Sexual Harassment Case ruined my Friendship
So basically i ruined a relationship with my best friend from university.
We both study the same field and we both are members of Students Club for that field. I am just a regular meber (although i organise students' cinema) and he is one of the two presidents of the club.
We recently had a problem with one guy, who turned out to be a massive creep and sexually harrased some of the women in our club. On a meeting, this was brought up and basically everyone wanted to kick him out and tell our professors about this problem. Official rules of the club are however, that whenever we want to kick someone out, we have to give them an opportunity to explain themselves.
The problem is, that the person was not at the meeting, so we had to schedule a special meeting just about this topic. However it was specificaly said, that we will forward this to the professors only after we hear his defense. This did not sit right with number of people in the club, so it was agreed to invite two professors to that meeting, so that they can get acquainted with the case. The main victim of the harasser was tasked to bring a case against him and she prepared a power point presentation with all the evidence of his behavior. She send that presentation to the other president of the club (we have two) and the president approved it.
So weekend passes and we are all in one room with this guy and our professors. The main victim starts presenting but in the middle she is cut off by one of the presidents, because they realised it looked too much like a mock trial. We didn't get to hear the worst cases of the creep's behavior (like groping) and we immediately speedran to his defense, which was solid as he took all the responsibility and said he is prepared to leave the university.
However because we did not get to hear the worst cases of his behavior, the main professor of our field told him that there is no need to leave university, that he just has to stop interacting with all these people and that it is not up to us to judge him, because ombudsman is for that.
Anyway, understandebly i and number of other people were were unhappy with how the meeting went. I was particulary unhappy, that the victim was cut off in the middle of her presentation and it then gave an impression that we are persecuting this guy just because he is a creep and not because he is a harasser and groper.
So we were talking about this in chat that i have with my friends from the field (which includes both presidents) and i let them know that i think that we basically fucked it all up and that we now need to go directly to ombudsman. We all agreed to this and everyone was keen to move on, except for me. I still wanted to talk about it, i guess looking back rather stupidly, and i was still going over what happened in the chat, to which my best friend (one of the presidents) told me that he considers the case over for us as it is up to the victims to go to ombudsman and that he now does not want to talk about it and he wants to rather use this group chat to talk about planning trips and playing DnD.
This made me incredibely angry and i told him, that this is basically the reason why rape and harassment victims are afraid to talk about their experiences, because it makes everyone uncomfortable and everyone tries to distance themselves from the situation as fast as possible.
To that he basically told me that i have to be drunk to write this and that he said that if we bring this up one more time he leaves the groupchat (which he did not btw, i triple-checked), which he proceeded to do. I thought that his reaction was rather dramatic so i just laughed and thought nothing much of it.
Fast forward a week or so and he doesn't hold eye contact with me, is incredibely cold to me and barely says hi to me. We went to pub together and i basically asked him if i can add him back to the groupchat and if we can put this past us, to which he said no and next day proceeded to greet me in the most hostile tone i ever heard.
In the meantime me and my girlfriend (studies the same field, is in the same friend group) were kicked out from our commom DnD group which we have with our friends and him (officially because we roleplay in a way the rest of the group doesn't like and because there is a tension between me and him) and all the other friends are distancing themselves from us.
Well, to make this shorter i am heartbroken and don't really understand what's happening. Me and my girlfriend spend the whole last evening crying together, because we never thought that a remark (which i still think is true) could ruin two years of the best friendships we ever had. We could be ourselves with these people, we went on trips together, played DnD, went to pub every few days, played theatre together and generally loved and cherished each other and it feels like i fucked it up by being too vocal about the issue of sexual harassment. You would guess that there is longer history of me making problems for our group, but there isn't a history that i'd be aware of. We got into a fight with that best friend once over a study topic, but we apologised to each other the next day and i though that this'll be the same. It's not and i feel like all is lost.
Anyway, we agreed to meet today with my (i guess former) best friend and discuss what's happening. I guess i should tell him that i'm sorry, but i honestly don't feel that i'm in the wrong.
I'd be happy to hear your takes on this situation.