Gavin Grier found liable for stalking and harassment

Summary

For eleven months, Gavin Grier texted me from over 30 fake numbers, catfished me on Grindr, played me a robotic death threat over the phone, and poured a gallon of paint on my car. In late 2025, the Franklin County Municipal Court of Ohio found him liable for damages from stalking, vandalism, and harrassment, ordering him to pay the amount I was suing for and court fees.

What follows below is a LONG article detailing exactly how it happened, but this is the summary. The important point to note is that, to this date, he STILL hasn’t paid the court fine.

You can verify the court decision yourself at https://www.fcmcclerk.com/case/view by searching “Gavin Grier.”

The rest of this page is dedicated to explaining exactly what happened, the extent to which Gavin stalked me, and the extent to which I pursued legal remedies. Everything below is from my perspective, but I have screenshots, audio, and court records included to back everything up. Third-party names, phone numbers, addresses, and other identifying details will be redacted on this post. If a phone number is not redacted, this is because it didn’t resolve to a real person, it’s just a fake number that comes from a virtual-number service like the Pinger or TextNow apps. Those numbers are fake and can be obtained instantly by anyone who downloads those apps, so I don’t redact them.

Lastly, if you have questions, email me at questions(at)sullivan(dot)mx.

Let’s get into it.

Court record

The court record is the shortest version of this story. I filed suit in Franklin County Municipal Court, and won in 2025. This was a civil case, so I am not saying he was criminally convicted.

January to April 2024: How we met

My name is Sean. I have a regular job, and I graduated college fairly recently. I met Gavin in January 2024 on a dating app. He had just moved, coming from Seattle, WA to Sidney, OH to join this small flight school. I think his goal was to graduate in 6 months and then move on to be a pilot elsewhere in the country. (Future Sean here: That is really funny, becuase he still there when I served him the final court order in early 2026, putting him on notice that he owes me all the money i won in court)

After texting for a few weeks, we went on one date on March 5, 2024. It was fine. I told him I was busy with my last semester and probably would not be able to see him much.

Around April 4 (2024), I invited him to my fraternity formal with about a day of notice. I was surprised he said he was free. I texted him back and said plans were changing, so not to count on it yet. The next day I canceled because it was too hard to coordinate that quickly. I stopped texting him after that.

That is when the first of the messages started.

The first messages

The first texts came in right as I stopped texting with Gavin. The messages were aggressive and full of homophobic slurs. At the time, I did not know who was sending them.

For the rest of this post, screenshots with blue outlines are messages from Gavin’s real number. Screenshots with red outlines are messages from fake or untraceable numbers, usually virtual numbers from services like Pinger or TextNow. You can tap any image to open it in a new window.

I did not notice those spellings right away. Months later, when I was going back through everything, they stood out. The fake numbers were using slang like “fkn” and “tmmr.”, all things Gavin would say. I searched every text message I had received since 2018, and he was the only person to ever use this slang.

By late April, I was still trying to figure out who was behind the fake numbers. One number FaceTimed me one night, from an iPhone. I traced the number and found it resolved a man who lived in Seattle. I reached out, and the man informed me that his cousin from Seattle, who now lives in Ohio, had told him to prank call my number.

May to August 2024: It stops when we talk, and it starts when we don’t

In early May, Gavin and I started messaging on Snapchat again. I got back in touch with him while the stalking was happening. I still did not know who was doing it at this point.

Interestingly, the harassment stopped almost immediately. The last message from that first round of texts and calls was April 17.

Gavin and I were friendly through May. In June, he came into town, and we met up with my roommate and a group of friends. Gavin met my roommate that night as well as a woman named K*** (full name hidden for privacy) who was part of the friend group and lived in Chicago. After that night, Gavin and K*** started texting regularly.

A few weeks after that night, Gavin told me he wanted something serious. I told him I did not feel a romantic connection and was not interested in pursuing that. I suggested keeping things casual, and he said no, that he would rather not talk.

The last real conversation we had that summer was in July. I mentioned that I was helping my parents move before a family trip to Europe, so we’d be cancelling the trip. He made an extremely disrespectful comment about my parents, so I called him out for it and he left me on opened.

September to October 2024: “River”

In September, someone messaged me on Grindr under the name “River.” He said he was moving to Ohio in December for flight school.

Something was off from the start. His photos had old Grindr watermarks, the kind the app stopped using years ago. He claimed to have a girlfriend but texted back instantly at all hours of the day. When I ran his photos through a reverse image search, the only result I found was an adult film link. No social media, college photos, nothing that made him look like a real person with a real life.

I kept talking to him for a little while, and he asked about my history with guys.

I told this person about Gavin, calling him an asshole and a narcissist. The next day day, “River” changed completely. He called me “super stuck up” and said he was done talking to me. Then he said he had found Gavin’s number through a flight school schedule and claimed to now be texting Gavin. River told me he was going to send Gavin copies of everything I said about him.

The idea that this man somehow got Gavin’s number from the internet is impossible. Flight school instructor numbers are not listed publicly, especially for MCA (Midwest Corporate Air). And this person, who supposedly had no connection to either me or gavin, suddenly cared enough to track Gavin down and forward him screenshots? It makes no sense. I checked for months after tese messages were sent and can confirm, MCA has never posted contact phone numbers for ANY instructors or students of their flight school on the internet.

The story I was supposed to believe

The story I was supposed to believe was that a stranger from Grindr found Gavin’s private number from a source that did not exist, texted him screenshots of things I said, and then spent weeks harassing both of us.

What actually kept coming up was the word ‘narcisist’. For some reason, this random person who found me on the internet was so concnerned that I’d call Gavin a narcisist. It also didn’t matter that I’d maybe said unkind thigns about other people, this number ONLY cared about what I said about Gavin.

I want to be clear about this part: the “River” account is based on timing, the impossible flight-school-number story, and the way the messages kept circling back to Gavin. It is not the strongest evidence by itself. It is one piece of the larger pattern.

After a few days, I texted Gavin directly to ask how he was doing. He sent me screenshots of what “River” had supposedly sent him. He seemed happy I reached out and even apologized for how he had acted in the past.

November 2024 to January 2025

Sometime this winter, the stalker had been asking to call for days. I thought that even if he just yelled at me or harassed me over the phone, a call might help me figure out who it was, so I agreed.

Unforunately, I was played yet again. There was no person on the line, it was just a prerecorded robotic voice. It read this threatening message over and over. At first I thought it might be a person, then I realized the same message was repeating, and so I quickly hung up.

At this point I wasn’t stupid, so I recorded the calls. so you can listen to them below. The first audio is the clearer one. The second has more silence, but it is still part of the same pattern.

You can also listen on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/9QgQPyUm_g0

So after this the texts kept coming through, evenn into October and November. The angle had shifted, though: the stalker said I had ruined things with Gavin, that I was the problem, that I was “stuck up” and unlovable. It got to me. I started wondering whether I had been unfair to Gavin, or whether I had caused all of this by calling him a narcissist.

Unfortunately at this point in my life, having just graduated and dealt with many changes both in my professional life, my personal life, and with my family, I was already extremely extressed. Because of this, I didn’t really have any defense against what was happening. I started to believe all the messages Gavin sent me. I had no self-confidence left at that point, and sometimes I would come home from work and think about it all night.

The point where I thought I had been unfair to him

In mid-November, I reached back out to Gavin. I apologized and said I felt bad about how we had left things. I genuinely believed everything this stalker said, that calling someone a narcisist was such a bad thing to do that I deserved death for it.

Gavin replied quite fast, and of course, the stalker went quiet again.

Gavin and I texted through December and made plans for early in the next year. I went over to see him in January. Later in January, on the 28th, he came to see me. That date is important because I drove us to this concert in my Kia sedan, which I had bought the previous August. At this point, we hadn’t seen each other since last summer, so he had no idea I drove a Kia sedan until January 28. Keep this in mind.

After the night at Gavin’s, and the night out at the concert, I realized nothing had changed romantically for me. I felt better that we were talking again, but I still was not into him. I stopped responding as quickly (still responding, though) and stopped initiating plans.

Suddenly, two days after the concert, the stalker came back!

I got this from Gavin:

Late January to March 2025: The car

The texts restarted after I pulled back from Gavin. This time they went to my backup AND my main number. I’d given “River” my backup phone number, thinking that I shouldn’t give out my real number to a stranger I met on the internet. But somehow, he had my real number too. (How did he get that?)

This new tranche of messages was the worst by far. One of the first messages told me to go look at my car, saying there was a “gift” for me, which made me afraid there might be something dangerous waiting. I went down to my parking garage and checked from a distance, approaching a different car and pretending to look at THAT one, only briefly glancing at my Kia from across the floor.

I went back upstairs and told the stalker my car looked fine. He said that he knew it was fine, and that it was a ploy to figure out what car I drove.

But if he had actually watched me in the garage, he would have thought I owned the other car. When I asked what car, he said a gray Kia sedan. Gavin had ridden in that car four days earlier!

Six weeks later, in early March, my car was vandalized. Someone dumped a gallon of paint on it overnight. The paint caused permanent damage to my hood, which was matte and had to be stripped and re-applied. The repair cost was about $4,000.

The next day, one of these fake numbers texted me: “Omg sean what happened last night”.

Then my roommate started getting texts

After the vandalism, the harassment expanded. My roommate started getting texts too. The numbers claimed to know where he was during the day as well. Somehow the stalker knew where my roommate was at all hours of the day. It was extremely strange. The interesting thing about this, is that when we went out the previous summer, Gavin was added into that group chat with both me and my roommate. Scroll up to see the screenshots from earlier. Gavin had my roommate’s phone nummber, AND his Snapchat, too.

One of the stranger moments was a text to my roommate claiming I talked badly about him for leaving dishes out. Earlier that same day, I had texted my roommate to thank him for doing the dishes for me.

March to May 2025: How we tested it

By February, my roommate and I believed it was Gavin, and were trying to confirm it.

The location texts were the clearest test, as my roommate had told me he shared his location with everyone on Snapchat. I told him to unadd Gavin, because I thought this was how the stalker was getting his location. My roommate kept Snap Map on, but removed Gavin Grier, nobody esle. The texts about his location stopped immediately.

We also fed fake information to one of Gavin’s friends who regularly asked my roommate how we were doing. (This is K** from earlier) My roommate told her a bunch of mean things, that he was moving out because the stalking had driven us apart, that I (Sean) did not care about the stalking, and that I was being a terrible friend to him.

Within days, the stalker texted us with that exact fake story, framed as an insult!

That was the point where we knew, unequivocally. It was him.

May to December 2025: Filing the lawsuit

In May 2025, I had a boyfriend. The stalker texted me one day, saying he saw us kissing in a park. By this point, my roomate and I had more than enough evidence, but we had just sat on it to keep collecting, lest Gavin dig himself further into his grave. He texted my boyfriend, too. I talked to my boyfriend and learned that Gavin had actually met him months prior, so Gavin DID have his phone number already.

The commonality between every person being stalked, and every modality of the stalking, was one person: Gavin fucking Grier.

Once I learned that it was Gavin texting my boyfriend, I went to the Franklin County Municipal Court and filed suit immediately. I also made a group chat with me, my roommate, and Gavin, and put the evidence directly in front of him. We have not received a harassment text since the day I texted Gavin.

We heard from people in Gavin’s circle that this message sent him into a panic. He was “freaking out,” they said, and would not tell them why.

After things got filef with the court, I started reaching out to some of the people who had called and texted me, attempting to get witness statements. Several of the numbers were iPhones, so I followed those leads. I had a few conversations that helped connect the calls and texts back to Gavin’s friends and relatives.

I learned that Gavin moved back to Washington because of this very lawsuit. Three different people corroborated this! A few months later, despite him trying to run away, I won in Franklin County Municipal Court anyway.

After court

I thought the stalking orderal would be over after court, but it wasn’t.

Months went by and Gavin did not pay. In April 2026, I personally served him a copy of the court order to make sure he knew he was on notice to pay me. I have been vying to garnish his wages if he does not pay, as he has racked up nearly one year of interest payments on top of the money he already accrued.

If you want to hear what he said when I served him, prepare to be disappointed. His response showed that he has no promise to stop, and no indication that he understood why any of this mattered. He only acknowledged that he would pay what the court ordered him to pay.

Why I’m publishing this

I am writing this because it seems to never end. After I realized Gavin was the person behind what happened to me, I connected with other people who described similar harassment from him. Turns out, he’s harassed FIVE people that I know of. It’s gotten to the point where we literally text each other when either Gavin or a fake number reaches out to us. Also, I have learned that he continues to talk about me, to this very day! So therefore I must be allowed to respond. This is my story.

It geuinely seems like Gavin believes there will never be consequences for this, but I hope there are.

Last thing: Every fact in this story is verifiable. If you have any questions or concerns, having read this article, please REACH OUT using the email above, and I can address any questions.

Stay safe and use this knowledge to better protect yourself in case you too are being stalked.