Will try to make this as readable as possible as it's a bit complex!
I have a really good friend who I met a university which is now hundreds of years ago. We see each other regularly and both have kids. She split up from the father of both her children about 5 years ago, for complicated reasons he has stayed living with her and the children (he was paying a lot of the rent till recently and my friend felt it was useful for him to be around as their youngest is severely autustic and it's hard for her to manage on her own). While they were together, in my opinion he was an absolute arse. He cheated on her with at least with one other woman (he has another daughter as a result of that) and was rarely around and pretty much left everything to her. If it had been me, I'd have run for the hills far earlier than she did and booted him out of the house immediately. She didn't and her life, her choice.
More recently, her mother has died and she's had a pretty big inheritance including a house (which she's renting out). She's also invested money into a small business with her ex partner (which she told me she felt pressured to do by him). At Easter they went on holiday as a family together to his home country, paid for by her. This time away has led to them starting to have sex with each other again.
My friends ex-partner has a girlfriend, about 15 years younger than my friend. The ex-partner doesn't want to get back together officially with my friend and wants a scenario where she keeps schtum so the girlfriend never finds out but he still has sex with both of them. My friend on the surface is feeling like an attractive, desirable woman again so it has done her some good - but on the flip side she does seem to have fallen back in love with the knobhead and has been obsessing over facebook pictures of him and his girlfriend on holiday over the last few weeks.
I've been encouraging her without telling her what to do to take this new found positivity and use it to focus on what makes her happy and re-explore the old her. While I've not told her to boot the ex to touch, I've said I felt she should be really cautious and not tie herself to him, emotionally or financially. She has been talking about using her inheritance to buy a house with him which I've told her I think is a bad idea. I think she thinks this will tie him to her.
Last week, I had a facebook message from one of her friends who I barely know but also went to university with us. It was a really badly spelt hectoring self righteous rant demanding that as my friends best friend I 'sort her out' and 'deal with it' -i.e the situation with the ex. It also included a lot of screenshots of the ex frolicking in the pool with current girlfriend. I wrote back to this woman saying that our friend knew I didn't like the ex-partner but it wasn't my role or her's to go heavy and instruct our friend how to live her life, she is an adult and aware of the situation with the girlfriend.
As above, I barely know this woman - she's circa 50 and as far as I know, hasn't ever had much in the way of a grown up relationship that's lasted more than 2 seconds. After my reply I blocked her on messenger. She then emailed me at work, also in the same vein but even more demanding. If I didn't sort out our friend then it should sit on my conscience for life sort of stuff, ending with 'deal with it!'.
I was pretty hacked off that she'd gone to the extent of contacting me at work - I'd replied to her original message. If someone blocked me I wouldn't then go to the lengths of finding their work email and sending a personal message to it. She did get a pretty rude response from me from my personal email, again repeating that our friend knew my thoughts on her ex partner, it wasn't our duty to 'sort it', asking what she was thinking as a professional emailing me at work and suggesting her own career in journalism might have gone significantly better if she had learnt how to spell. I appreciate the last bit was nasty, my only defence was that I was very hacked off!
So what do you all think? Is this woman right and should I get more involved than I have? Do I have some kind of duty to 'deal with it?'. Or is what I've been doing to gently actively encourage my friend to live a life that's based on her and the kids and not on the ex enough? Basically, do you all think that I have some kind of duty to be alot more brutal?