Teenager stirs family drama with ‘fake’ diary entry

A teenager is stirring an online debate after sharing how she handled a conflict with her “invasive” stepmother.

The 17-year-old shared the situation in Reddit’s AITA (Am I The A******) forum. Her post explained her response after suspecting that her stepmom was reading her diary.

“Our relationship has always been weird,” the teen wrote. “She’s a nice person but she can be pretty mean and childish if we do something she doesn’t like. She also has a tendency to run to our dad if she hears something bad about us.”

‘I wrote a fake entry’

The teenager wrote that she’d been quarantined with her dad and stepmom since the pandemic began. Her situation became more difficult when, one day, she got in trouble with her dad.

“Dad called me a few days ago (we were visiting with our mom) saying he has to talk to me when I come back,” the teen wrote. “Apparently I was in trouble because of something I apparently said to stepmom.”

However, the teen claimed she never said the thing that got her in trouble. Instead, she’d written it in her diary. Her solution? Create a phony diary entry to “trap” her stepmom into admitting that she’d been snooping.

“I realized a lot of the stuff I wrote down was stuff she was telling him, so I decided to come up with a plan to see if I was right,” the Redditor wrote. “I wrote a fake entry basically saying stuff I would never do in a million years and set the trap.”

‘A gross invasion of your privacy’

A few days later, the teen’s dad grounded her for something “concerning” her stepmom claimed she said. This time, the 17-year-old was ready to defend herself.

“I told [my stepmom] it was fake, knew she read my diary and refused to speak to her. My dad came in and tried to talk to me and I told him that stepmom was reading my diary and he didn’t believe me,” she wrote.

The teen left her dad’s house and began staying with her biological mom, but felt unsure if she’d done the right thing. Redditors, however, seemed to agree she was not in the wrong.

“That is a gross invasion of your privacy. And a clever move on your part to confirm her prying. She’s the [a******] for sure!” one user wrote.

“You didn’t go overboard at all, you needed your evidence before you started falsely accusing her, I’d have done the same thing,” another added.

Others claimed the issue ran deeper than just an invasion of privacy.

“For whatever reason, this woman is threatened by you to the point she’s repeatedly violating your privacy to stir trouble between you and your father,” one user wrote.

“This is the kind of thing kids lose trust in their parents over. You even explained to your father what was happening and he still sided with his wife, your step-mom, over you, his own kid. Wtf?” another added.

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