I think my coworker (37f) believes I’ve (26f) had a fictional ‘relationship’ with him, I’m not sure how to approach this?
I’ll try not to ramble, but I’m very confused about this situation and have no clue where to turn to.
My coworker , who I’ll call L, has autism and has always been quite touchy feely, saying inappropriate things, and not fully reading the room. I don’t work directly with him, but he’s a mutual friend who I’ve seen outside work in group settings.
In the past year he’s:
Spammed my phone trying to talk to me, despite no answer. When I finally did answer it was to say that it had made me uncomfortable and I’d like him to stop (I had to do this multiple times)
Repeatedly tried to meet up (I’ve always said no or ignored)
Touched and rubbed my thigh despite me moving his hand and/or asking him to stop. He also always asks for hugs despite me saying I’m not a very touchy person.
I put all of this down to the autism, and assumed the behaviour was entirely innocent, but made an effort to swap seats so I wouldn’t be next to him, and not meet up with him when there wasn’t a group.
Finally, the reason I’m posting…
I was alone with him, while a bit drunk, and he groped me. The next week I bought it up to mutual friends, mainly just to see if he’d done it before and if I was over reacting. Obviously everyone was shocked, and after a bit I decided to reach out and get an apology and an assurance that it wouldn’t happen again.
He suddenly acted as if this was something I wanted, and made it clear this isn’t an accident. I didn’t respond, and asked someone else to have a word with him.
I’m unsure what went down in that conversation, but the next day apparently right after the chat, he called a different friend and either told or implied that we’d had some kind of thing with each other, for months!
Examples he gave her, half were completely fabricated, the other half were really odd (such as me making eye contact with him? Then not making eye contact).
I got a message from him, a loooong message saying I was his favourite person but he can no longer be around me one on one (we’ve only ever been one on one once since we met a year ago, and that was when he groped me), implying that I was asking for it?
Apparently the way he talked about it, was as if he believes it, and I think he does. Obviously I can disprove everything, others can confirm I’ve asked to swap seats with him, and I have multiple messages from me asking him to leave me alone/not touch me/stop contacting me.
I have no clue what to do? As you can imagine hearing this just confused the fuck out of me
I’m stuck between wanting to text back saying that we’ve never had a relationship or fling or something, ignore, block, escalate this to more people, or what??