Denial. Chloe Allred told her story of how her best friend chose her rapist over her to StyleCaster. She said it took a long time for her to realize that her best friend for years was really still friends with the man who sexually assaulted her. “My best friend no longer said my rapist’s name,” Allred said, “no longer mentioned him, and I assumed that this meant she had cleanly cut him from her life. Deleted. Forgotten. It was incomprehensible that Tory would remain friends with Jake after he raped me, and so I chose not to see it until it was flung in my face.”
Jake. The aggressor. Allred describes him as someone who perpetually “creeped out all the girls because he hit on anyone in his vicinity.” She never knew why Tory was friends with him, and Jake was aware of Allred’s distaste for him. “As always,” she recalls, “he wore oddly large, formal clothes and a fedora at an angle on his head.”
Chloe’s aunt. Only a month before Allred’s own sexual assault, her aunt was raped and murdered in a Salt Lake City park. “It didn’t seem possible,” she said, “but there you go. It was.”
The aftermath of the assault. After deciding to spend the night at Tory’s house, Allred was raped by Jake. “I gathered my things, woke Max, and we left,” she said. She also confronted Jake before she left the house. “If you ever f**king touch me again, I will punch you in the face,” she said to him.
The engulfing silence. As Allred told her friend, Max, about what had happened, he stood in silence, shrugged, and refused to make eye contact with her. “His silence engulfed me, and I became confused. Did he not hear me? I thought. I called Tory the next day. With shame burning in my chest, I told her everything. Her reaction was all, ‘Oh my God!’ and ‘I can’t believe he f*cking did that!’ and ‘I’m so sorry.’ I felt deep relief, thinking she believed me.”
Re-enter Tory and Jake. “I was at a falafel shop with Caitlin… She was telling a funny story about one of Tory’s many funny escapades,” Allred says. “Tory’s apartment had become a makeshift hostel. Three girls were staying there already, and now Jake was too! How funny.”
Confrontation. Allred immediately called Tory and confronted her. Tory admitted that Jake was staying with her, and apologized. But she started to ignored Allred and the two didn’t speak again for two years until they ran into each other at a figure-drawing session.
The lie. Tory apparently had confronted Jake about raping Allred, and he created an elaborate lie to justify his actions. “After she confronted Jake about raping me,” she said, “he told her that I was actually his girlfriend, that we had been having sex for months.”
Goodbye. Tory knew that the story didn’t justify touching Allred without her consent, but didn’t do much about it. Allred decided to never talk to Tory again. “When trust has been so badly broken between two people, there is no going back,” she said. “Perhaps something new can form, but I have yet to find out.”
Best friends and bridesmaids. Claire Hodgson reported for Cosmopolitan the story of best friends ripped apart by sexual assault. “What would you do if, not long before your wedding, one of your best friends and bridesmaids-to-be told you that your fiancé had raped her?” she said. “That’s what happened to two university friends after one was raped in the room next door to where her best friends, her rapist’s fiancee was sleeping.”
Accusations. After the rape, the victim went to the hospital, reported the assault, and then decided to tell her friend. She said she couldn’t stand in a church on her friend’s wedding day knowing what had happened. But her friend didn’t believe her.
Lying out of jealousy. “But sadly her friend chose to side with her fiancé, who claimed that the victim was lying out of jealousy over their relationship,” said Hodgson. “He accused the victim of using a sex toy she had found hidden in a drawer in the room where she stayed – planting the evidence. He claimed that the reason that his semen was found in the victim, is that he had used the sex toy a few weeks before and denied the victim’s claims that he had raped her.”
The aftermath. The victim’s friend group was divided after the results of the trial. The assailant was found guilty and jailed for seven years. “Our whole friendship group has become divided when I most needed my close friend,” the survivor told Hodgson. “Not only that, but it also caused the breakdown of her own relationship. She had tried to call her boyfriend at the time after the attack, but his phone was switched off. While she says he was like a ‘rock’ in the wake of the rape, they eventually broke up.”
Suicide. The survivor’s boyfriend took his own life a few months after the breakup. Hodgson reported that he in many ways felt responsible for what had happened because he had his phone off the night of the rape. The survivor, according to Hodgson, is still suffering with PTSD.
Hard to say. At the end of the day, of course no one can dictate who anyone spends time with. But it does seem like a general amount of common sense would prevent someone from befriending a rapist, or staying friends with a rapist.
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