I’ve been asked by my church leadership to attend a meeting, where I will be “testifying” against a former friend who, in their words, has sexually harassed me. I’m doing it because I want to bring this vile excuse of a man to justice, but at the same time, I’m all nerves. I have never confronted a predator like this before.

So I had a male friend who swooped in to the rescue during a very difficult time of my life. We got to talking and very soon after our getting acquainted, he began making passes at me. He asked if he had a chance because I said I liked older men and he’s a year younger. He showed up for an outing with a haircut and claimed that he got it because I said I liked men who groomed themselves. And during an outing with another male friend, he would wait until that guy left the table and then pissily ask me if I wanted to see that dude shirtless and sulk that I was apparently “paying more attention to him”.

I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable and suffocated. I should have just cut it off there. But I must have been lonely and afraid of losing friends (my family has always ingrained in me that I’m flawed/broken). And I’ve cut a toxic family member off, so I felt I needed all the friends I could get. So I continued to hang out with him for a while. My bad.

During a zoom conversation, we somehow ended up talking about rape. A director we had recently talked about apparently included a rape scene in a movie that wasn’t faked. I was horrified and expressed this to him and he did the whole devil’s advocate LVM “but akshually, if she agreed, it’s TECHNICALLY not rape”. I told him that he was totally wrong and that he didn’t get to decide consent for women. He suggested tabling the conversation since he said he didn’t want to trigger me and cause me to have a sleepless night. I thought it would end there. NOPE.

Later in the conversation, he told me that if we were dating, he would not have allowed me to drop it. He would have forced me to justify my position and would not have let up until he was satisfied. And I said, so you’re ok with me having a sleepless night after all. He was all like, I’ll be there with the hugs and the tissues. And when I said, you know I might have some personal experience with assault, right? Wouldn’t you be afraid of traumatizing me? He said, I guessed this was a possibility. I wanted to throw up, honestly.

Throughout the conversation, he was making comments like “I could see us together” or “I have feelings for a girl, maybe it’s you!”. Finally, fed up of all the stupid hints, I asked, “Just be straight with me. Is it or isn’t it?”. He revealed that it was n’t at the moment. So everything he’d been doing up till that point was just a hollow, creepy act he put on so he could try to get me to fill a void while he searched for the girl of his dreams. I felt dirty, used, and disgusted. Especially after writing this all out, I see the many, many mistakes I myself made in not nipping this in the bud sooner.

So I shared with one of my small group leaders, who is also a dear friend, that I was contemplating leaving our group because of him. She very quickly escalated this to our senior pastor, who was horrified. He asked if I was willing to come forward and speak out about this. He felt we shouldn’t protect people like this. I said yes, I was willing. I spoke with the senior pastor and he thinks what happened between us is tantamount to sexual assault. He asked if I would be willing to join a meeting with this scrote and speak out against him. I said I would.

So I’m spending this week pacing back and forth, writing out what I am going to say, and am low-key freaking out. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to calm down, say my piece, and most importantly, prevent this from happening again? Thanks!

TL;DR: You can’t even be friends with these hunks of radioactive waste. Even the slightest exposure is cancerous.