess the whole new business was tied to some sketchy stuff and a lot of the restaurants he knew of had gotten cold feet. No one had heard from Jay in a while and this friend had not seen him at a recent industry event.

This caused one of our friends and me to go into detective mode. Back when Jay had first moved back to the area, a bunch of us were invited over to a party at his house which was a huge mansion in a super wealthy area. Liz and I were having a nude time remembering but feel like he was telling people he had just bought it. Last week, the friend who I’ve been doing detective-y stuff with found that house on a website full of luxury homes for long-term rental. We checked on Zillow and the house was last sold almost a decade ago so we don’t think that he bought it and rented it out. We looked up a news report for when his company sold and we don’t see his name anywhere in the article. That being said, the only person it named was the CFO so maybe he was an owner? We can’t figure it out.

So that’s it. We don’t have any answers for what happened to Jay. We can’t figure out if he was just a sketchy guy whose new company had closed or if he was some kind of scam artist. Part of me thinks that he got a payday and is probably living in Costa Rica or something but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been telling stories the entire time. Maybe he only owned a few shares in the company so he had a bit of cash but conflated his role and his bank account? I don’t think we will ever have answers. On the plus side, it seems like he’s out of our lives, and while we are continuing to keep an eye out, we are hoping we don’t ever have to see him again.

TLDR: Liz blocked him, possibly into the shadow realm