Some dude ruined my life with a fake SA allogation
A guy I’d never met spread a lie about me when I was 15 and destroyed my life. I’ve never told anyone. It’s been a year today.
I go to school in an extremely rural small town (A), 15 miles from my house. The town (A) my school is in is 15 miles from the next town (B). So the town (B) this story takes place in is 30 miles from me.
Around 10 people in each grade from Town B go to my school in Town A. There is another school about 10 miles outside Town B where most people from there go to.
All of my friends at the time were from Town B but went to school in Town A.
I was always a bit of an outsider in Town A, but I had a solid group in Town B and used to make the trip regularly.
So here is the story:
I’m going to call this guy Jack. He was 17, almost 18, a junior at Town B’s school. I was 15, almost 16, a freshman at Town A’s school. There was also a girl from Town B’s school, I’ll call her Sarah, who was 16, almost 17, and a sophomore.
The first time I ever saw Jack was on a night out in Town B with my friends. I saw Sarah that night and tried talking to her. She shut me down after a while, so I left it at that. No drama or anything.
Apparently Jack saw this and decided he didn’t like it. Me, an outsider, talking to a girl from his town.
Two weekends later I was back there with my friends in the outdoor seating area at the back of the same bar in Town B. Jack’s group was sitting there too under another canopy.
One of my friends decided it was a good idea to chug three beers in a row and started to throw up on the floor. When I got up to go to the restroom with him to make sure he was okay, Jack came up to me and cut me off before I got to the door back inside the bar.
In front of everyone, he said out loud that he heard I said I was going to rape Sarah.
I pushed back immediately and said that was absolutely not true. He wouldn’t listen and just kept saying someone had shown him a video of me saying it two weeks earlier after she shut me down, but for whatever reason he couldn’t show it to anyone. He insisted he had seen it and that it was definitely me in the video.
I told him to leave me alone and that it wasn’t true. I decided it probably wasn’t safe to go to the restroom anymore, so I sat back down.
I could feel the tension building between our group and theirs, which was about three times the size of ours.
One of my friends slipped out the side exit and ran away. Another told me I was overreacting and nothing was going to happen. One was blacking out and had no idea what was going on, and the other was in the restroom throwing up.
Around two minutes later, I started to leave through the back entrance, which doesn’t go back inside the bar.
Jack went over to his group of nearly fully grown men and started telling them something, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying since I was about 50 feet away and it was very noisy.
Before I could reach the gate to exit onto the street, about 10 seniors from School B got up and came sprinting at me, shouting that they were going to beat the shit out of me. Meanwhile, Jack was there laughing his head off.
I was absolutely petrified. I ran faster than I ever had in my life, probably a mile and a half, and hid behind a Walmart. I stayed there until I felt safe, then made my way back and got the bus to Town A.
My parents picked me up and drove me home, completely unaware of what had just happened to me. I have never felt that powerless in my life. I genuinely thought something terrible was going to happen to me.
After that, a lot of my friends stopped wanting to be seen with me. They said I made them look bad and slowly started distancing themselves.
The following week, Jack heard a rumor that I was going to go to his house and shoot him. He messaged me on Instagram with a half-hearted apology, saying he thought he had seen a video and maybe it was someone who looked like me. When I asked to see the video, he said he had lost it.
I didn’t want any more trouble or for the story to spread into my school, so I told him it was fine and that it must have been a mistake.
When I asked him who sent the video, he said he wasn’t going to rat his friend out.
Looking back, that doesn’t make sense. If it were true, the person who sent it would have backed him up that night instead of him being on his own.
I also messaged Sarah to clear things up and make sure she knew it wasn’t true. She told me not to worry and said she knew Jack had made it up.
About a month later, I found out from someone who used to be friends with him that Jack had made the whole thing up on purpose for entertainment. He knew it was false and just wanted to see me get jumped for coming into his town and trying to talk to girls. Despite that, people forgave him almost immediately.
At the start of summer break, I went back to Town B one more time with what was left of my friend group. At the end of the night, we ended up outside the same bar.
It was just me, him, and a group of girls, including Sarah and her friends. I confronted him about it, but he still insisted he had seen a video. Then he started laughing in my face and said I wouldn’t do anything to him. He said that if I brought it up again, he would beat me up himself. The girls laughed at me too. After that, my friends completely ghosted me.
In January, after my school’s musical, my dad was picking me up in a Target parking lot at night in Town A. I saw Jack walking across the lot with his girlfriend, who is from my town. They walked right past me and didn’t recognize me.
By then I had grown a few inches and put on about 20 pounds of muscle. I probably could have taken him if I wanted to. But I didn’t do anything. It was freezing, I was only wearing a T-shirt, and my dad was pulling in right behind me. If anything happened, he would have seen everything and found out the whole story.
I’ve never told my parents because of the nature of the rumor and because I didn’t want to add more stress to their lives. I turn 17 in August and he turns 19 in July. It has been a year today. He is doing completely fine. Everyone likes him.
I have nothing. No friends. People have mostly forgotten about it, but it still weighs on me every day. I don’t know what to do about it. I was disrespected in a way I can’t even put into words.
I don’t hold any resentment toward the seniors who came after me that night, or toward Sarah. They were told something serious and reacted to it. I get that. But I do hate Jack. I don’t know what to do with that, especially seeing him doing well and moving on like nothing ever happened. He’s studying for the SATs now, getting on with his life, and it feels like he won.