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In case you care.

About ten years ago, when I was young(er) and stupid(er), I became involved with a man who...was not a good man. There's loads of other things I'd like to call him, but I think that would get me kicked out of the guild.

Long story short, the relationship turned very abusive (and I'm not talking like he hit me a couple times kind of abusive, I'm talking like he stapled me to a wall with a staple gun and raped me kind of abusive, and did equally heinous things quite frequently).

After not seeing or hearing from him at all for close to eight years, I've now run into him twice within a week or so, once near my work, and once near my home. I have trouble viewing these instances as mere coincidence, and I'm not worried that he knows both where I work and where I live.

Up until now, I've been relatively okay and thought that I'd put that part of my past behind me, but now...I'm quite frightened. I'm relatively confident that he won't hurt me, certainly not in a public place (and I'd sooner die than go some place private with him), but this is just not a person I want in my life at all. Period. I don't want to see him when I go to get a cup of coffee near my work, I don't want to see him when I go to the shop around the corner from my flat to buy a pack of cigarettes...if I never saw him again, it would be too soon.

This isn't the first time he's tried to weasel his way back into my life, and I don't think I have it in me to fight off his advances yet again.

I can't really press charges against him for what he did to me when we were together. It's been too long since it happened. I don't know that I would even have the grounds for something like a restraining order since nothing he's done recently has been explicitly threatening.

I just want him to go away and leave me alone. And I've verbally made that very clear, but let's just say that he's never been a good listener.

Pray that I don't end up hacked into little tiny pieces in a creepy abandoned warehouse?

Thanks.

Personally, I think this guy is a control freak that wants to desperately be in a relationship, no matter who with, and take control in the most abusive way. I am sorry to hear what has happened to you. I understand what your going through, for I've had those incidents where somebody may coincidentally be at the same spots I'm at. Just remember that I'm here and any of your friends on here are here for you. I'll be praying for you to be safe and I hope the guy gets what is coming to him. Just stay positive and ignore him. If he makes a move, just defend yourself. It'll shock him that you can defend yourself. Weak spots on men are the throat, the groin, the eyes, and the stomach. Go for each of these and he'll be on the ground guranteed.

I carry a (legal) knife on me almost everywhere, except in places where weapons are forbidden (at the two places I volunteer, nobody is allowed to bring a weapon in the buildings), but even in those places I'm permitted to leave it in the managers' respective offices while I'm doing my work there, and I can reclaim it when I leave, so I still have it while travelling to and from those places. And I know how to use a knife to defend myself.

I'm not really afraid of him hurting me so much as I just want absolutely nothing to do with him and he's creeping me out. It's been nearly a decade since we've even spoken, and the last time we did speak, I beat the living crap out of him and told him I'd kill him if I ever saw him again.

It's been eight years. I'm married (to someone I knew BEFORE him), and I've moved on. He's complete poison and I don't want him to crap all over the happy, stable life I've somehow, by the grace of God, managed to piece together.

And maybe I'm just being paranoid and it really is coincidence. I hope so.

I'm so sorry for what has happened to you. I pray for you. And, I also pray for your safety. I know that God will give you the strength to forgive and move on but it may take awhile. And Jesus said that He will heal your wounds. I know that He will. Sweet Jesus is good. This may be a test from God in a way. I know God will protect you.

I'm in Texas lol, people look at you funny if you say you don't have a gun.
I have a shotgun and various pellet guns. Why is the UK so strict about guns anyway? How do you go hunting? o,o

Thanks for the support, everyone. It really does mean a lot to me.

Europe just doesn't have the same sort of gun culture that the US has. Here in the UK, our police officers don't even carry guns. I think it is technically possible for civilians to own a limited guns if they're considered "collection pieces" or something like that, but basically unless you're in active service in the military or are a collector of antique firearms, it's pretty much impossible to acquire a gun legally. I'm sure that if you know the right shady people you could get one off the black market, but the sorts of shady people I know sell drugs, not firearms. And I wouldn't want to get a gun illegally anyway. I've managed to keep my legal record clean up until now, knock on wood, and I'd like to keep it that way. It would be a real slap in the face to run into legal problems only after I've cleaned up my acts considerably with the drugs and whatnot.

Both my partner and my boyfriend know about my history with this man. I was involved with him during the two-year hiatus in my relationship with my partner, because I moved from France to the UK to study music (and freeing myself from the oppressive expectations of my family was an added bonus). My partner, who is English but was living in France when we met, ended up getting a very good job offer in the city where I was studying about two years after I left, so we got back together at that point. The only real relationship I was in during the two-year period Henry (my partner) and I were separated was with He Who Shall Not be Named (well, okay, his name is William).

For people who haven't been in abusive relationships, what a lot of people don't understand is that such relationships rarely start out badly. Mephistopheles Will is very good-looking (seriously, he's just about the spitting image of Kurt Cobain, he's not just normal-person good-looking, he looks like he belongs on the cover of GQ kind of good-looking) and he can be extremely charming. He's also very wealthy. Not because he's smart and successful, but because his parents are smart and successful, bought him a ridiculously lavish house, and pay his credit card bills. The man is in his mid-to-late-30's and is still financially dependent on his parents. But he has looks, charm, and money, so he's used to getting what he wants.

When we first met, his band (yes, he's in a band, or at least he was...I'm so embarrassed how cliche this whole story is) had just finished playing a set at a club I was at. He bought me a drink, we got to talking, and he asked me out for dinner the following week. At first, it was all expensive dates and gifts and coke parties with his band mates. He treated me well. He made me feel special. But more and more, he started getting demanding and possessive. He didn't like me spending time with my friends, he accused me of cheating on him (which I never did, although I found out after the fact that he had been cheating on me near-constantly since we first got together), and he started to use my promiscuous past against me. He'd frequently tell me that I was a "used out whore and nobody else would ever love me." Whenever I didn't want to have sex with him, he would guilt-trip me into it, saying things like, "Oh, so you'll drop your trousers for some bloke you met less than an hour ago, but when your boyfriend wants to be intimate with you, suddenly you're a prude." Then he'd start using all the "nice things" he'd done for me or bought for me as leverage to get me into bed with him. And I'll be honest, guilt-trips work on me. I think it's a Catholic think. (Thank God I'm not Jewish, I can only imagine the things I could be guilt-tripped into doing if I'd been raised Jewish.)

And things got nastier from there. At some point he just gave up all pretence of treating me like a human being. He told me that I was his whore, bought and paid for, that he owned me. It became quite clear that he'd never wanted a boyfriend or a romantic partner. He wanted a slave. When his guilt-trips stopped working to get me into bed with him, he'd just rape me. And after a while, I just stopped fighting back. He was stronger than me, it was just a losing battle.

I finally got up the courage to leave him. Sometime after that he contacted me and wanted to help him with songwriting for his band. This was after Henry and I were back together, and for some retarded reason I agreed to help him and his band with their music. But he kept making romantic and/or sexual advances on me, even though I made it clear again and again that I would never be with him again, ever. At one point, a mutual friend told me that when Will and I were together, he frequently drugged me and basically whored me out to his friends. At the time this was happening, I attributed the black-outs to the heavy drinking and drug use I was doing at the time, but that piece of information was the last straw for me. I drove to his house, and when he opened the door I pushed him inside and locked the door behind me. I told him what I'd learned and asked him if he denied it. He didn't, and started crying, and I proceeded to beat the crap out of him. When he was bruised and bleeding on the floor, I got down at eye-level with him and told him that if he ever contacted me or came near me again, I'd kill him. Then I spat in his face and left.

I actually really didn't feel good about what I'd done to him. I'm a very non-violent person, and just the fact that I was capable of getting angry enough to lose control like that scared me. And obviously I'm not going to kill him, but when I said it, I really did mean it.

So that's the back story, and that's why I do not want this man anywhere near me or anyone I care about. I think I will go to the police, but part of the problem is that male victims of abuse are generally not taken all that seriously by authorities (unless they're young boys). Because, you know, men (especially gay men) can't be raped because we want sex all the time with absolutely every male on the face of the planet. rolleyes But I think it's worth at least talking to someone in law enforcement and seeing what, if anything, can be done. I'm not terribly hopeful, but I don't really have anything to lose.

And as I said, I'm not even terribly worried that he will hurt me. He's definitely screwed up, but he's not the snatch-you-and-rape-you-in-an-alley type. He basically just sees me as "the one that got away," and thinks that I'm just "over-reacting" to the way he treated me. In his eyes, he really hasn't done anything wrong besides maybe "getting a little too rough a couple times." In other words, he's completely delusional. I've long-since missed my window of opportunity to press charges for what he did to me, and frankly, even if I had, the fact that I'm a gay man with a colourful sexual history, combined with the fact that his family is crazy rich and would be able to hire a whole flock of top-notch solicitors to defend him, so it would have just been a waste of time, regardless of how strong my case may have been.

But once again, thank you all for the prayers and words of encouragement. It really does mean a lot to me. I'll be okay I hope I never see him again, but if I do, I think I'll just make a loud, obnoxious scene, which will hopefully make him think twice about trying to track me down again.

praying for you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!