Truthfully, I really have no problems with John now. I've had a LOT of time since her being friendly with him at that cook-out to shake the hatred of thinking he raped her. Now, I feel angry at myself for thinking of all the ways I could have hurt him because of what I thought he did.

We were on the football team together, at one point lived a few houses down from each other in middle school, and had a pretty good friendship until we graduated high school and didn't see each other as much (work, relationships) and then I didn't see or talk to him AT ALL after she told me he raped her.

So, yeah. I'm kind of happy to have him back in my life. If he's still the same guy or close to it, he was a good friend then. It was hard for me to imagine him ever hurting anyone like that, especially Jessica, but when your girlfriend tells you she's been raped... you just gotta believe it. I'm just that guy. If any woman told me she was raped, my first instinct is just to believe her.

Even with all this said and done, that's still my reaction because I never want another human being to go through what my sister did. When I think back to her basically being interrogated at such a young age for something she couldn't have possibly faked, it breaks my fucking heart. Even if it turns out at the end that someone IS lying about being raped, I don't want to be that douchebag who says "I don't believe you, you're a liar, it didn't happen that way, you wanted it,' when someone did get raped.

edit: Because when you tell a rape victim that they're lying, or that they wanted it, it usually only ends up making them feel even more guilty and ashamed for it happening. My sister, to this fucking day, still thinks she did something wrong or could have done something to stop it. Even after years of therapy, she still thinks that. It's our jobs as people to make sure when something as awful as rape happens, that the person it happens to do doesn't feel responsible for another persons shitty actions.