So a little back story because of why this bothered me so much. I’m 35M. When I was young and inexperienced I slept with a coworker who had been actively pursuing me. She then tried to blackmail me into essentially letting her do whatever she wanted at work. When I said no she tried to get me fired claiming I assaulted her and forced her at threat of termination.

I got written up rather than fired because I had screenshots of all her texts trying to blackmail me and even a screenshot of her texts with a close friend (she didn’t know we were close friends) bragging how she was going to seduce me to get out of having o work.

She got “promoted” to the day shift cuz she “felt unsafe working with me” and I got written up for fraternization. It fucked me up and it has made false allegations a major hot button for me because if I hadn’t had the texts I could have been fired and thrown in jail. Instead she managed to get a shift that was only available to people with seniority.

Well fast forward to the last few days.

My best friend (we will call her Tiffany) of 16 years had a DV situation at her house. Cops showed up, dude left, Tiffany had a bruise on the side of her face/eye but refused to press charges.

So she calls me crying wanting to go out. I show up and we go to the bar.

She mentions she had taken Valium “earlier but couldn’t sleep”. I assumed it was just her normal everyday Valium as she has stress induced “seizures” whenever she gets super worked up and obviously she was pretty emotional so after her reassuring me that it was okay I agreed to a single drink.

1.5 lemon drops later she is slurring like she pounded a fifth. She even starts falling asleep at the bar. I close out and she demands another drink. I tell her no and she gets up to storm out of the bar.

I managed to catch the back of her jacked as she got out the door and nearly face planted. Her body was literally limp as i was holding her trying to get her feet under her and she continued to slur. I called 911 and she began arguing with me and demanding the people outside the bar help her up.

When she realized nobody would help she got pissed and managed to get up and run off (I was trying to answer 911s questions). I stopped her and got in front of her blocking her from running into the street to “just go home”.

She realizes I’m on the phone with 911 and starts screaming “help me! He’s assaulting me! Help! Help me he’s assaulting me! Stop assaulting me”

Cops show up. 3 dudes and a woman. One of the dudes (he was the stereotype asshole cop and was acting weirdly aggressive towards Tiffany) was looking at me like he was just going to shoot me and plant evidence after looking at her (remember the bruise from the prior nights DV?)

I thought I was fucked because a woman outside a bar, bruise on the side of her face, screaming through the phone that she’s being assaulted and then a man standing over her…talk about fucking flashbacks.

Luckily the female cop was actually on scene for the DV call the night before and knew I didn’t cause the bruise. She asked me what happened. I explained it all and then proceeded to explain it to several of the paramedics. They all seemed concerned enough as they were confused when I said “she’s had about a shot and a half” when they asked how much she had to drink.

To a person all the EMS agreed I did the right thing, but I was absolutely terrified for a brief moment that my life was over.

Tiffany?

She went to the hospital and when she got out I confronted her about what she did and her response was “well I was mad at you for not listening I just wanted to kill myself” (also to note, my ex wife said the SAME LINE when I told her I wanted her to apologize for all the times she physically attacked me…”well I was mad at you for not listening, you should have just listened”). I could tell she was still out of it when I got her home and tucked her in. She was yelling at her mom about something that was later explained to me as Tiffany trying to strangle herself with a phone charger after the whole DV fiasco Thursday.

This morning she called me and told me she was sorry. It sounded genuine but I am still struggling with all of it. Like sure maybe the risk isn’t as high as I felt it was when she was screaming while on the phone with 911 but with current social topics like the stripper admitting she lied about the lacrosse players raping her and all the lives she ruined with that lie…I can’t help but feel sick to my stomach.

The hitting really didn’t even phase me, I’m sure it will bother me more once I manage to work through everything going on in regards to what she said but I’m just struggling with it (and I’m already dealing with a lot of issues regarding my dads health and such so my mental health was fucked up before all of this went down)