life turned upside down

[dawntildusk]

I am really freaked out and need help putting this in perspective.
Here goes.
2 weeks ago a good friend of 25 years told me straight out that my dh (then boyfriend) raped her. It happened 14 years ago. She told me she has no recollection whatsoever of the night leading up to or immediately after the event. She woke up with him in the bed and he was inside her. She shouted at him and he left. Obviously I was shattered, devastated, nauseous, reeling from the shock. I sympathised with her, held her and hugged her and apologised over and over. When I confronted dh he was all the above multiplied by a million. His recollection of the event is this. We were all out drinking for the afternoon at a rugby match followed by the pub and then a club. 16 hours later we went to her house and he was helped to bed(by my brother and me). During the night he got out of our bed, he reckons to go to the bathroom, and climbed back in her bed. He remembers kissing and fondling, he does not deny he may have penetrated her but only "came too" after some kissing and they both realised what was happening at the same time. He left immediately, still really drunk and went back to bed.
I don't know what I am looking for by posting this but the word "rape" for me conjures up much different images than the one described to me. We have been married 12 years and have 4 beautiful children. My dh has been a kind, thoughtful, caring and supportive partner to me and I love him dearly. My friend is single, turning 40 this year and is blaming her recent breakdown on this event. I am so confused and need to know what you think. Is this rape?

Is this rape?

hear hear

What do you know about the victim or her character?

how do you know she forgot about it for 14 years?

just because you laughed it off, does it mean that somebody else can?

Nobody has said the perpetrator is a bastard.

your argument is flawed to say the least.

a crime isnt defined by the character of the victim, it is defined by the intent of the perpetrator.

if i had every drunken mistake locked up for rape...!!

like i and many other people have said before, people who cry rape just because they regret what happened, make it harder for geniune cases

and if she didnt forget, then she CHOSE to socialise with her rapist. sorry, i just dont see it.

Without knowing any of the poeple here all the arguments are flawed, that is how it is here.

We are presented with a scenario and we are asked if it is rape, whether we would consider it rape - i have said no it is not. I am relating it to a very similar event i was involved in - i did not laught it off, it was horrible but it wasnt rape - rape requires intent, it is a violent act.

This woman preoccupation with the effect she is having is telling - the fact she has told others but not the police and the fact she has been incredibly close to this family for such a long time is really telling.

She has a history of drug and alcohol abuse which sounds as if because of the long term nature of it would be a much more likely source of her mental breakdown.

I am basing it on the op's information and relating it to a similar situation in my life and i feel really strongly that this is a manipulative attempt to blame someone for something they havent done. This woman had also found a reason for all her life's ills - she is blaming her breakdown on this sole event!!!!

Accusing someone in this way and the fallout from it can be as damamging as a rape itself - this has the potential to blow a family apart and completely isolate this man from everyone. The assupmtion that rape is just about cocks going into bodies with no explicit agreement is not so - it has to de with intent. As a rapist - your intent is to fuck someone without their consent - that's the point - it is about dominace and violence.

This is a drunken mistake maliciously taken out of context to provide a scapegoat for all her ills.

WHy are some people finding it so hard to entertain the possiblity that this woman may be an attention-seeking headcase? While most women are not, some are: think of the more deranged vampiric trolls we have had on here (CVQ, Dizzymare etc).

SGB - very good point.

SGB, she may not be, and should be supported at this time.

She did not ask for any of this!

The person at fault it is the OP's DH.

SGB, like i said last night, some of the ladies on here like to blame the evil men. they are in no way responsible for their own lives...

in this situation, how was the victim in anyway responsible?

ok, that was badly worded, i wasnt suggessting that this woman was responsible, just that some women blame men for everything.

however, just because she wasnt to blame, that doesnt automatically mean that he was. no-one would have invented the word "accident" if it wasnt possible for something to happen that wasnt anyones fault.

Have read parts and skimmed parts.

I have to say.

That if I got drunk and went to bed by myself.

And in the middle of the night I came to to find my friends OH on top of me with his penis inside me,

I would say I had been raped.

Whether the bloke made a genuine mistake and thought I was his girlfriend etc is neither here nor there.

I went to bed. On my own. I woke up and some man had his cock inside me.

I am amazed that anyone thinks this is fine TBH.

Also people do have real trouble processing stuff like this, people often minimise it in order to not have to deal with it, espcially when it is a situaition like this where making a "fuss" will cause huge ructions. It can be years before people face up to what happened and strat to deal with it.

I am flabbergasted TBH that so many women on here would be unphased by waking up and finding people having sex with them.

The partner stuff is by the by - consent between couples can be based on experience IMO - if one partner knows the other likes to be woken by a spot of cunnilingus, as they have said "I really like it when you do that" then in the context of that relationship it's fine.

MLB: While the woman was not responsible for the incident (the man getting into bed with her and initiating sex she wasn't expecting and didn't want), she is responsible for the way in which she is behaving now which (on the information we are given here, which is all we have to go on) does suggest attention-seeking, same as the information we are given about the man's behaviour in this particular case suggests drunken error rather than calculating sexual predator or even a woman-despising opportunist who didn't care who he fucked.

"Rape is a violent act" WTF you realise you have just casually dismissed the rapes of tens of thousands of women. Rape does not have to be violent, or commited by a stranger etc etc.

I also was never aware that rape was all about what men think and feel. I was under the impression that rape was about what happened to the victim.

What about if the man had gone and got into bed with someone's teenage daugther and started to have sex with her? That would be fine and dandy too would it?

Sorry it's a long thread and I have skimmed some of it so this may have been covered.

Has he ever apologised to her for what happened?

ISNT: no one is suggesting that it's not distressing to find a man starting to have sex with you when you are asleep or half-asleep and wasnt expecting or wanting it.
However, someone who makes a genuine mistake and apologises for it shouldsurely not be treated the same as someone who acts with conscious malice towards you, drunk or not?
If your drunk friend punched you in the cause of an argument, you would be (justifiably) angry - if your drunk friend stumbled into you and knocked you down so that you got hurt, you might still be angry but (unless you were particularly self-righteous and vindictive) you would probably be able to accept that your friend meant you no harm and was sorry.

but it is a violent act - i am not talking about someone being hit - it is an act of violence from one person to another using sex as a weapon. I also never said it had to be by a stranger - i don't think that anyone here in unintelligent enough to think that...

get off your high horse i am not dismissing anything at all - i am saying it surely has to have some intent - mean some harm??

And no it isn't always about how the victim perceives it at all - so if two people are making out drunkly in a bed and then they start to fuck and then she says no - he stops immediately.. is that rape?????

this is a drunken error which stopped when they both realised what was happening

what was she doing socialising and being so close to someone she is now so terrified of??

ISNT - he apologised the next morning and she told him not to worry about it

It's still a punch though, rather than a stumble IYSWIM. Maybe the analogy would be that one is punching after an argument, the other is punching you after a misunderstanding. Which I would still be livid about TBH.

If a drunk man gets into bed with his teenage daughter and has sex with her, thinking that she is his wife, is that not a problem? I would say it was a problem.

I am also not sure I buy this "wrong person" stuff anyway. IME it's more often the case that you are hazily aware it's the wrong person, but as you are drunk your inhibitions and judgement are up the spout, so you proceed anyway. Maybe not always, for everyone, but really, I have spent a lot of time in various altered states with lots of different people in lots of situations, and have never mistaken one person for another.

I have to go out in a sec so will vanish shortly.

OP I am sorry this has happened and I also think that your DH may have had no bad intentions - but the thing that happened to this woman, from her POV, was rape.

isnt - yes the morning after they discussed it and he said sorry and she said forget about it...... i am not buying the blocked it for 14 years and was your best mate and only now i remember it was rape and i hate him...

bollocks

im not saying this is the same, im just trying to draw comparison to a different crime...

so someone is at a party and puts your coat on when they are drunk. either because they think its theirs or because they think you wont mind. or even because theyre so drunk they dont think about it. you are so drunk that you dont notice either.
as they are leaving, you notice and ask for your coat back. they give it to you, leave, and apologise the next morning for being so out of it that they didnt know what they were doing.
then 14 years later, you have a breakdown and blame it on this "theft"

I don;t get this violence, sex as a weapon thing TBH.

Sometimes it's simply about a man wanting to have sex and that desire outweighing the needs and wants of the person he's with not. He just doesn't care. He's not making some political point or necessarily acting out of a desire to debase and ruin women - he may simply want to have sex and that trumps anything else.

Re the intent; If I am driving my car and on the phone and not paying attention to what I'm doing, and I run someone over and kill them, then everyone should simply say "oh whoops well these things happen" and forget all about it?

Why is everyone assuming that the man made a drunken mistake just because he says so? What else was he going to say once confronted "sorry wife, I fancied a shag with your mate but she wasn't up for it". This forum is usually full of Men getting short shrift for crap excuses and tbh the "I was sober enough to get aroused but drunk enough not to know that the woman I had penetrated was not you" is amongst the most ridiculous I have heard.

I am not commenting on the motives of the woman. Who knows if she is unstable or to what degree that instability might be a result of having lived this experience but even if she is malicious in her attempts to come between the OP and her dh that doesn't change the fact that someone put their penis inside her when she didn't want them to.

Really who can say they could disregard a man they know doing this to them and putting it down to stupid mistake - it is a violation. I wouldbe disgusted.

Equally if dh did this to someone else I would be horrified.

I seriously do not know what sort of world you live in where it is ok for a man to stick his penis in vagina just because he is drunk. Imagine this happened to your 15 year old daughter on a sleepover- friends father does same? Would you seriously say oh well he was drunk didn't know?!

How is this different? Or are we really saying that because this woman was presumably sexually active she is fair game for any random man?

I really must go out in a sec.

This idea that women have to react immediately otherwise they are making it up/up to something.

Can no-one conceive that a woman in this situation might not know what to think, might be ashamed and confused, might not want to make a fuss. That she might set it to the back of her mind and later something brings it to the fore and she thinks, well actually, that was a really shitty thing that hppened to me...

This idea that women should react as they do on eastender is something else which clobbers the rape conviction levels. Not all women scream, shout and cry, immediately breaking down etc. Many don't react like that at all.

If you had a party and a drunk guest got into bed with and had sex with one of your teenage daughters, would you say "oh well, an honest mistake, it could happen to anyone, poor chap"??

i'd like to think that my teenage daughter wasnt so drunk that she didnt notice.