Dude have you been in jaiL? Seriously.
What, me? No! Well, for one night after an anti-apartheid protest. . .
Get me some deep fried twinkies, bitch
While in Spain, keep in mind what you wrote above. If you give in to renewed rage after seeing her, she may soon be saying those same words about you.
There is no–and I repeat–NO good reason for you to be anywhere near the guy who did this.
No you’re not, no you’re not, no you’re not, and I hope your friend gets better soon and that the ex-friend rots as far as Spanish law allows for (which isn’t very far).
There was a bit on the news this morning, about a recent poll by INE: 15% of teenagers (the reporter didn’t differentiate by gender) think “gender violence” (hitting your woman, rape, etc.) is justified, 15% of boys believe girls find violent guys attractive, 2% of girls find violent guys attractive. The reporter thought that first “15%” was horrible, but I’m old enough to remember when that was the default mentality. We’re getting better, but changes so deep take time. So long as that kind of mentality
…exists, this kind of shit will happen. (and how did I manage to cut that sentence off, eh?)
Not only can it, but unless the fiscal is a moron in the 20th degree, it will. In Spain, electronic documents are exactly as valid as paper documents or personal testimony. Dude’s fried himself (metaphorically).
Rape trials are fast-tracked. The Spanish justice system has a huge backlog, but this is a kind of trials that gets done as fast as possible, and it isn’t even a case of “needing to find some guy whose description sounds like John Spaniard”, they have him. And the shrinks not only won’t try to lock her down, they even can’t (there’s literally no legal mechanism to do so, and no inpatient psychiatric care except for a very few hospital wards which get used mostly by people on suicide watch or with alimentary obsessions). Hopefully she’ll have good doctors.
So, hopefully this won’t cause pain to the OP by bringing up this thread again, but has the forum in question saved the evidence for use against the perpetrator? I hope so. It astonishes me that anybody could be so stupid on top of being so evil, but hopefully this will help convict him.
They are legally obliged to; also, according to JoseB’s report, they notified the authorities, notification which would have been instantly met with “please give us copies of it”.
There have already been several convictions based on posts in forums or youtube.
He described it on a forum? WTF. JoseB, while I don’t condone tit for tat violence it has been a source of comfort to me to imagine a punishment for rapists to be to have their legs severed at the knees. Your friend will know her fear of being alone, of going outside is irrational and not preventative of a further attack, this only makes it worse. There’s often a period of time when you just can’t get around by yourself - akin to my imagined punishment.
Thanks for being a good friend.
If you feel you have to mention your guilt over having introduced them, don’t do it more than once – she’ll know damn well it’s not really your fault, and it’s not about your issues anyway.
Don’t be afraid to give her a hug or take her hand or whatever if you’ve done that in the past; if she doesn’t want you to, you’ll probably be able to tell right away, and she may actually want the physical comfort. She’s not automatically wary of all men because this one betrayed her (she may or may not be).
Expect her to be very, very very easy to startle, and when she does, it’ll feel to her like she just missed a head-on collision with a tractor trailer by six inches. Do whatever you can to avoid sneaking up on her, even unintentionally. If you’re wearing quiet shoes or are on carpet, make some sort of “this is me” noise before entering a room she’s in or approaching her from behind or when she is distracted.
Finally – she might not want to talk about the attack itself. But she also might want to, and be finding everyone else wanting to shy away from it. If that does happen to be the case and you can find a way to let her open up about that, she’ll be grateful.
Oh, one more thing, about the revenge fantasies? Don’t share them with her, but let her share hers, if she wants. Odds are they’re rather more thorough than yours anyway, and differently focused. The bastard who raped me, I didn’t want him dead, I didn’t want him tortured, I didn’t want him to feel what I had felt, I wanted him erased. As in, his dead body put through a meat grinder, fed to rats, then the rats themselves incinerated and every molecule of ashes shot into the sun sort of “erased”. I wanted him never to have existed.
Sorry about that. But I hope you get my point. What you want to do to the guy may not be a help to her.
Thanks again to everybody for your comments, your advice and your support.
As I said, I am going to be meeting my friend on the 28th, in Madrid. I will let you all know how it went.
I understand that she is undergoing intense therapy as of now.
I hope that whatever therapy she’s getting now works; and that if it doesn’t, she has the strength and patience to keep looking for a therapist and therapy method that works for her. Bad enough to have to deal with just the physical repurcussions without having this asshole ruin her emotionally for the rest of her life.