Life has never been easy for Donnie Bartlett.
There was the depression and anxiety disorder, the short jail sentence for uttering threats — “years ago,” he says, “a stupid thing, just my big mouth” — and at least one failed business in Ontario.
When he returned to his home town of Truro in early 2015 he was so penniless he ended up in a homeless shelter.
But a story about his plight in The Chronicle Herald helped him get back on his feet.
After a while things were looking up. His home renovation business was busy enough that he needed three other employees just to keep up with the work.
Then, about three weeks ago, the phone calls started.
“You, you’re not fooling anyone,” said the first caller, who, like all of the others, didn’t give a name. “You are the pedophile, the pervert.”
At first Barlett, whose full name is Donald Duane Bartlett, thought it might have something to do with some Facebook posts he had made about a former employee who had stolen a bunch of tools.
After about a week of calls like that he went online to try and see what was going on.
That’s when Bartlett learned that police in Halifax had been advising residents that a man soon to be living there had just been released from a federal penitentiary after completing a sentence for the distribution of child pornography, printing/publishing child pornography, possessing child pornography and counselling another person to commit an indictable offence.
The name of the sexual predator, who police warned was likely to reoffend, was Donald Duane Bartlett.
“Not only are our names spelled exactly the same way, including the middle name, but he even looks a bit like me,” said Bartlett, who is 175 centimetres tall and has a thick head of brown hair and, at 54, is five years older than the convicted sex offender.
The other Bartlett’s name and face — as often happens when a sexual offender who is at risk of reoffending is released — were splashed across the news and shared through social media.
So the calls to Donnie Bartlett the home renovator just kept coming, each of them anonymous and each of them expressing anger, disgust and revulsion over having a “perv,” “monster” and “pedo” living secretly in their midst.
When he tried to explain the guy in the papers and on the newscasts wasn’t him, nobody really listened.
Suddenly the work stopped coming in for his company, Nova Scotia Renovation Group, while jobs already on the books, just disappeared.
Bartlett was scheduled to repair a roof for one woman who owned seven or eight other properties in Truro that he hoped to someday renovate.
One day she called him up said, “I Googled you and I’m not very impressed” and then just hung up. She’s never called back.
The employees are gone now, Bartlett told me over the telephone, and the business he worked so hard to build is “going down the drain.”
Even if there was work, the 54-year-old couldn’t do it.
Beset by the anxiety that has troubled him most of his life, he told me Tuesday that he hasn’t left his apartment for three days — not even to go to the Truro Tim Horton’s he likes to visit.
There, he tells me, he sometimes runs into down-on-theirluck folk whom he treats to a lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant.
“My way of giving back,” he calls these acts of charity.
It’s not like Bartlett has much to give.
He shares his one-bedroom apartment with a couple of borders, a set-up that leaves him sleeping on a love seat in the living room.
Mostly he just sits in the apartment, wondering each time the cell phone rings whether more abuse awaits him on the other end of the line.
Monday Bartlett took to Facebook to tell how this story of mistaken identity is ruining his life — by press time on Tuesday the post had been shared nearly 850 times — and has started a GoFundMe campaign in the hope of saving his business.
If you click on his Facebook page you’ll see the beginnings of a moustache he is growing to differentiate himself from the other Donald Bartlett.
Tuesday if you happened to be eating out in Truro you might have glimpsed that face and burgeoning facial hair across the restaurant.
Bartlett’s mom had hoped he could ignore his demons and leave his apartment for an hour or so.
It was, after all, his birthday.
“Not much of one,” said the birthday boy, trapped in his Google-age nightmare.
Not much of one at all.
