He was an addict. She was his counselor. Who was the real stalker?

The text that appeared on Shawn Stewart’s phone was from an unfamiliar number. He didn’t answer.

I hope things are going well for you. I may have some things that is beneficial for you and can help you out. I know that sounds weird. Don’t be worried anxious or scared. If you need help, let me know.

It was Sept. 17, 2022. At age 28, after years of struggles, Shawn, a warehouse worker, was focused on his recovery from devastating heroin and painkiller addictions. He had moved into his parents’ apartment in Sacramento for stability. He held a steady job and managed his cravings with methadone.

Finally, Shawn had gained control of his life.

Who do you think I am? Who would you want me to be? I’m sure you know.

What haha I have no clue who u are.

Lol you do. I promise you that.

I don’t get it haha do you know who I am?

Yes! I know obviously. You’re Shawn Stewart.

Ok I know who this is haha.

Shawn’s younger sister, Samantha, had spent the night at a friend’s house. Maybe the girls were pranking him.

No. Would they actually want to help you? I was serious when I said that.

It just sounds like my sister tryna mess with me.

I do know you lol and I do want to help you!

At that moment, Shawn realized who might be texting him.

Three months later, a woman walked into a courthouse in Sacramento and asked for a restraining order. A man, she said, was stalking her. She was afraid to leave her home.

“I have been receiving relentless text messages from his phone number for the past two months,” she wrote in her application, “stating he was going to have people come after me, relentless name calling, stating where I was, what I was wearing.”

Her name was Bridget Adams. She was a 39-year-old drug counselor who had settled in a home in Citrus Heights, northeast of Sacramento. She declined to list her address on the application, for safety purposes. She did, however, attach a screenshot of an email she said she’d received just hours earlier from one of her patients at a methadone clinic.

Through two years of private sessions, she had guided Shawn Stewart through his fragile bid for sobriety. And now, she explained, he was destroying her life.

From: Shawn Stewart

To: Bridget Adams

Date: December 22, 2022 at 10:52:01 PM PST

I can’t wait until u lose everything. Your a dumb bitch. I wish you would die and I can make that happen. That was nice outfit today, in those jeans and purple shirt. You should show more skin. I wanted to give u a kiss but was afraid. 🤣😘

A Sacramento County judge granted the restraining order and scheduled a hearing. Shawn could be arrested if he got within 100 yards of Bridget, her home or her workplace, according to a summons the court mailed him. He was not to call, text, email or contact his former counselor in any way.

The police came for Shawn less than a month later.

He had passed out late one weeknight, high on fentanyl, on the living room couch of his parents’ apartment. He was scheduled to work a swing shift the next day driving a forklift at an Ace Hardware warehouse. He planned to sleep in before getting a ride from his parents, making his daily stop at his methadone clinic on the way.

When his parents arrived home that night, they didn’t think much, at first, about the police cars lined up in the apartment lot. There had been a recent shootout nearby.

After they stepped inside, the family’s Chihuahua-dachshund mix, Rocket, started barking. Shawn woke up, and seconds after the door closed shut, someone knocked on it loudly.

“Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office!”

Shawn’s mom shot her son a glance.

“Well, open the door,” he said. “No one’s done nothing wrong.”

Deputies carried a warrant for Shawn’s arrest for violating the restraining order. In the weeks after her court visit, Bridget had forwarded evidence to county sheriff’s detectives that Shawn had repeatedly contacted her. Followed her. Tormented her.

The order appeared to have made things worse.

From: Shawn Stewart

To: Bridget Adams

Date: December 29, 2022 at 8:56:18 PM PST

Subject: ?

Bitch u better drop this restraining order or I will blow up your car. Bitch I will say ur doing shit to me. Don’t fuck with me. I know where I are at.

The deputies cuffed Shawn’s hands behind his back and steered him across the parking lot to a patrol SUV as neighbors gawked. “Don’t worry,” his mother shouted, “we’ll bail you out!”

They drove him to the county’s main jail, a cement tower blocks from the state Capitol. One read him his Miranda rights: “You have the right to remain silent …”

Shawn, however, wanted to speak. He begged the deputies booking him to first search his devices. To read his text messages. To fathom a story of unrelenting pursuit and digital masquerade that obscured two identities — the stalker and the stalked.

“My phones are right there,” Shawn pleaded, shouting out passcodes, before he was strip-searched and deposited in a cell. “Look at my phones!”

Table of contents

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Matthias Gafni, a member of the Chronicle’s investigative team, spent two years reporting this story. He reviewed thousands of pages of records from criminal and civil courts in California, Pennsylvania and Indiana; hours of video and audio recordings; and numerous text messages, emails and social media posts. To improve readability, the Chronicle limited use of attribution throughout the story and is instead describing its primary sources here.

Gafni obtained many of the records used in this story through public record requests. All of the texts and emails quoted were described in court filings or shared by Shawn Stewart’s criminal defense attorney. Gafni interviewed Shawn dozens of times in phone calls, text exchanges and in-person meetings. He made repeated attempts to communicate with Bridget Adams, including requesting interviews through one of her friends and mailing Bridget two letters. She ultimately wrote two letters to the Chronicle in response, which are discussed in the story.

Gafni interviewed dozens of sources, including Bridget’s family members, friends, co-workers and victims; Shawn’s family members and other people close to him; and experts on the law, police practices, drug treatment and the psychology of lying. He reviewed medical studies and data on stalking. In addition, Gafni and Chronicle photographers attended multiple hearings in Shawn’s and Bridget’s court cases.

As of publication, Bridget was appealing her two criminal cases. Gafni was monitoring those proceedings.

1
Shawn

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

In Shawn’s earliest memory, he’s 4 years old and with his foster mother on the family’s back deck. She’s forced him to sit on his palms for hours, pressing his knuckles into the planks until his skin is raw.

On his fifth birthday, she locked him in a dark bathroom. It was a common punishment. If he turned the light on, she’d keep him there longer. Or spank him.

Shawn had been born in a prison as his mother served time for prescription fraud. His biological parents, who long struggled with drug use, lost custody and disappeared from his life. He was thrust into foster care in El Dorado County, a forested stretch of the Sierra Nevada between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Child welfare workers moved him regularly. His guardians, his schools and his friends were fleeting. Even when things went well, Shawn would often run away. “I’ve done that my whole life,” he would later say. “I cut people off and then I’m gone.”

At one foster home, the religious father would grab 8-year-old Shawn by the jaw and order him to make eye contact when spoken to. One day, the boy pushed back, and that was the end of that placement. While in another home at age 12, Shawn’s grade point average plummeted to 0.6. He started smoking weed, got in trouble and ran away.

He began supervised visits with his biological parents as a high school freshman and learned his younger sister was living with them. He asked to come home, too, but his parents said they didn’t have custody and feared jeopardizing any future rights.

At age 15, the county sent Shawn to live with a classmate. The father had lost his job installing cabinets and would finish three bottles of wine by the end of the day — “Jesus drank wine,” he’d say — then turn violent. One evening, he jumped into his hot tub fully clothed and held the teen’s head underwater. After dinner another night, when Shawn tried to squeeze by him in the kitchen, he stabbed the boy in the ribs with a fork and bit his neck.

Shawn ended up in a treatment facility, then a halfway house, but ran away again. He couch-surfed at the homes of friends, evading the foster system for nine months. A social worker barely recognized the skinny and dirty teen when she found him. A lock of his brown hair, which she snipped and sent to a lab, tested positive for cocaine and meth.

Now 16, he was given two options by his social worker: a group home in Sacramento or one in San Andreas, east of Stockton. Shawn didn’t know anything about the rural town, but he’d played the video game “Grand Theft Auto,” set in the fictional state of San Andreas, so he chose that.

There were additional positive drug tests, but a sympathetic social worker eventually helped Shawn graduate from Jenny Lind High in nearby Valley Springs. The day before his 18th birthday, a friend picked him up and he left behind his final foster family. His social worker reported him missing, but Shawn was already partying in Reno, watching fireworks and celebrating his emancipation.

Shawn Stewart is pictured on Feb. 21, 2025. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

Shawn soon landed a dream job as a parking attendant at the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort. One of his foster families had owned a Tahoe timeshare, and he had fallen in love with snowboarding. By age 20, Shawn had been sober for two years. He moved in with his biological parents and, during ski season, stayed with a friend in Pollock Pines west of the resort.

On Christmas Eve 2013, Shawn clocked out after a morning shift and headed to the snow park and its jumps and rails. The regulars typically took turns on the course, but this afternoon a novice cut him off and Shawn veered into a metal rail, flipping into the air.

Reaching the base of the mountain, he found he couldn’t move his right arm. He’d ripped the tendons that held his shoulder in place, leading doctors to tie the joint back together with an Achilles tendon from a cadaver.

He was prescribed 80 Percocet pills. Shawn finished the first bottle quickly, then got another. Soon, pharmacists refused to refill his order. He’d dabbled with heroin in the past and knew friends who used the drug. In time, he was smoking it.

Shawn didn’t want to disappoint the friend who’d allowed him to move in. Lucas was a childhood buddy, and they shared the same birthday. So Shawn left the only place he’d managed to stay sober. He returned to living with his parents, who required him to be clean as they moved between hotel rooms from Sacramento to Humboldt County.

But during the family’s time on the North Coast, Shawn tripped on a tree root while camping and shattered his collarbone. This time, doctors gave him two months of pain pills, and before long he was smoking heroin again. He grew so irritable that his parents couldn’t stand to live with him.

After a few more aborted efforts at sobriety, Shawn returned to his job at the ski resort in the winter of 2016. He spent a couple of clean years living with Lucas. Then his older brother Kyle, who had lost his own job at the ski resort, began calling.

It was 2018 and his brother was on the street. Shawn blamed himself for Kyle’s introduction to drugs, so he figured he should at least help. The pair moved into Shawn’s Toyota Camry. Before long, his brother convinced him it was not only more efficient to inject heroin, but provided a superior high.

Each night, the siblings would find a discreet location near Placerville to park and shoot up, often in the woods. Shawn would pass out in the reclined passenger seat, his brother next to him in the driver’s seat.

Shawn worked odd jobs, mostly weeding and raking; he once flipped burgers at McDonald’s for a week to earn a single paycheck. His beard grew out, and his clothes got dirtier and looser. When he wasn’t high, he and his brother would lament how they’d thrown their lives away.

One evening, they parked the Camry on a residential street in Citrus Heights. After Shawn shot up and as Kyle prepped his syringe, police cars surrounded them. “Let me see your hands!” the cops yelled, guns drawn. The pair spent a nightOpens a popup that shows additional information. in jail on suspicion of public intoxication and possession of drug paraphernalia. In a packed holding cell, Shawn thought to himself, “Man, I gotta stop this shit.”

The next morning, squinting in the morning sun, he walked out of jail. He was 25 and desperate to stay straight. He picked up his Camry and, as he often did, gave his sister a ride to her job as a hostess at Huckleberry’s, a breakfast spot in Sacramento. That day, the restaurant needed a dishwasher and hired the young man.

His mother, who had learned of his arrest and living situation, pleaded with Shawn to give her methadone clinic a try. She had kicked heroin at BAART, an opioid rehabilitation clinic in a one-story office building in Carmichael, east of Sacramento. It was time, Shawn thought.

When he walked into the lobby that first day — Dec. 7, 2018, almost four years before his stalking arrest — he was so sick and distraught that he broke down crying. His brother, who had driven him to the clinic, cooked him up a shot of heroin. Shawn pushed it into a vein in the lobby bathroom.

2
New Counselor

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

A machine dripped pink liquid methadone into a clear plastic cup. A nurse stirred in water and watched Shawn, who had stumbled out of the restroom, swallow his 15-milligram dose. It wasn’t nearly enough. He was so dependent on heroin that he continued to inject it for two weeks. But as the clinic ramped up his methadone to 70 milligrams a day, his cravings dulled.

Methadone launches the same receptors in the brain as heroin and fentanyl — but at a muted intensity. Soon, Shawn no longer used anything else. And after six months, his parents agreed to let him move from his car into their apartment. He just had to stay clean and find a job.

Part of a national chain of treatment centers, BAART, a program launched in San Francisco nearly 50 years ago, offered no frills. After signing in, patients would take methadone doses there or, once they earned more privileges, bring home medication. Patients could use Medi-Cal or Medicare. Bus lines 23 and 29 stopped out front.

Some of the clinic’s employees had their own addiction histories. Jen Maxwell, a young mother of two with tattoos and a piercing above her upper lip, had quit meth, earning a unique perspective to offer patients.

By the summer of 2020, Shawn was stable. He landed a position scanning and stacking packages at a FedEx warehouse. He moved into his own apartment and started saving to buy a house.

It was around this time that Shawn’s counselor, Marcella Alfano, received a promotion to supervise the methadone treatment unit. BAART assigned him a new counselor it had hired recently.

The woman had just secured her state certification as a drug counselor. Though she had bounced around clinics in the Bay Area and Sacramento region, Bridget Adams listed on her application a master’s degree from Temple University.

Bridget Adams is pictured on Sept. 23, 2025. Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle

At first, Shawn was happy with the change in counselors. Bridget, who had shoulder-length brown hair and hazel eyes, would meet him at reception and walk him to her office. He noticed that most other counselors stayed in their rooms when clients arrived.

In California, patients using methadone in a licensed program must receive at least 50 minutes of counseling per month from professionals who discuss their treatment plan and goals. Bridget and Shawn met every week, plus once a quarter for a broader discussion. In confidential, one-on-one sessions, Shawn shared details of the rocky life path that had left him in need of her care, and they bonded over their experiences in foster care.

After Shawn turned in three months of clean drug tests, while keeping a job, he earned weekend methadone take-home privileges, saving him a daily trip for his doses.

As the months passed, though, Bridget began to make strangely personal comments. Age, she said, was just a number — and shouldn’t matter in dating. When Shawn, 10 years her junior, disagreed, she got upset.

She began criticizing a woman he’d been seeing. You should focus on yourself, she would say. In one session, Shawn told Bridget he had nothing to share. “Well,” she responded, “we can just sit here and stare at each other then.”

After a relapse, Shawn had to return to visiting the clinic daily. When he’d come in on Saturdays and Sundays, Bridget would be there, even though she was off. She’d greet him and follow him around. When he would leave the clinic, she would, too.

Bridget accessed the BAART file of Shawn’s mother and lectured him to move out of his parents’ home, bringing up private details from his mom’s confidential sessions with another counselor.

One weekend after leaving the clinic, Shawn sat in his car, planning to wait five minutes for Bridget to drive away. Yet she stayed in the lot. When he started his car, she started hers. When he pulled out, she tailed him, cutting off other cars to stay behind him.

Shawn kept quiet about Bridget’s behavior. She was the counselor and he was the junkie, he thought. She once told him she’d reported another patient to human resources, succeeding in booting him from the clinic.

But Bridget’s presence began to unsettle the rest of the clinic. She struck many colleagues as a know-it-all who refused to back down. She often put a cautionary “stop” hold on her patients, meaning they had to check in with her before they could get their meds. Some staff members saw this as caring, others as controlling.

The counselor at one point coined a phrase that played on a popular religious refrain: “What would Bridget do?” She joked about putting the motto on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

She also fiddled around with home businesses, creating jams and jellies and holistic remedies. After she gave a front desk worker a lime-flavored lip scrub while warning her not to lick her lips too much, the clerk was immediately in the bathroom with diarrhea.

One day in March 2022, workers and clients heard yelling from Bridget’s office and were unsure what to do.

“You’re not gonna continue to talk to me sideways because I don’t do that to you!” Bridget said, her voice rising.

Bridget was arguing with one of her patients, Jaxon Mills, who filmed the encounterOpens a popup that shows additional information. and posted it on Facebook. Mills wore a backward cap and a COVID mask as Bridget sat on a yoga ball. They quarreled over whether Mills had permission to take home methadone.

Jaxon Mills poses for a portrait outside of his trailer in Sacramento on Aug. 6, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

A supervisor finally knocked on the door before asking, “Everything good?”

“It’s good,” Mills said. “I would just like a new counselor.”

“There’s the form!” Bridget snapped, slapping the document onto her desk.

Bridget’s boss, Alfano, reprimanded Bridget, who would later sue BAART, alleging that management had let Mills “intimidate and harass” her, while allowing a patient to inappropriately film her.

Soon after the episode, Bridget informed her patients she was leaving for another clinic, while imploring them to follow her. She repeatedly asked Shawn, who told her no each time. It felt weird and inappropriate, he thought. BAART was convenient, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his sobriety.

Bridget worked her last shift at BAART on July 8, 2022.

A little more than a month later, Shawn received a text message from an unfamiliar phone number. The texter claimed to have seen leaked footage of Shawn taking methadone at BAART — a potential breach of rules designed to protect his privacy — and offered to help him.

It was exactly what Bridget had warned him might happen.

3
Texts and subtexts

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

During the next month, Shawn received the string of texts offering him help — the ones he initially thought might be a prank by his younger sister. In that first conversation, the person sending the texts had played coy, even after Shawn guessed it was Bridget.

Two days later, around midnight, another text arrived. Shawn played along.

Okay so going back to the very last question I asked the other day hypothetically speaking, what if I really was Bridget?

Id be happy of course haha.

Okay. Soooo I guess to make you happy. It’s me lol

Really? No way I don’t believe u!

I ‘moved’ to a different clinic.

Now Shawn felt certain that Bridget was behind the messages. And he didn’t see any reason to continue the charade.

Everything I said was to get u to admit who u are your weird as fuck …  leave me the fuck alone u shouldn’t have my number. I’m blocking u if I get more texts from unknown numbers were finna have problems.

Your happiness must have went away … Okay never mind. It’s okay. You seem nervous now. Like I said before. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Never my intention so I’m gonna go to sleep now. Have a good night, Shawn!

Another text arrived just after 4 a.m.

Hmmmm this is what got me nervous and scared me away. This is why I said maybe I crossed a boundary I shouldn’t have. I’m Sorry. Now I feel bad. Look, I still wanna help you when you need it and I meant what i said. I won’t talk to you anymore, Shawn. Don’t worry.

But there were more texts, seemingly from Bridget but sent from a series of anonymous numbers. Shawn would block them, one by one. Periodically, he’d buy a new phone and change his number. Nothing stanched the flow of messages.

Later that September, Shawn, who was now seeing a new counselor at BAART, shared the text messages with clinic supervisors.

They told him they would report Bridget to the certification organization for drug counselors, the California Consortium of Addiction Programs and Professionals, and he contacted the agency as well on their advice. Less than a week later, Bridget received a letter from CCAPP advising her she was being investigated for a code of conduct violation.

Her career was in jeopardy.

Days after that, Shawn’s father answered a knock at the apartment door. A woman in large sunglasses and a scarf handed him an envelope addressed to Shawn. Inside was a “letter of intent to sue” printed on the letterhead of a prominent law firm. Bridget alleged defamation, demanding $30,000 unless both parties reached “a resolution on their own.” The letter said Shawn had to comply or risk arrest.

Shawn Stewart checks his phone as he eats ice cream with his father, Sydney Stewart, right, in Sacramento on Aug. 6, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

Shawn later received a text warning that his mom could be added as a defendant, jeopardizing her Section 8 housing assistance and Social Security benefits. And that Shawn’s wages could be garnished.

The text, like the letter, recommended an alternate path: Shawn should simply communicate with Bridget.

She may lash out at you at first but if you talk nice and calm she may be okay.

Shawn did not reach out. Instead, he turned over the mounting evidence — not only to CCAPP but to the Department of Health Care Services, a state agency that ensures drug counselors follow ethical requirements.

On Nov. 4, 2022, Shawn started getting texts from another number.

Who the fuck do you think you are accusing and lying on my wife!

The person identified himself as Corey Adams, Bridget’s husband.

My wife said don’t reach out to that little boy no matter what … I usually listen to my wife but in this situation when you fuck with my family we gonna have problems! A black hooded sweatshirt with the hood covering you will not hide you.

Shawn had been out to dinner recently with his brother and sister and had worn a black San Francisco Giants hoodie. Was someone following him?

You going around reporting to her licensing agency that you were fucking my wife in her office when she worked there!!! You fucking wish. Best sex you would ever have.

Shawn didn’t know it at the time, but Corey wasn’t with Bridget any more. He was in rehab — without the means to text him.

Shawn soon opened his Facebook account to discover a message that seemed to be from his other brother. It contained six memes featuring a photo of Shawn’s face and different captions:

“GOT FENTANYL? GIVE ME SOME!”

“I WANTED TO FUCK MY THERAPIST BUT COULDN’T SO I LIED ABOUT IT!!”

A screenshot of messages and memes sent to Shawn Stewart. Personal details have been redacted from the messages and memes. Illustration: John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle; screenshot: Shawn Stewart

Shawn worried that when he got off work he might find similar images plastered in the warehouse parking lot. During breaks, he rushed outside to check.

On Nov. 15, 2022, Shawn received an email — not an anonymous one but a real message from an attorney Bridget had hired. Bridget believed she had been impersonated in communications sent to him, and she knew why: Her ex-colleagues at BAART were trying to get Shawn to file ethics complaints against her.

An hour after reading the message, Shawn filled out a reportOpens a popup that shows additional information. with the Sacramento Police Department alleging Bridget was harassing and threatening him.

“I have over 5 numbers and a fake (Facebook) account messaging me,” he wrote. “I block one and another number texts. I just want this to stop. I’m constantly watching to see if someone’s following me, stressing I’m going to lose my job, or someone will show up at my apartment. She still tries to deny it’s her even after she admits it’s her so I’m hoping someone can see it’s her through the numbers or Facebook account.”

He filed the report online. No one responded.

4
‘Take it seriously darling’

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

What Shawn could not see was that Bridget, unchecked, was growing more adept at weaponizing her phone to bend reality.

Using apps that can obscure identities, including TextNow, she created a string of random, anonymous phone numbers. To obtain the new numbers, she just had to provide an email. TextNow advertises the service as a convenient way to create a confidential second line, or a number helpful for a “side hustle.”

When blocked, she moved on to the next number.

Some days, Shawn would receive more than 50 calls and twice as many texts. His phone would ring and the caller ID would indicate he was hearing from a lawyer, or a private investigator, or a detective. Sometimes the voice would sound like a robot, and he’d put the person on speaker to let his family listen. But the message was always the same: He should drop his complaints against Bridget because she wasn’t the one bombarding him. She was being framed.

One time, Shawn received a call from a robotic voice and hung up. The phone rang again but this time, instead of hearing the altered voice, Shawn was confident he heard Bridget’s voice. Shawn told the caller they had forgotten to turn on the voice modulator. The caller hung up, then called back with the robotic voice.

At the warehouse where he worked, an unidentified woman called his boss, claiming he was using drugs again. Human resources pulled him into a meeting and questioned him. Shawn didn’t yet know if the threat of a $30,000 defamation lawsuit was real. Or how Bridget kept obtaining his new phone numbers.

Worse, Shawn wasn’t confident his version of events would prevail. No one will believe the recovering addict, he thought. He didn’t know who to trust. He stopped sleeping. And going to work.

He called an old drug dealer he knew. Someone who would have good fentanyl, not the fake or cut stuff. He bought no more than a half gram, maybe $30 worth, stifling his guilt by telling himself it was no big deal — a small concession under the circumstances.

Shawn’s BAART tests came back dirty. He started missing courses of methadone and, after two weeks AWOL, the clinic followed its policy and dropped him back to square one — smaller, 20-milligram doses. He vomited during the ensuing withdrawals.

Over several weeks, he repeatedly drove to San Francisco’s Tenderloin to find a dealer, score and get high. His distress over Bridget dulled just as the threat intensified.

When Sacramento County Judge Deborah Lobre granted Bridget’s initial request for a restraining order against Shawn on Dec. 22, 2022, she relied in part on the email Bridget said she had received from Shawn that read, “I wish you would die and I can make that happen.”

Every week, in courthouses around the state, stacks of temporary requests are quickly granted, pending future hearings. The legal system defaults toward trusting the person expressing fear, understanding that, for them, stay-away orders are often urgent and their only recourse.

The next afternoon, Shawn began to receive more anonymous texts.

Sorry Shawn. It’s too late now. I asked you to get back to me yesterday and you did not.

Nope. And I don’t care I’m sick of u messaging me …  I bought a new phone this one is going into the trash once I activate my new one.

The person sending the texts wanted to meet in person.

You pick the place and time

Shawn was finished. He hit send on a reply one last time.

Your so pathetic literally block you 5 times a day get a fucking life.

I think your embarrassed and scared to reach out to her because you meant the things you said in the very beginning and then you became an evil dick and the best way to handle things for you is being a passive aggressive narcissist instead of an actual man.

Three days later, a uniformed Sacramento police officer served Bridget’s restraining order. Shawn shook his head as his mother explained to the officer how her son was the real victim. He could see Bridget’s plan unfolding in front of him. Opening the court order, he read the threatening emails. Through his fear, he was impressed.

The final anonymous text of the year arrived just after lunch on Dec. 29, another appeal for Shawn to contact Bridget.

Something has to give Shawn … Take it seriously darling.

That evening, Bridget logged on to her email.

First, she typed a message pretending to be Shawn and threatening to “blow up” Bridget’s car. Then she sent it to another one of her accounts. From the second account, she erased her name and address as sender and replaced it with Shawn’s Gmail address. Finally, she took a screenshot of the doctored email.

The next day, Bridget sent that screenshot to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, alleging a breach of the restraining order. Deputy Ambar Vicente-Rivas wrote up a report, summarizing Bridget’s statement: “Shawn was my patient and he got upset (when) I left the office,” the report stated. “I am scared of him.”

Over the next couple of weeks, Bridget contacted the sheriff’s office five more times, including each time a threatening email from Shawn. Repeatedly, deputies either took a photo of her screenshots or asked Bridget to directly upload the screenshots to Evidence.com, a site police agencies use to store and manage documents, videos and other digital evidence.

As her case lingered, an “irate” Bridget phoned detectives, pushing for updates and “expedited” action, according to reports. She complained to deputies that she had to rely on Ubers because of Shawn’s bomb threat.

A new detective in the Crimes Against Persons Bureau, Nicholas Russell, was assigned the case. He emailed Bridget on Jan. 5, introducing himself. She immediately responded: “I can’t even leave my house in fear (of) him.”

For Russell, the paper trail rendered the case clear-cut and dire. He submitted requests for an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Shawn’s phone and email accounts.

He opted not to confront Shawn, who might have told him about the police report he had filed with Sacramento PD and the ethics complaints detailing Bridget’s harassment. The detective reasoned that he didn’t want to tip Shawn off, stating in a report that the move could “be the catalyst for future violence to Adams.”

So he didn’t know about Shawn’s parallel effort to clear his name. Shawn had submitted a response to the restraining order that included not only the threatening texts from anonymous numbers, but a video he recorded attempting to show he never sent Bridget a single email.

On Jan. 13, Bridget and Shawn logged into Zoom to argue for and against the restraining order. Shawn pleaded with Judge Allison Williams to subpoena his former counselor’s email and phone records. Bridget interrupted the judge and Shawn so often she was reprimanded.

Williams asked Bridget to return with more evidence and postponed the hearing a month, keeping the temporary order in effect. When the judge cited a “pending criminal case,” it didn’t dawn on Shawn that he was the suspect.

Three days later, minutes after Bridget turned in another email to the sheriff’s office, a deputy phoned her. She told him: “He is stalking me and I fear for my life.”

The cops decided they could wait no longer. That was the night they headed to Shawn’s parents’ apartment. In a statement justifying the arrest that night, deputies wrote that Shawn violated the restraining order “at least six times,” and was meticulously tracking his victim, knowing her location “constantly.”

They didn’t mention that they hadn’t checked the authenticity of the emails from Shawn provided by Bridget. They were relying solely on the screenshots.

And there is no evidence that they had looked into Bridget’s past.

5
Bridget

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

On the evening of Aug. 9, 2003, Sgt. Edward Kisselback responded to the Top of the Ridge trailer park in Bensalem Township, Pa., northeast of Philadelphia. The call was urgent: A 3-year-old girl had been kidnapped from an Acme grocery store.

Kisselback rang the doorbell at Unit A-36. Bridget Kelly, 19, answered and identified herself as the missing girl’s mother.

Bridget had been born a few miles away in the tiny borough of Hulmeville. She’d tell people later that her father, who worked with vending machines, wasn’t in her life and that her mother, who died when Bridget was in her teens, was slain in a botched robbery. As she grew into adulthood, Bridget had bounced from foster care to group homes to friends’ houses.

Kisselback called in the abduction over the radio — a blond girl in a pink dress named Haley taken by her father, who didn’t have custody rights — and was anxious to get more details to expedite the search.

However, Bridget’s doorbell was stuck, and the teenager became preoccupied with fixing it, the officer noted in his report. “She was,” Kisselback wrote, “unusually calm for a mother who just lost her child.”

When he asked for a photograph of the girl, Bridget said she didn’t have one. When deputies raced to Acme, they found no witnesses to an abduction. And from there, things would only grow more confusing.

In subsequent interviews with police, Bridget’s storyOpens a popup that shows additional information. changed. At one point, she said she had been shopping at the nearby store with her toddler, walking the aisles from “milk and eggs” to greeting cards. She felt Haley tugging on her leg one moment, then nothing. When she turned, she saw her ex-boyfriend, the child’s father, holding Haley. She didn’t cry out, but sprinted after them before her ex sped off in a reddish car.

At another point, Bridget said she wasn’t at the store at all — because she didn’t have custody of the child, either. Her daughter was in foster care as a ward of nearby Lehigh County. She said she’d learned of the abduction in a phone call from the foster parents, who told her the ex-boyfriend had snatched the girl away from them in an Acme in another town.

The next day, investigators received a call from a woman identifying herself as “Liz Cooper,” claiming to have been an eyewitness. She said she was dating Bridget’s ex and confessed to helping with the abduction. The girl kept asking for her mommy, she told a detective. The ex’s motive? He was “pissed the fuck off at her mother.”

Detectives became increasingly suspicious. Bridget kept shifting critical details — including whether her daughter’s name was Haley or Natalya. At one point, she faxed police child-custody documents for a daughter named Natalya Marie Kelly-Edwards. Meanwhile, the authorities could find no record of a woman named Liz Cooper.

The only part of the account that remained consistent over the 48 hours: The kidnapper was a man named Anthony Edwards.

Edwards had met Bridget at Cutco, a knife company. He was the sales manager; Bridget, soon after being hired, jumped to top salesperson. But it had all been a lie. “She faked every order,” Edwards said later, describing how she invented clients and their credit card numbers. After leaving the company, Bridget would call the office repeatedly, jamming the line, never uttering a word. She called so much, the company changed its number.

Officers soon found Edwards, and he agreed to come to the station to make a statement.

Edwards told investigators how Bridget had been hired and fired at Cutco in less than a month. That he and Bridget had dated for only a week and a half. And that Bridget had filed custody papers saying he was the father of her 2-year-old girl. Edwards had been pulled out of a Cutco meeting by police and summoned to a court hearing in Philadelphia, during which he was ordered to take a paternity test.

That was the last he’d heard from her.

At some point, the Bensalem Township investigators showed him a photo of the kidnapped child, who had bright red hair.

Investigators let him go.

They soon discovered that Bridget had no children.

Erica Lundberg was 18 when she met Bridget at the Covenant House, a transitional homeless shelter for young adults in Philadelphia. The roommates clicked right away. Bridget “came off like a normal person, very friendly,” Lundberg later recalled.

When Lundberg confided she was due $86,000 from an inheritance after her mother was murdered, her roommate paid more attention to her. Bridget was then 20. She had served one year of probation for filing the false kidnapping report in Bensalem Township.

Forging her roommate’s signature and explaining she had put on weight, Bridget convinced a bank teller to issue her six cashier checks — totaling $64,500 — from Lundberg’s account. When police caught her, Bridget claimed the identity of a high school classmate. After pleading guilty to identity theft and theft by deception, she was sentenced to 23 months.

Lundberg, who lost $13,000 and managed to recover the rest, showed up in court and told Bridget to rot. “She totally screwed my life up,” Lundberg said later. “It set me back a decade.”

Bridget eventually had three children — real ones — including twins born during a stay in jail. According to court records, a judge once noted that she had at least one child taken away from her. All three were ultimately adopted by a Pennsylvania couple. She took out a marriage license twice with a local man, but never married and then was convicted of assaulting him.

Over the years, she was sentenced in at least eight criminal cases in two Pennsylvania counties. Judges ordered mental health exams, treatment and courses of medication. After one arrest, an officer indicated in his report that Bridget had been wanted for escaping from a Bucks County jail.

The common thread in the cases: Exotic but not terribly sophisticated fraud schemes executed with false identities. In 2003, while working at a Boscov’s department store in Philadelphia, she bought three pairs of shoes, toddler clothing and a CD player, among other items, with credit card numbers she’d stolen from customers. The caseOpens a popup that shows additional information. was easy to solve: Bridget used her employee discount to knock $3 off the bill.

By 2010, Bridget lived in a Philadelphia apartment. That October, she swung her 1994 Oldsmobile into a Wawa convenience store parking spot and slammed into the open door of another customer. A passenger said Bridget gave her the finger and drove off.

Police obtained a warrant for her arrest, but never managed to serve it. Soon, Bridget pointed her car west toward California.

Bridget arrived in Marin County without a place to stay and in search of companionship. At the Mill Street Center homeless shelter in San Rafael, she met and pursued Aaron Adams, who rebuffed her advances.

One day Aaron received a hysterical call from Bridget. She said an ex-boyfriend had tried to choke her to death. Aaron hung up his phone in a rage, contemplating whether to confront the man. Before he could decide, a mutual friend called and told Aaron she’d watched as Bridget scratched her own neck to create red marks. Aaron blocked Bridget’s number.

A few months later, Aaron’s brother Corey was smoking a cigarette outside the Mill Street Center when he noticed a woman arguing loudly with someone on her phone in the patio area.

A San Rafael native, Corey had spent two decades battling addiction and was staying at the shelter. Unaware of Bridget’s interaction with his older brother — who had by then left Mill Street — he began a relationship with her. In November 2010, the pair watched the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers in the World Series from the shelter TV.

Eventually, Bridget found work and Corey moved into the Richmond apartment she rented. For him, it wasn’t so much a romance but a way to get off the street. “I thought God was trying to tell me something,” he said later.

Corey Adams is pictured on July 12, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

Bridget was so controlling, though, that he quickly became estranged from his family. She followed him everywhere — the laundromat, shopping, restaurants.

The couple later moved to San Leandro, where Bridget got a job as a data processor at the Fairmont Acute Rehabilitation Center — which soon fired her. Bridget responded with a lawsuit claiming her boss had called her body “disgusting,” wrote her up for “frivolous” dress code violations and snatched reports from her, causing “paper cuts.” The company denied the claims but paid a settlement.

By the end of 2018, Bridget and Corey had married and moved to Sacramento, where Bridget got her certification as an alcohol and drug technician. She was dictating most aspects of his life, forbidding him from speaking to his family. When she would leave for work, she’d take his phone and the TV remote. She denied him Wi-Fi access and wouldn’t let him attend AA meetings.

When Bridget landed her job at BAART, she made a practice of bringing Corey to work, forcing him to sit in her car in the parking lot for her eight-hour shift. In the words of another of Corey’s brothers, it was “borderline kidnapping.”

6
The visitor

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

Shawn watched as a black cockroach scuttled across the cement floor of the holding tank and disappeared down a drain. Following his arrest on Jan. 16, 2023, he spent his first night in the temporary cell in Sacramento’s main jail with about a dozen other men.

He pulled his hood up, curled into a ball and tried to sleep on the floor as he came down from a fentanyl high. The cell reeked of body odor as men snored from benches.

Periodically, guards would call the last names of new prisoners and buzz them out. One man didn’t respond when his name was called. He was dragged off by his feet.

For the first week, jail officials kept Shawn locked alone as a COVID precaution, allowed outside his cell for 15 minutes every 48 hours. He had no toothbrush or toothpaste. Breakfast was served at 3 a.m. Lunch came in a plastic foam cup, a soup consisting of leftovers from the day before. Once his parents wired him some money, he splurged on Top Ramen noodles, softening them with cold water.

Meanwhile, Bridget received good news. On Jan. 17, 2023, the day after Shawn’s arrest, the state credentialing agency for drug counselors, CCAPP, closed the ethics complaint against her as “unsubstantiated.”

The Department of Health Care Services soon ruled that Bridget did not attempt to engage in an inappropriate social relationship, nor did she violate patient confidentiality. DHCS investigator Natalia Whitehead reported that she had scrutinized records and interviewed staff and clients of the methadone clinic by phone.

“Review of text messages from the unidentified numbers could not be traced back to Counselor Bridget Adams,” Whitehead wrote. “In addition, Counselor Bridget Adams denied that the individual behind the text messages was her.”

In jail, Shawn was moved to the seventh floor, among gang members trying to beat murder charges. Because he had relapsed shortly before his arrest, he was now experiencing withdrawal. He slept five minutes at a time, used the toilet every hour and felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach. The cellblock was freezing, but he dripped with sweat. His cellmate chattered nonstop. He felt like he was losing it.

He created a routine for himself. Read books sent from his family. Work out. Attend drug-treatment classes.

For a violation of a restraining order, Shawn figured he’d be released in short order. But at his first court appearance, he learned the Sacramento County district attorney had charged him with death threats and stalking. Prosecutors, too, were relying on screenshots.

According to Carlton Hershman, a retired detective who trains officers on how to investigate sex assault cases, authorities should “act on theories and arrest on evidence.” Corroborating Bridget’s story would have been as simple as getting a data dump from her devices or requiring her to forward the original emails. “Forty-five minutes later, you could’ve had it,” Hershman said.

Shawn’s court-appointed attorney, Brandon Hintz, visited him in jail and read the charges, noting that he could end up with a “strike” on his record. Shawn cried. He faced up to six years in prison.

Hintz liked to feel out his clients when first meeting them. Shawn came across as calm and measured, confident in his story that he was the real victim. Either he was a fantastic liar, Hintz thought, or he was telling the truth.

Bridget, meanwhile, continued to send investigators screenshots of emails she said Shawn had sent. On Jan. 25, Detective Russell finally served a warrant to Google for Shawn’s Gmail account, calendar, photos, location history, search history and more.

In court two days later, Shawn pleaded not guilty. Four days after that, the intercom in his cell crackled.

“Stewart, you have a visitor.”

Spending 23 hours a day locked in his cell, Shawn was eager to get out. The visitor must be a family member or his lawyer, he thought.

The door popped open and Shawn shuffled out of his dorm unit, checking in at the guard station. He walked up steps into the visiting room, half a dozen stalls separated by partitions. There, he arched his neck and squinted, stunned by what he saw through the thick safety glass.

Furious, Shawn turned to leave. Bridget slapped her right hand against the glass.

“Five minutes,” she mouthed, holding up five fingers.

She looked awful. Bags under her eyes, she sat sideways in the chair. Shawn took a beat and thought it over. The call would likely be recorded. He could catch her saying something stupid. He sat down and picked up the black receiver.

“You know you’re a liar,” he said.

Bridget looked toward the ground, fidgeting. Over and over, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I know you shouldn’t be in here.”

“You’re going to jail,” Shawn told her. “You know what you did and you’re scared.”

For about 40 minutes, Shawn would recall later, they talked in circles. Bridget blamed everything — the incessant messaging, the court order, Shawn’s detention — on BAART’s employees, and she lobbied him to join her in suing the company. As she stuttered, avoiding eye contact, Shawn said he wanted nothing to do with her.

An automated voice sounded a one-minute warning. Bridget kept talking as Shawn hung up his receiver and walked away.

The next morning, the speaker in Shawn’s cell announced another visit. He asked the guards who it was.

This time, he turned her down.

That same week, the detective handling Shawn’s case finally, through a warrant, obtained everything that had been on the young man’s phone.

7
Free to fight

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

When Detective Russell scoured Shawn’s digital footprint, he found nothing — not a single threatening text or email to Bridget.

The detective did, however, find Shawn’s report to Sacramento police the previous November detailing Bridget’s threats and harassment. He also located the texts sent from anonymous numbers asking Shawn to reach out to Bridget, as well as correspondence to Shawn threatening him with the $30,000 lawsuit.

Separately, as Shawn had anticipated, the jail recorded Bridget’s visit — and investigators reviewed it. “Ms. Adams was attempting to get Mr. Stewart to admit that he had sent the messages,” they would later summarize.

That was enough, at long last, for the sheriff’s office to begin to reverse course.

Shawn’s attorney visited him and shared the good news. With the new evidence, he planned to request a release on bail that afternoon. Shawn smiled, but only briefly, before asking: Could I just stay in jail? In his cell, he could avoid Bridget.

On Feb. 8, 2023, after Shawn spent 23 days behind bars, he walked free under a judge’s order. Shortly after midnight, he fell asleep in his own bed, exhausted and relieved.

The next morning, there was a knock on the door. The visitor introduced himself as a private investigator for Bridget. If Shawn would sign paperwork to join her lawsuit against BAART, the man explained, she would drop her restraining order against him.

It’s not over, Shawn thought. His mom, listening in, yelled at the man at the door: “Can you just please leave us alone?!”

Eleven days later, Shawn and his family spotted Bridget sitting in her white Chevy Volt outside their apartment. This time, they took action.

Shawn Stewart waters plants outside his home in Sacramento on Aug. 6, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

“I just want to get this on video,Opens a popup that shows additional information. ” Shawn said from the back seat of his parents’ black Hyundai Sonata. His dad was in the driver’s seat, his mother riding shotgun. “There she is.”

Shawn told his father to drive slowly past the Volt’s back bumper so he could capture her license plate number. As they rolled past, they watched Bridget slink down and recline her seat.

“That’s her, she’s crouched all the way down,” Shawn said. “Fuckin’ weirdo.”

They pulled out of the parking lot. Bridget followed. Shawn’s father drove east for more than 10 miles, pulling up to the methadone clinic. Bridget followed and parked nearby. Shawn’s cellphone buzzed with a message from an unfamiliar number.

Why do you still insist on coming to clinics, Sweetheart? You missed me, didn’t you? … Did you have fun in jail?

The following day, Shawn received a text from a person identifying themselves as an attorney.

Good morning Shawn. I want you to keep in mind that there is an active restraining order. Even though she was at the apartment complex, regardless why she was there, YOU APPROACHED HER VEHICLE.

Another day, Shawn opened the apartment mailbox to find a letter from “Vanessa McKilap,” a Sacramento-area private investigator requesting a phone call. One evening, when only Shawn’s sister was home, someone knocked on the door and tried to open it. She called her parents, who were picking up Shawn from work, and everyone stayed on the line until they got back.

A frustrated Shawn opened new complaints with the two watchdog agencies, DHCS and CCAPP. A new state investigator reached out to Shawn, but he expressed confusion. Haven’t we, he asked Shawn, been emailing each other for weeks?

The investigator told Shawn he had been communicating with someone apparently pretending to be him, using an email address created to look like Shawn’s. To continue conversing, he had Shawn take a selfie while holding up his driver’s license.

By March 2023, the texts sent to Shawn grew only more personal and vicious.

Go overdose and die you fucking junkie! You and your junkie family!

You can block me and change numbers for the 3rd time all you want. The more you think Bridget is doing things, the more we keep texting lol. It’s funny for us but makes you look like you’re fucking brain dead!!!

Shawn continued to block the numbers, but he also began to send the texts to Russell, the sheriff’s detective who had shifted his target — from Shawn to Bridget. Shawn had forwarded so many texts, the detective told Shawn to stop.

Meanwhile, the detective received three more screenshots of threatening emails from Bridget, purporting to show Shawn violating the restraining order again.

On March 15, Russell confronted Bridget in a phone call. At that time, she still thought she was considered the victim and Shawn the suspect. She talked incessantly until the detective cut her off to tell her what he knew. She “became very quiet,” he wrote in his report.

The detective also asked her if she still had access to the original threatening emails from Shawn, not just the screenshot. She told him they had been deleted.

The next day, a judge approved a prosecution motion to dismiss all of Shawn’s charges.

In the end, Bridget’s remaining lies were exposed.

During the ordeal, Bridget had impersonated everyone from Shawn to multiple attorneys to her husband Corey. The private investigator Vanessa McKilap was an invention, just as Liz Cooper had been decades earlier. Bridget didn’t appear to have a master’s degree from Temple, though the university cited privacy laws in declining a reporter’s request for comment.

By one count, she had used at least 43 different numbers to harass Shawn. Police found that they all originated from Bridget’s devices and traced them to internet servers at her new workplace and Citrus Heights home.

Bridget wouldn’t stop after the charges were dropped. Four days later, desperate, she walked into a courthouse outside Sacramento.

8
The shrine

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

Pretending to be her old boss at BAART, Marcella Alfano, Bridget requested a restraining order against Shawn’s mother at the Placer County Superior Court in Roseville. The next day, she requested one against Shawn.

In both cases, Bridget misspelled Alfano’s name while providing the court hundreds of text messages said to have been collected by BAART’s “compliance team.” Shawn’s mother had purportedly threatened to strangle Alfano. Shawn had allegedly texted that he was “going to kill me.”

The application contained a new, shocking allegation: The whole episode had been cooked up by Jen Maxwell, the former BAART counselor.

And Maxwell could not defend herself.

About six months earlier, as she celebrated the opening of her new esthetician business, Maxwell had been driving on Highway 70 north of Sacramento, on her way to pick up her eldest daughter from volleyball practice. A pickup broadsided her, throwing her car about 50 yards into a ditch. Bystanders brought her back to life three times before paramedics arrived.

Doctors removed her gallbladder and spleen and saved her nearly crushed kidney, while treating a punctured lung and three broken ribs. They thought they’d have to amputate her right arm, but saved it. The impact caused frontal lobe and brain stem damage. She would remain in a coma for months.

So the person seeking the restraining order — Bridget — would not have to face Maxwell. But she would have to appear in person before a judge, along with Shawn and his mother.

The court clerk set the hearing date for “4/10/2023” on official documents. But before Bridget hand-delivered notice of the case to Shawn and his mother, she added a circle above the “0,”Opens a popup that shows additional information. changing the date to “4/18/2023.” If Shawn and his mother missed the hearing, the judge would likely approve the restraining order request and not realize Bridget had stolen Alfano’s identity.

It didn’t work. Detecting the altered court date, Alfano and her lawyer, along with Shawn and his parents, attended the April 10 hearing to inform the judge about the falsified paperwork.

As they parked, they spotted her Volt. The group of five entered the courthouse together and headed to Department 44. Just as the hearing was set to begin, the courtroom doors swung open momentarily and Bridget peeked out, locking eyes with Shawn. A few seconds later, Bridget exited, chest out and shoulders high. “Hmmmm,” she muttered as she strode past.

“Go and do your walk of shame!” Shawn’s dad yelled. Surveillance videoOpens a popup that shows additional information. captured the encounter.

Alfano’s attorney then told Commissioner Michael Jacques that his client had been impersonated. The judge dismissed the restraining orders.

Days later, Bridget changed the cover photo on her Facebook page to an apocalyptic scene from Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” with a cartoon image of herself standing amid the fleshy vines of the show’s “Upside Down” alien ecosystem.

The following month, Detective Russell received an email from an attorney named “Aleksei Benjamin,” who had no state bar record, spelled his name two different ways and wanted details about Bridget’s criminal investigation: “Is it possible you can shed some light on what is going on?”

On May 8, Bridget unsuccessfully requested another restraining order against Shawn — this time a long way from Sacramento, in Indiana’s Tippecanoe County. “Respondent has a vendetta against me,” she wrote.

None of it mattered. On July 2, 2023, Sacramento County deputies arrested Bridget on suspicion of stalking, perjury and filing a false report. Detective Russell told Shawn to enjoy his Fourth of July.

Four hours after Bridget posted bail, at 12:31 a.m., Shawn’s phone lit up. A text from an anonymous number.

Why do you want everyone arrested?… I hope you rot in hell.

At his San Francisco rehab facility, Corey Adams woke out of a deep slumber. “Your wife’s here,” a fellow participant said.

Corey was thriving. He was sober and had graduated from the first two phases of his treatment at San Francisco’s Salvation Army. In the third phase, he secured a job, working the graveyard shift at a Sprouts market.

He hadn’t heard from his estranged wife in months, so the arrival left him confused. He found Bridget in the lobby crying. Corey worried she was there to tell him his grandmother had died. Bridget instead said she had been wrongfully accused of a crime. She explained how BAART’s Alfano had deep connections in law enforcement and had set her up.

Back in Sacramento, Detective Russell wanted more evidence. On July 5, as Bridget walked into a court hearing, deputies detained her and then searched her car, home and seven devices.

They found evidence she had called Shawn using Star 67 to block her number. They found messages to her attorney, pretending to be Shawn recanting his allegations against her. They found attempts to frame Alfano. They discovered that her phones’ location data showed she had been at Shawn’s apartment on a dozen different days — including on Feb. 20, when Shawn filmed her.

In mid-August, Shawn’s parents spotted Bridget sitting in her car again while walking their dog in their apartment complex. His mother received an anonymous text Aug. 17 threatening to go public with her personal information. Shawn called Russell and told him he was scared.

The final anonymous text to Shawn arrived Aug. 24. In it, Shawn was warned not to testify against Bridget or his drug testing results and confidential counseling notes would become public.

Hours later, the following day, deputies took Bridget into custody and booked her into the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, south of Sacramento.

She spent her first month in jail phoning Corey, pleading with him to fabricate letters pretending to be Shawn and Alfano admitting to crimes.

Bridget took a deal in March 2024, pleading no contest to eight criminal counts, including stalking and false imprisonment, and agreeing to serve a sentence of nine years, four months in prison.

At sentencing, Deputy District Attorney Miranda Drolet read a victim-impact statement from Shawn, noting that the charges he faced still showed up on background checks despite the dismissal. Bridget spoke to her attorney throughout, paying little attention.

“Bridget, for the past two years you have relentlessly done anything you could think of to destroy mine and my family’s lives, and get away with it,” Shawn’s statement began. “You thought that because you were a counselor and I was in treatment, seeking help to better my life, that nobody would believe me.”

Bridget Adams appears for arraignment on seven felony charges in Placer County Superior Court in Roseville on Sept. 23, 2025, more than a year after she pleaded no contest to stalking Shawn Stewart. Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle

Following the hearing, after Bridget was led out of court, the prosecutor asked Shawn and his parents to follow her back to her office. To Shawn, one question had remained unanswered: Why was Bridget so intent on targeting him?

Drolet brought out a thick stack of evidence. One photo showed papers that had been seized from Bridget revealing she’d practiced signing Shawn’s name. Another photo, from the jail where Bridget was held, showed her handing a fellow inmate, who was about to be released, a letter she wanted delivered to Corey, containing instructions to set Shawn and Alfano up.

Then Drolet showed Shawn a photo of a homemade shrine. Bridget had placed photos of her and Shawn inside a drawing of a pentagram with a heart inside, outlined with lit candles.

The prosecutor displayed printouts of emails Bridget had sent, shortly after she started her campaign of harassment against Shawn, to witches in New Orleans. She had spent $1,800 on mind-control spells so Shawn would fall in love with her.

In one email, Bridget had lodged a complaint with a witch: Her spell didn’t work. Shawn had not fallen for her, he wouldn’t leave his treatment center for her and, in fact, he had filed a police report against her. She demanded her money back.

Read the fine print, the witch responded. While spells could be recast, there were no refunds.

Reporter’s postscript

John Blanchard/S.F. Chronicle

As a reporter on the investigative team at the Chronicle, I contacted Shawn Stewart on April 2, 2024, soon after Bridget started her prison term.

I had become intrigued by a two-paragraph press release distributed by the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announcing Bridget’s sentencing. The case had garnered zero attention, and I persuaded my editor to let me drive to the records room at the Sacramento courthouse to read the file.

Shawn’s email address was in the paperwork, so I immediately typed a note on my phone asking if he was willing to talk. The reply came 17 minutes later. “Because of everything that has happened, is there a way to verify who you are?” he asked me.

If anyone had earned the right to be paranoid, it was Shawn. I emailed him my background, sent him a recent story I’d written and offered to FaceTime with him to verify my identity. The next day, he agreed to a call.

“Yea it was hectic, no matter how many times I changed my number or got a complete new phone it never worked,” he wrote that first day, “but now (that) everything is finally over I don’t mind telling the story.”

Shawn was having trouble finding jobs, likely because his arrest showed up on background checks. Target flew him to Chicago to train on warehouse equipment, then went silent. “People don’t know that getting charges dismissed doesn’t give you a completely clean record,” he said.

California law allows those who are wrongfully convicted to claim $140 for every day they are locked up. Shawn was never convicted, so he was not eligible. Shawn considered suing BAART and contacted a lawyer, but the potential legal action fizzled out.

At Bridget’s March 2024 sentencing, a judge suggested to Shawn that he take the rare step of trying to get himself declared factually innocent. A month later, Shawn filled out a “statement of factual innocence,” explaining how Bridget had fabricated evidence and set fire to his life. He would have to prove “by a preponderance of evidence” that he did not commit the crime.

The process was overwhelming, and Shawn could not find any help. He gave up.

Belatedly, state regulators took action against Bridget. A spokesperson for the Department of Health Care Services said the agency initially cleared Bridget of harassing Shawn because investigators were “unable to determine the origin of electronic communications.” But DHCS ultimately revoked her certification, as did CCAPP, after her pleas. Asked about the case, the accrediting organization replied, “No comment.”

Robin Johnson, a BAART representative, said she could not discuss the company’s dealings with Bridget due to “pending litigation,” but noted that the clinic cooperated with law enforcement and that Bridget’s alleged crimes occurred after she left the company.

The sheriff and DA in Sacramento County also declined to comment on the case.

Throughout the reporting process, my editors and I struggled to understand why investigators and prosecutors relied largely on screenshots of purportedly threatening emails without once asking Bridget for the kind of real evidence courts require — the message files in her inbox — during the month Shawn spent in jail. Had they done so, their case likely would have evaporated.

“I always wondered why they didn’t just try and contact him,” Hintz, the defense attorney, told me. “He could’ve turned the texts over and he never would’ve been arrested.”

Experts I talked to were hesitant to question the police work on this case, as the officers earnestly tried to protect a woman they believed was in danger. But UC Berkeley criminal law professor Andrea Roth, who is generally sympathetic to the difficulties of investigating sexual assault threats, said that if prosecutors and police officers don’t realize emails and text messages can be easily fabricated, “that is embarrassing ignorance on the state of digital evidence.”

As I reported this story, Bridget’s punishment kept lengthening. She pleaded no contest to charges in a second criminal case, this one brought by Placer County prosecutors over the fake restraining order application made in Marcella Alfano’s name. None of Bridget’s victims showed up to speak — but a supporter did.

Lori Woods said she had been a counselor at a treatment center in Sacramento in 2017, when Bridget started as a receptionist. She talked Bridget into pursuing drug and alcohol counseling, and the two became friends. Woods handed a letter to the judge. Before sentencing Bridget to two additional years in prison and a second strike, he read the words to himself, seeing the defendant described as a “true and faithful friend” with “impeccable integrity.”

“The person described in court,” Woods wrote, “is not the person I know.”

Corey Adams met me for breakfast burritos on an overcast morning in July 2024 in Pacifica. Next door was a veterinarian’s office where he had worked briefly after completing rehab. He wore a cross around his neck engraved with a Bible passage: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

“I’m trying to put her in the rearview mirror,” he said.

More than a year sober, Corey was assembling a life, having moved into an apartment in San Bruno. He’d connected with Shawn, and they bonded over their shared relief.

Corey Adams, the estranged husband of Bridget Adams, watches television at his home in Pacifica on July 12, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

Corey Adams wears a cross on his neck. Corey Adams shows a series of letters he received from Bridget Adams while she was incarcerated. In the letters, Bridget proclaimed her innocence to Corey. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

Corey had been getting prison mail from Bridget and had thrown most of it out. In one letter he read, she told him to report Shawn to the local housing authority for living in a “trap house” that was “infested with drugs.” Later, Bridget mailed a five-page letter to Corey’s new girlfriend at a supermarket where she worked, writing “urgent” on the envelope.

“You have been having an affair with my husband,” she wrote. “Your relationship now (is) going to be investigated as a motive for him keeping me in prison. … San Quentin is on the horizon for Corey and you will be here with me. I’ll request you as a cellmate.”

From the California Institute for Women in San Bernardino County, Bridget successfully lobbied a family court judge last year for spousal support payments from Corey. She asserted she needed “support to help rebuild her savings, so she will be able to get back on her feet after being released from prison.” The judge awarded her $973 a month, plus nearly $3,000 in back pay, and another $1,500 in attorney fees.

In a call to Corey in February, I informed him of the judge’s order. It was the first he had heard of it.

“I’m not rich,” he said.

Jen Maxwell receives 24-hour care at Mission Carmichael, a skilled nursing facility near her old job at the BAART clinic. She can’t speak or walk, and has no use of her right arm or leg.

“Every doctor she’s seen has said that she’s a miracle to have survived,” her father, Scott Maxwell, said. “I’m not totally sure.”

He hadn’t heard of Bridget before I called him. When I told him Bridget had claimed Jen had crashed while high and texting Shawn, he was furious. He explained that, after she crashed, tests confirmed she was sober. Her phone was found in her purse.

The father remembered receiving a call from one of his daughter’s former methadone patients, who was distraught about the car wreck. Scott Maxwell told him, “If you give up now, you’ve given up on everything my daughter did to help you.”

A few months later, that patient called back. It was Jaxon Mills, the man whose yelling match with Bridget had preceded her departure and his being reassigned to Maxwell. He said he had been inspired to return to the clinic — and go back to school to pursue a career as a drug counselor.

Jaxon Mills takes a moment as he moves items from his trailer into his car in Sacramento on Aug. 6, 2024. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle

I wrote to Bridget repeatedly over two years seeking to interview her. This February, a handwritten letter arrived at the newsroom.

Bridget, now 42, was adamant that she had been wrongly accused. Corey should be prosecuted, she wrote, as should Shawn and Marcella. Once again, she attacked Jen Maxwell, falsely claiming she crashed her car “while she was high and sending Shawn another text.”

She said she trained in a prison fire camp before helping to fight the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles — a claim the California corrections department said was untrue when I asked. She said she was framed by artificial intelligence. “Before running an article,” she wrote, “you should really look into these questions starting investigating the truth!!!!”

Bridget denied stalking Shawn. She is now appealing her prior no-contest pleas — and has achieved a small breakthrough: Prosecutors acknowledge committing technical errors in charging three of the eight counts she pleaded to in the Sacramento County case, and have asked the appellate court to vacate her no-contest plea in its entirety and send the case back to the trial court to determine how to proceed.

The appellate court has not yet issued its decision, but if it were to vacate the plea, it is unclear what the outcome of any subsequent proceeding in the trial court will be — or if Bridget will plead no contest to any of the charges a second time.

Regardless, Bridget, who had been slated to remain locked up until 2035, was to be released to a halfway house sometime after April 4, according to a notice that Shawn received. As of publication, records show, she was still at the Institution for Women.

Earlier this year, she asked Woods to deliver a four-page letter from her daughter, who is now in her 20s, to her attorney. Woods later sent it to me. “My mother is the most caring, thoughtful, helpful and non-revengeful person I ever met,” the letter reads. “My mother doesn’t do these things she’s been accused of.”

The daughter’s name is misspelled in the letter.

After giving up for a time on his bid for factual innocence, Shawn sought help from Miranda Drolet, the Sacramento prosecutor who secured Bridget’s first no-contest plea. The prosecutor directed Shawn to Kellen Farnham, a county public defender with experience in such petitions.

On Feb. 21, 2025, Shawn and his father sat on a red padded bench outside a courtroom in Sacramento, on the first floor of the county building where he’d been jailed. “This shouldn’t have taken this long,” Shawn said.

He told me he is working at a grocery store and driving weekly to a BAART clinic, where he has a supportive new counselor. Once he puts the case behind him, though, he hopes to wean himself off methadone. He doesn’t like being on it. It feels like trading one drug for another.

At the hearing, Shawn’s father said he was already thinking about the prospect of Bridget’s return to their lives. The family hopes to move from the apartment that Bridget knows well.

“We thought it was done a few times with her,” he said, “but she keeps proving us wrong.”

The courtroom door swung open and the hallway chatter went quiet. Farnham emerged, smiled at Shawn and told his client to come inside. Court was in session, and lawyers dashed through dozens of matters on the morning calendar.

Then it was Shawn’s turn. The whole proceedingOpens a popup that shows additional information. took two minutes. Judge Shauna Franklin signed a single piece of paper and wiped his record clean.

“I apologize that this happened to you,” she said.

Shawn Stewart listens as a judge declares him factually innocent in Sacramento on Feb. 21, 2025. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle