Reddit Stories - BETRAYAL Unveiled_ Woman Ends 5-Year Bond After UNCOVERING STARTLING Truth_

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #betrayal #truth #relationships #drama #unveiled  Summary: A woman ends a 5-year bond after uncovering a startling truth, leading to betrayal and emotional turmoil.  Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, betrayal, truth, relationships, drama, unveiled, emotional turmoil, shocking revelation, heartbreak, secrets revealed, trust shattered, relationship advice, personal stories, confronting betrayal, moving on, relationship endingsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.

I hope you enjoy this story. Female Sever's ties with close companion for half a decade, believing he betrayed her, until her former partner admits to orchestrating the deception and falsely accusing the blameless confidant. A span of five years. A go, when I was 23, I had been working with a company that handled hospitality training and stuff like that. What we did really wasn't important, but at that point I had been with the company for about three years already. Mark had gotten hired around the same time as I had and we did a lot of training and stuff together, got put in the same call center group, and all around just became extremely close friends

that hung out after work since we lived close to each other and were both unattached. To point out how close we had gotten, since we were both single, folks in the company and our department always made jokes that we needed to just say screw the company policies and start dating. We always laughed it off because at the end of the day we both had made it abundantly clear to each other that we only saw each other as friends. For what it's worth, I don't remember how the conversation came up, but it had and it was just a strictly platonic relationship. So yeah, we were basically attached at the hip for about two and a half years when I met Paul,

at the time 29M and currently 34M, and began dating him. Paul and Mark got along somewhat fine at first, but a few months into dating Paul started to get upset if I said I was going to grab dinner with Mark after work, even if Paul was working at the time since he had his own long hours. For what it was worth, Mark seemed to understand where Paul was coming from and only grabbed dinner with me when I asked him, never prompting it himself. Well, on my 24th birthday I decided to throw a party at my apartment and when Paul flaked on helping me get supplies, Mark stepped in and helped, even going out and buying the lion's share of the booze for the party. The party got going and Paul ended up showing up an hour after most of the

others were there. After a few hours, most of the people started heading out leaving a few people sleeping in the living room because they were too drunk to drive and then Mark, Paul, and myself. Mark insisted I go lay down since it was my birthday and he knew I was already pretty drunk myself so it wasn't right for me to clean up after my own party. So I said good night to everyone and Paul helped me back to the room. Like I said, I was pretty drunk and while I remember the night I also remember being very off my normal composure, he put me in bed on my side facing the wall and then left and I pretty quickly dozed off. The next thing I remember is loud music blaring in the room and feeling completely bound. I was still inebriated but as I tried to move around I could feel

I was tied to the bed and could feel someone on top of me. I was laying on my stomach and there was a hand on the back of my head pushing it into the pillow so I couldn't see anything and I could feel someone stumbling to try and pull my pajamas down and shoving his hand up against him. me. Someone was pounding at the door until I heard a loud crack and then Mark and Paul's voices arguing. The pressure pulled off my head and I could see the one of them pulling the other away but in the darkness I couldn't tell who was doing what but there was a lot of screaming and crashing. A few minutes later Paul comes back in the room and unties me from the bed and just holds me, telling me Mark had been trying to rope me. I wanted to file a police report but Paul

convinced me not to since he had gotten there in time and nothing had happened which I should have taken as a red flag, but I just didn't at the time because I was so relieved that I had been saved. I took a few days off from work, blocked Mark on all social media, but not before he texted me trying to tell me that Paul had been the one to attack me and that he was the one that saved me. I didn't believe him because it had been Paul that came in and untied me, though, and if Paul had been trying then, why would he do that? Plus we were dating and it just didn't make any sense to me, so I thought Mark had just snapped or something. I ended up quitting from the company before my time off ended because I had been starting to look at advancement in my career

and moving on so I just decided that was my sign and tried to run away from it all. Paul and I kept dating for about six months after that until I caught him cheating on me with a lady from his office. Maybe this should have been a bigger red flag to me too, but I had been trying to distance myself from what had happened. Then life just went on. I got comfortable in my new job, stayed away from getting too friendly with anyone from work and have never had a close guy friend again. Occasionally I'd see Mark at the grocery store or around town. Like I said we had lived close to each other and neither of us moved and I never felt the need to since he kept his distance from me completely and I thought I was mostly over what had

happened half a decade ago until I get a notification a few hours ago that Paul had messaged me. I thought that was odd because I had blocked him, he made a new account, but I opened the message up anyway because of curiosity. I don't want to share the whole message because there's a lot of personal details in it so I'm going to just hit the important important details. So according to him, one, all is an alcoholic and has been for years. Even back when we first started dating he pretty much was always drinking something or looking for an excuse. Two, he got fired from his job for showing up to work drunk and assaulting the receptionist by trying to force his tongue down her throat in the front lobby. At 9 a.m., he was in court

mandated AA and as part of his recovery he was trying to make amends with anyone he is wrong because of his habit. And finally. Three, Mark never tried to rope me. It was him. He had been jealous of my friendship with Mark and saw an opportunity to get him out of the picture because of how gullible I was. His words. I'm not going to lie, I threw up after reading the whole thing. He had so much detail behind all of it that I just felt sick to my stomach that he not only remembered everything. From how he had secretly put ties on my bed before I even went to sleep once he saw how drunk I was getting to how he beat the shit out of Mark and threatened to kill him if he went to the cops. I know it's not a healthy reaction, but I've been drinking a bit since all of that message

hit my inbox trying to decide what to do. I know I need to call my therapist to talk about all of this, but my mind keeps going back to Mark and how betrayed he must have felt over it all. I even unblocked him on all my social media. He never blocked me so his profile. popped back up pretty quickly, and I've been trying to decide if I should message him or not. I know logically that Paul should be the one messaging him as a part of his AA stuff, but I'm also pretty sure that Mark did block him since Paul mentioned not being able to find him on social media. But he also might not have remembered Mark's last name either, so it might be hard to find him? So I guess my question is, should I message Mark? What would I even say?

Sorry I didn't believe you when you said you didn't try to rope me? mini update A close friend of mine answered her phone and is swinging by to spend the night with me here just so I have a shoulder to cry on because I could just use a good cry right now. I'm going to leave Mark alone for now while I get my thoughts in order, but I'll probably send him a message in a few days once I can talk to my therapist. I did put the wine away, it's not helpful right now and I don't want to make the wrong decision and message Mark strictly on a somewhat drunk impulse.

Some selected comments from OOP. commenter, yes, you should message him because that has to be an open wound for him that never healed. If he came in to try to stop Paul and ended up the bad guy when he was actually the good guy is a punch to the gut, and never being believed about it is a constant pain that never really goes away. Good luck. That Paul guy, glad he isn't part of your life anymore. Wow. Op this is exactly why my mind has been going to mark, because I feel so incredibly guilty. I've been sort of, I guess cyber-stalking him a bit here and it seems like he's had an okay life, but I just feel like I owe him some sort of message now.

Commenter, all I'll say is that you shouldn't be surprised if Mark wants nothing to do with you after you tarnished his name and kind of his soul in a way. I'll bet that because of this there's more than a couple people that think of him as Mark the Ropist, not just Mark. I hope you learned that you shouldn't believe the first story you're told when someone else's life is in the crosshairs of your poorly informed decisions. Y'all can get mad at that if you want, but this isn't a time to coddle anybody's feelings to avoid speaking an uncomfortable truth. There can be two sides of an argument without anybody needing

to go call their therapist because they got triggered over an ounce of opposition. I'm sorry any of this happened to you at all. That should have never happened. But what happened to him is even worse and at the end of the day you are the villain of his story. Op, while I completely understand that might be Mark's reaction and it is totally understandable if it is, I want to make it clear that I did never go around calling him that or outright telling anyone even though my first instinct was to file a police report. All had stopped me when I had brought it up and in hindsight it's probably because the investigation might have revealed it was him but I never told the company I was quitting because of Mark or

anything like that and only a handful of my close friends and my therapist even know of the assault. While that doesn't stop gossip, which may be what you're referring to, I didn't actively go out on the street's screaming Mark was a ropist. I'm also not saying I expect to even want to be close friends with him again and maybe now this is just my own selfish guilt that is telling me I need to tell him. But as other commenters have mentioned and I am taking the advice of, it's better for me to process this new information and talk to my therapist first. Update. I went to bed last night after putting the wine away when my friend got here and woke up to so many comments and PMs that I can't quite get back to everyone without being repetitive so I want to just answer a few common things I've been messaged

seen. One, in a comment I mentioned I have told a handful of friends. To be specific, I told three plus my therapist. I didn't have a whole lot of close friends back then and wasn't a part of a big friend group either. That said, one of those three were here with me last night after I got a hold of her and she's every bit as disgusted as pretty much everyone else. I can't say for sure if any of them told anyone and honestly given the passing of time I wouldn't expect them to have the same crystal clear image of who they might have told. But I do understand this might have spread without me knowing. Two, I am looking into statute of limitations and reporting in my state here. From everything I have read over coffee this morning, I believe it hasn't passed

and as several have mentioned he literally gave me a written confession. Three, as for how I didn't realize Paul was an alcoholic? Well, I don't have a good answer for that. I'm going mostly based on his message that told me he was always drinking even back then. We weren't living together and as I mentioned there were plenty of days that I didn't see him versus when I did and I don't even know now if he was even working late all the times he told me he was. I have texted my therapist and am waiting for a reply now. I'm hopeful she is sometime this afternoon or tomorrow that I can speak with her but my friend is staying with me until I can speak with her just so that I don't have to be alone right now and I can't say just how much I appreciate it. To those of you that have provided

or shared your stories with me. Thank you. Deeply from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Last night when I received that message I was thrown for such a loop that I didn't know where to begin or how to unpack it all given the time that had passed. Old wounds can be reopened so easily and this one was a scar that didn't need much to make it pop. Update 2, March 22nd, 2022. First off, I want to thank everyone who messaged me to check up on me or to share their own stories with me.

I truly appreciate each and every one of you. I would like to start this off by first saying I haven't gone back to the wine, though I did super desperately want to yesterday. I haven't really been much of a drinker since that night five years ago and last week when I learned the disgusting truth about Paul. To those of you hoping I would file a police report, I did. I spoke with my therapist at length the Monday following my post and she was shocked but extremely helpful in helping me process everything.

and she spent some time last what should have been the end of our video appointment looking up the statute of limitation laws in my state, there are none for SEG's crimes, and while she warned me that my report might just be added to a pile of other charges Paul could possibly have against him given that he was assigned court-mandated AA. All the same, I filed the report with screenshots of his messages to me printed and attached. I'm not sure what to expect from that and at the end of the day I hope he has an absolute shit life if it goes nowhere. Now, as for Mark, my therapist was insistent that I at the very least write him something, whether it be a letter to mail him or a message on Facebook.

He never reached out to me after I unblocked him but given what he thought I thought of him I think it's understandable. She, like many of you, pointed out that while he knew he was innocent, the thought of someone believing him capable of something monstrous like that could have weighed on him for all this time and even if his reception of my message wasn't ideal, he deserved at least the that this new turn of events could provide. I took a few days writing and rewriting a message in notepad, I didn't want to accidentally hit send before I had the wording right, and each time I sat down to write it I felt like I came up short even though the message just got longer and longer.

Again I didn't think just saying, oh guess what I learned Paul is an absolute psychopath last week, surprise. Would have been super appropriate either, but I wanted to find the right balance. Here's the message I ended up sending him. Hi Mark, so this is a bit out of the blue and I really don't know how to start this so I'm just going to put it out there. I'm sorry for not listening to you. Paul messaged me last week and revealed everything and I'm just sorry. This isn't easy to write and you deserve so much more than just an apology so long after the fact. There's no excuse for me not giving you the benefit of the doubt other than I let myself be stupidly gaslight by a psychopathic maniac. Screenshot of his

confession to me. This is the message he sent me. It even confesses to an assault on you in the event that you'd like to press charges against him as I have already filed a police report for what he did to me. If you would like to talk about any of this at all, my inbox is open. If you want to tell me to F off. Well, I guess I understand that too. I'm not sure what I expect really because this has ripped open a wound I had been trying to heal and I'm sure this might cause you some distress, but I felt you at the very least deserve to know. I know I probably could have said more, but any time I kept trying to write, I felt like it was just me making excuses. I sent that to him this past Friday, and I'm pretty sure he read it sometime between Friday and Saturday as the read

notification had been there when I checked Facebook again at lunch on Saturday. I had been out with my friend Jenny who had stayed over with me after I learned the truth, and when I told her I had messaged Mark she wondered if he had responded, so I checked. Last night at about 6 p.m. my phone dinged and while I thought it might have been a text from Jenny or maybe my mom, I don't really text or talk to a lot of people, I actually found that Mark had sent me a reply. I wish you would have listened to me back then, but I'm glad you know the truth. I thought that was all he was going to send me when the three dots kept going across the bottom of my screen. He was still typing when he sent me pictures as well. They were graphic in Paul's

assertion that he had beat the shit out of Mark did in fact also come with documented proof from him in the form of pictures. Mark went on to explain that he filed an assault report the next day after my birthday, but that the police had warned him against accusing Paul of sexually assaulting me given the turn of events and my don't speak to me again text I sent him when he tried to explain himself. Nothing had ever come of his police report and he wasn't even sure why, neither am I, but he intended to follow up once more today. Mark is still very much the kind person I remember him being, and while I was bracing for him to hold a grudge against me, he instead just expressed his happiness that I finally knew the truth. We exchanged small talk through chat for a little while,

but it was nowhere near the conversations we used to have. Mark is actually engaged to a girl he has been dating for about two years now. He had apparently never brought any of this up to her until she saw my name flash in his screen with the notification and asked who I was. While some of you expressed concern that my friends had smeared his name, he apparently never heard anything of it. He actually still works for the same company we had both been at just now in a copywriting role for the marketing team, so at the very least the lack of a police report from me or making a scene at work worked out in his favor there. I asked if we could keep in touch, even if only with small talk and he said that he thought

that would be okay, though he was a lot busier than he was back then between work and planning his wedding. While I thought that was going to be the end of it, he messaged me a few hours ago to let me know he refiled his police report with the added messages I had sent him and that if I'd be open to it, he'd like to meet for coffee with his fiancé in tow and a friend of mine if I felt more comfortable doing it that way. Not really sure if that's an entirely good idea, but I shot Jenny a text to see what she thinks and if she'd be open to coming with. She said it's ultimately up to me what I decide to do and she'd be with me either way. So yeah, that's the update for those of you

who have reached out and asked. Ops comment. Hi everyone. Someone brought it to my attention that my posts had been compiled over here, so I wanted to pop in and thank everyone that has reached out to me. Mark and I are planning to meet for coffee here this weekend with some added supervision. I think his fiancé is curious of my intentions, which is fair. I have both apologized to him at this point, but also, as many of you pointed out, he deserved a giant thank you too. I know some of you are telling me to leave him alone, but he was the one to suggest the meeting and in all fairness I owe him at least a coffee, and much more truthfully.

Words cannot stress how forgiving he has been over what has transpired and though I'm trying not to blame myself for believing the psychopath, it's not as easy as just letting it go. I knew making my post some would blame me, that's just Reddit, but being able to put this out there has allowed me a sense of relief in some ways that just talking with my therapist didn't fully accomplish. Police reports have been filed against Paul and I do hope something comes from it. I know he's an AA and some have messaged me saying I'm a

monster for airing this out when he's trying to better himself. Seriously, I got at least five DMs to that tune, but F-that. The shit he did to me does not get absolved just because he fessed up five years after the fact. Final update, September 19th, 2023. I haven't opened this throwaway account in close to a year and a half and honestly never expected to come back to it after I aired out learning about the gaslighting monster that had attacked my over half a decade ago. For anyone who wants more details, my profile has the posts logged and I'm really not trying to reshair and rehash it as I have gotten more than enough of that out of my therapy appointments. The reason I'm posting is primarily out of joy. My attacker, Paul, had a slew of other court

dates already when I had filed my case against him and I had started to lose hope that anything was going to happen since I was reporting an incident from over five years ago, but the court system in my state was stupidly overbooked and I just had to wait for things to take their natural course. Over the last few months I started to get follow-up calls from an investigator that was apparently going over the details of Paul's case. He was already facing some time in prison over a different assault charge. His time in AA had proven not to be effective even with trying to make amends, and the prosecutor was looking to add my report of sexual assault to an overall criminal case against him, but it would require me to submit either a document to be provided as testimony,

or to act as an in-person witness. Though I had received Paul's message, I hadn't interacted or seen him in person for well over four years and my therapist suggested I might get some closure over testifying against him in court. This finally happened last week. It was hard, and I won't lie. I cried while I was on the stand, but it felt good. The years hadn't been kind to Paul and while he certainly looked remorseful sitting in the courtroom, I could give two F.S about how this was going to affect him. I left after that and found out just this morning that between his various cases he's going to prison. I'm not sure how long, but I also know he is being added to the SEGs Offender Database, which is another win as far as I'm concerned.

Other than that, life has been going pretty well. I've decided to throw myself into some new hobbies, another suggestion by my therapist, and have overall tried to just become the best version of myself as possible. My old friend Mark, who had taken the blame for Paul's actions for so long, got married in the middle of last year and while he and his fiancé had offered me an invitation, I didn't feel like it was my place to attend. We hadn't been in contact for so long and I didn't want to have anyone asking me questions on why I was there when I didn't really have any other friends attending the event. We message every so often but he's got his own life, and it's not my place to intrude on that,

I'm just happy that Paul's bullshit never got to derail his life in any huge way outside of the obvious. I'll probably never have reason to log back onto this account again, and really only did it today because I was just so overjoyed in hearing the results that it reminded me I had vented to you all so long ago now. To everyone who has reached out to check in on me, thank you, I appreciate each and every one of you.