My Ex's Mother Has Msbp And I Found Out She Is Now His 'sole Caregiver'

*** TRIGGER WARNING***

I am in Oregon, USA.

tl;dr: I found out that my high school ex is living with his abusive mother, who has Munchausen Syndrome by proxy.

He was physically and psychologically tortured and lost body parts as a child due to her abuse and was raised by her parents (his grandparents.) I lost touch with him after high school, but I found out that they are now living together in an apartment.

The thing is, I know she's lied about to him to state agencies and medical people. I know she's used the fact that he is non-verbal, non-responsive in her presence to "prove" that he's a basket case who needs her care. I could probably prove that she lied, if I found anyone willing to listen.

Do any resources exist for people in that condition?

Here's the full story, if anyone is interested.

I (42, f) had a boyfriend in highschool (technically not a boyfriend– more of a prolonged, awkward flirtation) who had a horrific history of abuse and trauma from his early childhood when he was aged about 2-5. He is missing body parts-- part of his foot, and his tailbone that she broke when he was 2.

His mother was (eventually) diagnosed with Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy– so she would injure him and then take him to the hospital in a pretend panic, screaming “I dropped him! I dropped my baby!” or some such to get doted on by the hospital staff.

This was actually a semi-regular thing for him in his infancy.

His earliest memories are of being locked in a hot car so that his mother could flirt with the fire department personnel.

And every time she did something like this she would say, with utter conviction, “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” And then she would poison him, or burn him, trap him in his room or run him over with her car, slowly and carefully.

He was thrown through a window. He was regularly beaten and starved.

He was taken out of her custody at five and was raised by his grandparents (her parents.)

I met his mother only once.

She saw us walking home together– he had his arm around my shoulders– and she leaned out of the window of her pickup to scream: “Get away from her, you don’t deserve her.”

He lived with his grandparents, who were in deep denial about her behavior. When he told his grandmother about what happened she laughed it off and assured him, “Oh, she would never do something like that.”

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how much time they spent gaslighting him, and how insistent his grandmother (who he adored) was that no one talk about her precious little daughter’s drug problem and personality problems. If she ever saw him crying– she would scream at him, full volume, “After everything I did for you!” etc. I was on the phone with him once when she did this to him.

So his grandparents were– not the kind of people who should be taking in a traumatized child. They resented the inconvenience. They never really believed him.

He coped by becoming a workaholic. A lot of his identity was in earning money and he said he worked three jobs.

While I knew him, in 1998 or 99, his mother sued him. Something about owing parental support?

He was expecting me to testify about the one time when I saw her, but I didn’t. I was 15 or 16 and I still had a lot of unwarranted faith in “the system,” plus a mother of my own who told me that he was “really a tool of the devil” because he wasn’t a Christian– so transportation would have been an issue.

Also, he was kind of obsessed with who “knew” and who “didn’t know.” He kept a very specific list of names in his head of everyone who knew about his trauma.

So he didn’t want a jury trial, or even for his own lawyers to know what had happened to him. Anything to keep down the number of people who “knew.”

His grandparents testified against him.

She won.

He had to sign checks for her every month– the amount was not insubstantial, either, it came to thousands each month. His grandmother insisted that these checks be handed over in person– despite the restraining order he had.

He definitely felt like I had let him down, and that makes sense. I guess that was the first time I learned about courts irl.

A bit after that, he dumped me and we went our separate ways after he graduated. I went on to college and marriage and kids and work– him to work and health issues and I’m not really sure.

I looked him up when I saw his house went up for sale by a foreclosure company. (We wound up not living very far from each other, and his house is on a more central road so I pass sometimes on errands or jogging.) So I looked him up– and I found that his grandparents had died and he was living in the house with his mother.

They now live together in an apartment. He does not have a phone number separate from hers listed, and is nowhere on social media. No facebook, twitter.

This has just made me think about all of the things that I’ve heard over the past years. The last time I talked to him in 2007– he sounded disoriented and he stopped talking mid-conversation, just breathing into the phone like he was having a panic attack, and a woman screamed at him and hung up the phone.

A woman who might have been his mother dumping an entire casserole dish of food into the garbage and then calling inside, acting shocked about ‘what a pig’ he was.

In 2020, I was going down that street on a freezing night, and an old woman was crying and begging to be let in. As I passed the house, the door opened and a woman inside was saying, in the world’s most sympathetic voice: “Oh, you poor thing! Well, now you know not to make me angry, don’t you?”

And later that year, there was a time when I was out walking by an apartment complex (where I later found out she had an apartment) and I heard a voice like his calling for help, but when I stopped and called his name, I got no answer.

So I think, when I knew him, his mother was already making plans to abuse him to the point where he would be largely non-verbal– keeping him isolated to the point of mental breakdown, and physically sick, poisoned, and ashamed– and then use the condition to ‘prove’ he needed a caregiver, namely her. He would already have seen that the courts were against him.

Things I’ve done: I’ve tried calling, emailing, texting, and sending a physical letter. I told social services and they went and knocked on the door, but that’s it. And honestly, I’m just someone who used to know this guy twenty years ago.

Is there anyone out there who’s had a similar experience? Any advice?

Specifically, I'd like to know if there is something obvious that I should do that I might not have thought of?

(Note: it's completely fine if he doesn't want to talk to me. I just don't want him to be physically and psychologically exploited. And, no, I have absolutely no desire to get back together with this guy. I would honestly much rather someone else did the inquiries here, but I feel like I'm the only one left who knows or cares.)