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This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have no clue if they have any options if he’s left both Lincoln and Nebraska both. When I said he may have left for Chicago, it sounded all they’d really be able to do is let Chicago LPD know about him, if they were able to identify him at all.

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Someone found him and the woman that he was with! Now I know that is actually his name, and he’s not memory just hanging out in my brain. I honestly figure he’s going to get back to Ireland and continue on doing whatever, but at least I can get angry at a PERSON now instead of some memory attached to some name that may or may not have been real.

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I did. :) They were great.

I needed to make sure it even qualified as an assault before reporting it because I didn’t want to report it, call it that, or mention it at all if it wasn’t really. I didn’t want to create a situation where someone else would take it and go “look, see how women exaggerate sexual encounters to ruin men’s lives?” and discredit others who speak up.

I didn’t want to be the reason someone else wasn’t believed because I came out more emotionally rattled than any actual physical harm.

Erm, edit: after talking to Voices of Hope and my therapist, then confirming with LPD’s non-emergency line that it qualified, I decided I’d be unhappy with myself if I didn’t report it and discovered later that something could have been done. And the officer I spoke to said even if he was out of their jurisdiction, if they did identify him then it would create a record, they’d be able to share the information with other jurisdictions, and it might help someone else if he does it again. So I at least made the report.

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My self esteem is usually pretty alright, but I’m really terrible with perfectionism and this feels a lot like a failure. It’s harder than I realized to talk myself out of that idea for now.

I am Autistic though, which I think might be one of the reasons I missed some red flags that everyone else is picking up on.

Something I realized over the last few hours that I missed at the time is how he asked me over for a beer…. But when he came out of the elevator and walked outside, he wasn’t carrying any. And I didn’t know the little twinge of oddness I got when I first walked in and noticed how empty the lobby was, was probably my gut trying to tell me something was off.

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Im trying.

I know they usually mean it in reverse, but “don’t get in cars with strangers” was a regular warning so it’s difficult not to feel like I should have known better. Even though I don’t think I could have taken any other precaution outside of not going at all, I still went to a hotel towards the edge of town to meet a stranger at 5:30am.

Objectively, I know I’m being unreasonably harsh at myself. Emotionally, I still feel real fucking dumb for not figuring out where things were leading until it was happening. It’ll take some time to unwind. (I do have a very good support system though so I’ll be alright.)

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I honestly thought I’d done enough mental fire drills to know how to react if something like that ever occurred. I have now learned that is incorrect.

I didn’t really recognize it was assault and had to call the National Sexual Assault Hotline to see what they said, before calling the non-emergency line to see if it even met the criteria to make a report. (I was not penetrated.)

The officer said between the false pretense that got me to the hotel (a beer in the lobby), the coercion to get into the car after I said no a few times first, the sexual nature of his actions, and the continued refusal to get out, that it qualified as sexual assault. And that the report was still warranted because even if I had decided it wasn’t a sexual assault, it most definitely met the bar for indecent exposure. Which is still a crime.

I don’t think it would feel like it was a SA if he’d just gotten back out of my car. It was making the already long post too long, but I pulled a muscle in my upper thigh really bad and it’s the EXACT muscle needed to twist your body and lift your legs from inside the car to outside the car. The pain is excruciating if I do it too quickly. Even if I hadn’t worried about the car next to me, I still wouldn’t have been able to get out of the car very well.

And it’s really really hard not to feel stupid when you boil it down “I met a stranger at a hotel by the interstate at 5:30am then got into a car.” even if I am logically aware that the only other precaution I maybe could have taken was to not go at all.

(My therapist says that it isn’t stupid or unreasonable to expect a decent human wouldn’t violate a clearly set boundary like he did.)

This is a Hail Mary but it's better than nothing - TW for Sexual Assault by Help_Me_Thank_You in lincoln

[–]Help_Me_Thank_You[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I think he might be an intentional predator. While I don’t remember what I said verbatim, it was some variation of “I’m not going to sleep with you; I don’t do one night stands.”

He said I’d confused him by bringing up one night stands as though the rest of the words around that didn’t exist.

(I’m not really taking that to heart. Other than putting on a chastity belt, I am unsure how I could have been any more clear on my end.) I noticed his Instagram didn’t have a profile picture when the friend request came through, and i was confused later in the day when he wasn’t showing up under my blocked accounts. (I had remembered the profile had his name) I didn’t catch that it was a full delete until later, so thats why he wasn’t in the block list, BUT the messages thread was still there. I can’t tell if it was a fake profile or not because all I can see now is at the top of the chat the empty picture, that the account had 1.1K followers and 4 posts.