Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
This story is about a school teacher who had faked her students’ exam results, her academic qualifications, and her entire life story.
I love crime stories; I grew up on shows such as the CSI franchise, Criminal Minds and Lie To Me. I was intrigued by the behaviour and warped-mindedness of liars and psychopaths.
Of course, I hoped I never had the misfortune of meeting one, but life has a cruel sense of humour. When a new school teacher joined our cohort, I thought she was the sweetest person you’d ever meet.
Taken in by her charm, it took me and my colleagues 6 months to realise we had been working with a con woman who was a complete psychopath.
My colleague would tell us sob stories to gain sympathy
I was working at this private school when we were joined by a new Additional Mathematics teacher, a 30 year old woman. We weren’t that far apart in age, and so naturally we hit off.
She was bubbly, friendly and chatty. We even went out together socially. But unlike me, she had no problem opening up about personal things to complete strangers.
She told us all about her very unfortunate life: How she was a divorcee who had been physically abused by her ex-husband; how her parents had ‘sold’ her into that marriage because he was a surgeon who was well-off; and how her parents turned a blind eye to the abuse.
I remember feeling so bad for her and wondering how any parent could behave in such a heartless manner. She once showed up to work with a big bandage plastered under her chin, claiming she was hit by a truck the day before.
By that time, my colleagues and I were ready to nominate her as “Unluckiest Person Alive”, perhaps even recommend her to the Malaysian Guiness Book of Records.
For the next 6 months, we pitied her a lot, and as such she received many little gifts from us. We even took her out to family lunches and dinners to help compensate for her miserable life.
The pinnacle of her ‘series of unfortunate events’ had to be the death of her fiance. One Friday morning, she had a whole emotional breakdown in the office and told us that her fiance was in a fatal car accident.
As she was grieving, we didn’t pry or ask for further details. Our aim in that moment was to console a weeping and hysterical woman whose world has come crashing down.
She spread fake and scandalous stories about us, her colleagues
Unfortunately, the longer you spin a web, the more tangled it becomes. And the more people you lie to, the harder it becomes to contain the lie. Soon enough, we began to realise many discrepancies and inconsistencies in her timeline of events.
She claimed to hold two degrees at only 30 years old, and that she had a total 15 years professional teaching experience. To fan our disbelief further, she added that she had been a general manager of a company for two years after her divorce.
By her logic, that would mean her career dated back to the time she was fifteen.
Shortly after that, a lot of other things began to unravel. We found out that she had been spreading fake and scandalous stories about each of us.
Her stories were wild, spanning from two of our male colleagues being gay and in a relationship with each other; one of whom was engaged; to me being in a relationship with one of our students’ fathers; to our male boss proposing marriage to her and then raping her when she turned him down.
Due to their controversial nature, none of us ever asked each other if they were true, as that would have made for very awkward conversations.
And the worst part was, she fed these incredibly damaging stories to our students. She had built a very strong rapport with the students and had everyone eating out of her hand.
We had tried raising our concerns and filing complaints with the management, but they turned a deaf ear, saying there was “lack of evidence” as they were verbal and therefore just hearsay.
My colleague’s dead fiance was revealed to be alive and well
A month after her fiance’s supposed death, one of our colleagues followed the fiance on Facebook. To his shock, the colleague discovered the fiance was still sharing selfies and posts on his timeline.
He contacted the fiance via messenger, and true enough, the fiance was revealed to be alive and well. As it turns out, he had broken up with her and called off the engagement.
Perhaps it was because he realised her mental faculties had gone round the bend and how detached from reality she was. I think she had ‘killed’ her fiance in her mind, in an attempt to reconcile the fact he had dumped her – and to cover up the shame.
How do you come back from something like that? We struggled to come to terms with the fact that we had been fooled for months into sympathising with a pathological and psychopathic liar.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After that, none of us talked to her anymore and pretty much ignored her existence.
She was finally caught helping her students cheat on their exam papers
But eventually all good things come to an end; bad things too. She was fired a few months later on the spot for misconduct.
Having lied about the existence of her degrees and having presented fake certificates with her résumé, she was actually incapable of teaching Math and would leak the examination questions to the students to ensure they didn’t fail.
She was finally caught calling students into a dark and empty classroom a day after the exam and allowing students to complete the questions they did not complete; could not complete due to her incompetence.
The whole thing was caught on CCTV and there was nothing she could do to save herself this time. No story to spin in her favour, no sob story to hide behind. The can of worms had been spilled.
She attempted to pull one final stunt to save herself by claiming she was pregnant and that management couldn’t fire an expecting woman. But even that blew up in her face when she was asked for medical reports and an ultrasound and couldn’t produce them.
She was asked to pack up her stuff and leave at that very moment. And that was the last we ever saw of her.
We were a little disappointed that we did not get the justice we deserved for our tarnished reputations and credibility. But at that moment, we were so happy that she was gone, we decided to take the win.
I sometimes think about how many others have fallen prey to her psychopathy after she left. And I say a quick prayer to God to protect them.
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Read also: This Private School’s Entire Staff Resigned Due to the Boss’s New Wife.
This Private School’s Entire Staff Resigned Due to The Boss’s New Wife
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