I was a 22-year-old Turkish-Belgian university student, relatively new to human rights advocacy. Isa, who was 53, didn’t stop when I tried to push back. In a conversation from February 2021, he wrote to me in Turkish, “But I would really kiss you without letting you go.”

When I tried to change the subject, Isa persisted. “I would be so glad if you kissed me,” he told me.

Feeling disconcerted, I limited our interactions. But the next month, Isa tried to convince me to meet with him.

“You’re always on my mind,” he wrote in a message he later appeared to delete. In another conversation, he urged me to visit. “It would be good for you if we could meet,” he said. “You could come over for a few days. We would talk about nice things, I would make you laugh, and so you could blow off some steam.”

I told him I felt awkward about the idea of meeting alone because my activist friends might want to join us. Isa told me it would be better “just you”.

“Why would we tell others about it?” he asked. “Do you share it with friends that we often talk like this?”

I now felt like I hadn’t been valued for my work but for something else entirely. Disillusioned, I wanted to avoid Isa and eventually quit activism.

I didn’t report the incidents to the World Uyghur Congress, and for years, I didn’t tell other activists.

“I didn’t want people to know their leader is someone like this,” I said. “Keeping hope is already difficult for them.”