...and stop playing the victim?
I read an article today that was both entertaining and sad, entertaining because I swear the story should be made into a Lifetime movie but sad because this young African American woman is now scorned and I'm sure instead of her blaming herself she is blaming the person that betrayed her instead. This is the story.
Perteet is in the Fulton County Jail, charged with impersonating a physician. Officials at Piedmont Hospital, where police arrested him, deny that he ever worked in their emergency room or dealt with patients.
And his wife, Tammi Perteet?
She has a stack of documents that lay out a life built on lies. She has a scrub shirt from the hospital where she dropped her husband off for two months.
She has questions.
"Who is he?" she asked Friday. Perteet gestured at letters, grade transcripts and death notices — all, apparently, fake. "How could he have done this?"
The details following his May 19 arrest at Piedmont are sketchy. They have come in phone calls and discoveries in the closet of the six-bedroom, 41/2-bath home the Perteets share with two children from Tammi Perteet's earlier marriage. They are recollections of moments when a carefully crafted facade may have slipped.
He was good-looking, younger than she thought; he had told her he was 30, but police say he's 27. He once ended an argument by spelling, "I'm sorry," with rose petals. He talked big, dreamed bigger: She has sketches of a proposed $2.1 billion Conyers-area medical center that her husband drew up.
He also tried to borrow $4,000 for their wedding; promised her a wedding ring that cost about as much as a new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and didn't have a valid driver's license or insurance on his car.
And yet, he gave his 38-year-old wife cash, sometimes as much as $1,000 at a time. He was, Perteet told his wife, about to begin drawing a full-time, annual salary of $250,000 at Piedmont.
So she drove him there every day, kissing him goodbye near the ER door.
Leaving ghosts
The story was so awful it had to be true. He was working the emergency room at the University of Chicago Medical Center when he got a call from doctors in Arizona.
His parents and children, he learned, had been critically injured in a crash. They'd been airlifted to a special facility in Colorado, and he'd better get there quick.
He didn't make it in time. They were dead, he was devastated, and it hurt to talk about it, more than two years after the August 2005 crash.
The story came out after Tammi met him at an Atlanta club in November. Unemployed and bored — she'd lost her job at a mortgage brokerage when the bottom fell out of the housing market — she felt like weeping as the man told his tale.
"My heart just opened up," she said. "I felt so sorry for him."
The physician was healing himself. He'd left Chicago, left medicine. He got a job in Atlanta at Georgia Power, which hired him, he said, because he had an advanced degree in electrical engineering. He wasn't ready to resume the practice of medicine — not yet, not while the memories lingered.
But the memories began fading as he and Tammi made new ones. Once, she asked him his middle name. "He said, 'I don't tell anyone my middle name unless I plan to marry them,' " she recalled.
In December, about a month after they started dating, he told Tammi his middle name: Lee. He also asked her to marry him. She said yes ... provided they get pre-marital counseling.
"I thought that was the safe thing to do," she said. "I wanted to do everything right."
On March 14, a Friday, friends gathered to toast the couple at Vino Libro, a wine bar near East Atlanta. The next day, they stood in the living room of their home and promised each other forever.
It was time to lay aside old ghosts, too. When they returned from their Bahamas honeymoon, she said, she drove him to his new job at Piedmont. "He started that following Monday."
'Great asset'
Officials at Piedmont Hospital say they have no evidence Perteet was at the hospital for two months, as Tammi Perteet says.
"We cannot support the wife's statement," said hospital spokeswoman Nina Montanaro. "Our internal investigation does not support her statement."
The hospital, Montanaro said, has not altered any security measures because of Perteet's arrest. They say hospital security staff has interviewed an array of employees, but none has been able to say much about the faux physician.
The hospital on Thursday said Perteet could not have entered areas of the hospital closed to the public because he lacked the proper credentials. When police arrested him, Perteet had a stolen physician's pass. The hospital said it had been deactivated. Investigation closed? Not yet, said Montanaro. If anyone recalls dealing with Perteet, the hospital wants to know.
Tammi Perteet wants to know about his fake transcripts, which she discovered in their bedroom. They lay out a three-year course of study in which the would-be doctor excelled: Human Morphology I: A; Cell and Organ Physiology: A; Medical Ethics: A.
"You see? "she asked. "He placed himself at the top of his class."
Then there's the letter purportedly written by a physician at the University of Chicago, urging Piedmont to hire the promising young physician. It is rife with misspellings and malapropisms, from the greeting to the final line: "I insure you that he will be a great asset to you."
She has death notices she now thinks are fake. They list the deaths of 4- and 5-year-olds — Perteet's children, her husband said.
"I know people scam people, but death certificates?" she asked. "People don't lie about that, do they?"
Do they lie about telephone calls? Tammi Perteet can recall calls her husband fielded in which he spoke as if he were talking to other doctors. "He can communicate, medically, with other physicians," she said. "You would never think he did not go to med school."
He is in jail on $12,000 bond on multiple charges, including one felony count of stealing a financial transaction card and identity fraud. Perteet is scheduled for a first appearance in court Monday.
His wife plans to schedule an appointment with a lawyer. She wants a divorce — perhaps an annulment, because their marriage was based on a fraud.
She also may need to do some healing, said Tammi Perteet — the sort a physician cannot offer.After reading this story and watching this woman's interview on the news it left me shaking my head and wondering what's going through her mind right now, is she blaming the man for deceiving her and lying to her or is she understanding that all of this is really her fault? This woman basically fell for the oldest trick in the book that people play when they're not happy with the direction that their lives is going in, they recreate themselves.
OK but this post isn't just about her, it's about women period. Women need to stop playing victim, stop crying and being depressed when they end up being hurt or dogged by a man. I get tired of the "victims" in relationships, a man is only going to do what you allow him to do so how bout stop allowing it? I don't have a lot of female friends because I have a very low tolerance for bullshit, I hate dumb women, I hate women that allow their man to use them, abuse them and treat them like shit then expect me to side with them when they call me crying. I've actually lost friends because they say that I'm not understanding. I'm sorry but I will never understand women allowing themselves to be used as a door mat, I don't respect stupid women. What I really hate are stupid women with kids, you mean to tell me your exposing your kid to your ignorance?
When will woman take responsibility for the things that men do to them? A man can not abuse you without you allowing yourself to be abused, a man can't use you without you allowing yourself to be used.
If ALL woman worked on themselves, they worked on their self worth then men wouldn't have a choice but to get their shit together and act right. Imagine a world where women refused to allow a man to live with her unless he was helping to pay some bills, I'm talking ALL women. That means that men wouldn't have a choice but to get a job because without one they'd be by themselves.
These are the basic things that women need to stop doing and I swear to you it will help you sleep so much better at night if you don't allow this mess in your relationship.
1. Stop being with men that don't have jobs. It's one thing to hold your man down that you've been with for a while that lost his job but I'm talking about the dudes that refuse to work because they're just lazy and they want their woman to take care of them instead.
2. Stop letting your carless man drive your car.However he was getting around before he met is the same way he should get around arfter he met you, unless of course his car is in the shop and you need to verify that story.
3. Stop bringing every damn man around your kids! I don't give a damn how nice he is, give it at least 6 months to a year of ya'll dating before you do that.
4. Stop falling in love so damn easy. No explanation needed.
5. Stop trusting men so quickly, it take months for him to earn your trust, not only a few weeks, a fews dates and a few minutes of pleasure.6. DO NOT under any circumstance have unprotected sex with him until ya'll are married and even then get tested first.I mean this one, no explanation needed.
7. Stop messing with married men and men that are already in relationships and if your not sure whether he is or not then do some damn research before you give him some.If ALL women refused to mess with married men are men that are involved do ya'll realize that men would never cheat? Men only cheat because there are so many desperate women that allow it.
8. Leave men alone that are trifling baby daddies.No man that is a trifling father is going to be good you to, don't believe the story about how much he hates his baby mother, it means nothing, he still should be taking care of his kids.
I'll finish my list later, there is more...
