Can I just make it clear that I absolutely don’t condone anyone forcing themself on anyone else.
Yeah, I think so, too. I don’t think I’d invite a random dude to my apartment, but also, obviously, the guy was an asshole. Inviting an asshole into your place doesn’t mean you have to have sex with him, but it’s just smart to avoid assholes because…they’re assholes.
I think if she had been so frightened of the guy that she ran into the bathroom with a cell phone and locked him out, she would have been dialing 911 within seconds. And the police would have been involved. Here, even if you hang up, or if the dispatcher calls you back and you say there is no problem, there are going to be cops knocking on your door unless there is some crisis elsewhere at the same time.
I don’t think she would have opened that door again until he was gone or the cops were there.
But maybe that’s just me.
Honestly, not necessarily. I know it seems illogical, but I know a lot of women who would not take a potentially dangerous situation to thermonuclear by involving the police. Many women - especially young women - perceive greater potential risk by involving the authorities. If they can just get out and get away by seemingly acquiescing, they will. I know I did. There was no way I was going to fight back against my super-asshole experience. The unknowns of his reaction - both that night and in the long term - seemed potentially much worse than what I felt I needed to do to keep him calm. I can absolutely see where Alice didn’t want to turn a bad situation she hadn’t anticipated into a months’ long ordeal.
I wouldn’t make the kind of decisions now that I made then. Alice is only bad news if she doesn’t learn and keeps making this kind of mistake.
BTW, it took me a couple of times to realize the male “I need to change my pants/I forgot something at my place/I want you to meet my roommate” was a ruse to get me into their homes. I consider myself fairly savy now, but if you’re not expecting people to take advantage of you/lie it can take a few experiences to wisen you up. I was never an object of male attention in my teens. Suddenly when I got to my 20’s I got all kinds of attention I didn’t know how to handle.
Something that just occurred to me was how sober she was when all this began. As I said in the OP, Alice is “allegedly” allergic to alcohol; I put that in parentheses because my stepdaughter’s says she has occasionally seen her drink as much as one beer in the course of an evening. If she truly does drink very very little (but uses the “allergic” line as an excuse not to drink more), she might have gotten drunk without realizing it. The very first time I got drunk (out of exactly three occasions in my life), I was 29 years old, and it happened by accident; as I grew up in a family of teetotalers and rarely drank in college, I simply did not realize that it was possible to get plastered from two Long Island iced teas. (I foolishly thought that a LIIT was mostly tea with a sprinkling of alcohol rather than 3 or 4 different kinds of hard liquor. As I wrote above she’s pretty small, and I can imagine someone without experience drinking taking a couple of sips and having her judgment compromised and not realizing what was going on.
I may have missed it but did you answer as to what the “vibe” was she was giving you? Nervous, drunk, fidgety? Is it possible this was a manifestation of her allergy? My limited Google research has found that there really isn’t an allergy to alcohol but to other ingredients in alcohol: histamines, sulfites, grains, etc. I’ve known people who are allergic to hops (poor bastards) and couldn’t drink beer, or if they did would get itchy.
We have a bar up here that serves cocktails infused with herbs and spices. A coworker of mine had one and promptly freaked out. Said later it was like drinking two of those 5 hour energy things on an empty stomach. Turns out he was allergic to one of the herbs.
Did Cinderella ever give you her side of what happened? Did Alice share any of the prior incidents with her?
The part of the story that bothers me is: Where’s Alice’s car?
If she was indeed sober, why couldn’t she and Cinderella have driven off to another bar or something together, after you got them out of the bar safely (as in, without the Douchebag following them). It sounds like the night was young.
I would never dream of leaving my car in a lot that was bound to empty out by 4am, not if I was sober. Plus the possibility of this Douchebag Dude vandalizing the car when he sees it still in the lot? No way. If I was drunk, I would have had someone (like you) at least move the car to a spot that would be less conspicuous once the lot was empty. Was Cinderella drunk? It doesn’t sound like she was at the bar very long, did she really have that much to drink? She could have driven, too, no?
That’s why this sounds like made-up story to me. It sounds more like the Douchebag Dude did the driving in his car, the stop at Alice’s place and all the other stuff maybe happening, maybe not, but ultimately leaving Alice stranded with Cinderella once she got the guy to drive to the bar.
Maybe she was nervous once you got her home because she was worried Cinderella would recognize her car in the lot at home, and it would become obvious that she was telling at least a partially tall tale.