I had a friend for many years who always took a fancy to me. He seemed nice and I trusted him and he had been dating my best friend when we were 16 years old. Eventually we ended up at some parties together and he drunkenly used me to cheat on his girlfriend, my best friend 3 times. One of these times involved me being pinned, saying “no” 4 times, and telling them that if he went any further it was molestation. He did not care. He went further. And I was molested by him inserting his fingers in to multiple times, while I was too weak to fight him off of me. I tried to forgive and move on, hoping that if I pretend it never happened, continued being his friend, and never said anything to his girlfriend the incident would go away and I would quit feeling damaged. I tried to speak up, and told 2 of our close friends, but he found out and texted me, infuriated. He later went on to tell me that I was never allowed to talk about it again, and manipulated me by playing victim, and telling me that it hurt him and made him sad when I “brought up something from the past.” Years went by and I thought this boy had changed. At the end of our first year of university we ended up dating. He told me that after college i was to put my dreams aside so that I could follow his. Also during this relationship he would pretend we weren’t together at parties. He instructed his friends to never mention anything about his girlfriend (me) or even that fact that he just wasn’t single. And no, this did not change when I was at those parties with him. He would not dance with me, he would not talk to me, he would not look at me, he wouldn’t introduce me to his friends, he wouldn’t even stand next to me. I later found out he actually enjoyed watching me being flirted with by other men. It gave him some odd and concerning validation by other men that I, as a girlfriend, was attractive and acceptable. While i was being bothered by odd men and extremely saddened by the fact that my boyfriend ignored me in public, i did notice what the goal of this distamce was. He was constantly hitting on other women in front of me at these parties. He would poor drinks for them, take down their numbers, and chat them up all night. When i confronted him about this behavior he quickly made me the villain and said that it was unfair of me to ask him to stop “making friends” and went on to tell me that, even though it made me feel awful, the behavior would continue. At one party another atendee finally noticed this odd behavior and confronted him in front of multiple people about how he should be paying attention to his own girlfriend. My boyfriend at the time proceeded to get very mad at this attendee and told the attendee to stop telling him what to do. Multiple other men approached me that night to explain they had been to multiple parties where they had seen me, and never once got the impression that i had a boyfriend, much less that he was actually at the same party. Eventually I realized I was unhappy and wanted something else, but at the time I was too close to the situation to see how incredibly manipulative he had been. However I did break up with him. Later on in the year i would go on to ask his best friend if he thought that boy had cheated on me, he said he had not cheated on me, but it did seem that he had tried multiple times to do so, only that the attempts failed to be received well by the women he attempted it with. After the breakup we remained friends. However, just to be clear, I told him, about a month after the break up, that I didn’t want to have sex with him. He seemed extremely mad at me for not wanting to sexually pleasure him anymore but also, to my belief, because he had always had an extremely difficult time with women and quickly grasped the unlikelyhood of finding another woman. About 3 or 4 weeks went by and I ended up at a small party at his appartment. He stayed sober, waiting for me to get drunk. Me, being unaware of this tactic, felt I was in a small, safe space, with only close friends and proceeded to, for the first time in my life, get black out drunk. The next morning I woke up, naked, in bed next to that friend, remembering only bits and pieces of the night before. I remember shots, making out with that friend, puking twice, and some fuzzy memory of being naked, on my back, with him on top of me. I asked him what happened and he proceeded to try to initiate sex again. I told him no and moved out from his grasp. He told me we had had sex. This friend kept a security camera in his room that could see parts of his bed so I asked to see the video from the night before as proof. I could only stomach about 5 seconds of the apparently 3 hour rape. I told him that I didn’t like what he had done while I had been in such a state of inebriation. He said, and I quote “I was honestly pretty sober last night…. Yeah, I should have stopped, especially after I realized how bad(ly drunk) you were.” I was shocked. He admitted to being sober, admitted to knowing I was blacked out, admitted to having seen and heard me puke multiple times…. And had continued to sexually assault me for 3 hours. He was my best friend for 4 years and my previous boyfriend. I was beyond hurt. I struggled for a week before I finally broke and ended up telling all of my roommates and my mom about what had happened. I accused him of rape, not because I was going to go to the police, but just because I needed to hear him say it. He went on to deny it, to blame me, and to ignore me as my mental state deteeiorated. All of these things, of course only helped it to deteriorate further. We went to different universities, so I couldn’t even contact faculty to receive a restraining order. Most days I’m fine and I just feel lucky not to remember anything but the 5 seconds of video I saw. But every once in a while I still struggle with this, with being raped, with the fact it was my best friend, with the fact that I can’t put this manipulative sexual predator some place he can’t hurt anybody else. My biggest hope is that one single woman hears this story and somehow gains strength and knowledge from it. The strength and knowledge to leave a manipulative relationship, or to help someone they care about leave one. One of the biggest tellers (and problems) I see is women (and men) making so many excuse for shady/offensive/abusive behavior for their significant other and thinking that is a normal relationship. A partner should not do something to you that you are too ashamed to tell your friends. A happy relationship is not one where you constantly have to forgive and forget things that deeply bother you, or where you are even made to feel ashamed for being bothered. A healthy relationship is not one where you have to say “yes, I know deep down that this is wrong, but he said….” no. You deserve better. The people you care about deserve better. Everyone deserves better than that.
