a plea for advice

[bedlamsbard]

My friend Chicago has an ex-boyfriend who has been sending her harassing text messages. He's been doing this all school year now, after repeated attempts on her part to get him to stop, and since it's the end of the school year, she's afraid to go back to Chicago. He's also an ex-felon, for reasons that she's not sure of, but other fun facts include a baby daughter he never sees and an alcohol problem and a drug addiction. (She met him through a friend who does AA.) Unfortunately, he hasn't sent her anything that she could go with the police with as grounds for a restraining order, and she doesn't want her parents to know about this. Right now, her latest option is to get her gentleman friend (who's AFROTC) to send him a text telling him to leave her alone, in the hopes that it will get him to threaten her via text and she can take that to the police. Does anybody have any advice or other options? She really doesn't want to go to her parents, and any advice would be much appreciated.

(She is making me add that she is a fine, upstanding citizen, and I can vouch for her character, if not her taste in men.)

(She also can't block his phone number; she has an unjailbroken iPhone.)

ETA: Chicago would like me to add that her parents don't know this guy exists, and has absolutely refused to tell her parents, despite repeated entreaties on my part. (Also she is reading over my shouldder and vetting everything I type.) Things I should add: she is not in Chicago proper (small town where everyone knows everybody, including the cops), she is not a minor, her parents are paying her tuition, and she's a gender studies major so I have no idea why she is so stubborn on this point, and she believes I am over-reacting.

And thank you very, very much to everyone who has replied at this point.

Comments

[sara]

I'd vote for getting a new phone number and a summer job and/or summer school wherever she's going to school, myself. Having had years where I avoided various cities for similar reasons, often if one can stay far enough away from the unstable man who was once in one's life, he will fixate on something else. *cough*

And why she thinks this isn't enough to get a restraining order, I don't know -- looking at the Cook County Clerk of the Court site about orders of protection, which is what the thing you'd want is called in Illinois, it sounds like this guy, particularly given his history, has more than done enough for her to get one.