What happened
CW: sexual assault
This post is about someone I know. I'll call them P, which isn't actually what their name starts with, but is short for "person." That's the most neutral fake name I can think of.
The first time I met P in person was at GDC 2018, although we'd been internet friends for some time already. At dinner with them and some other friends, I mentioned being touch starved because I hadn't seen my then-boyfriend (now-husband) in several days and was missing snuggles. P asked if I wanted a back rub. I said no thanks. Five minutes later, P reached over and started rubbing my back. I didn't say anything.
And thus began a pattern that continued and grew for years.
But let's back up before we get into that. Because first I want to tell you about our friendship.
It was 2016 or 2017 (I don't remember exactly), and I was mainly doing film composing and was looking to break into doing music for games. I started connecting with some game audio people on Twitter, and P was one of them. They messaged me to say hello, and we quickly became friends.
As I got to know more people in game audio, a friend group started to form. A few people have come and gone, but there have been 5 of us at the core of the group throughout the years, P being one of them. We all became very close despite all living in different cities. Just 5 marginalized people at somewhat similar points in our careers, trying to make it in a rough industry.
We helped each other out a lot. We'd share and refer each other to jobs. We'd give each other feedback on our work. We'd discuss things like how to figure out fair rates and how to respond to sexism from our colleagues. But we also had Jackbox nights and inside jokes and yearly secret Santa and lots of talks about things that weren't work related. This friend group has really meant a lot to me, I guess is what I'm trying to say, in both professional and personal ways, even if we have drifted apart a bit in the past few years.
And P was at the center of it all. P is fun and hilarious. They have a way of making you feel really special. They had a cute little nickname for me that I loved, they'd send gifts with thoughtful handwritten notes, and they always made time to check in and plan one-on-one catch up time. They also advocate for marginalized people a lot, seemingly never hesitating to call out sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism or any other kind of bigotry.
They also continually made me uncomfortable.
They were all small things, but there were a lot of them. I'm just going to name a few that stick out to me. Hugs that went on too long, with them holding on for a full 30 seconds after I'd let go. Frequently asking if I had a crush on anyone despite knowing that I was in a monogamous marriage. Sending me NSFW fan art of video game characters without ever asking if I'd want to be sent that kind of thing (this one felt especially weird because they knew I had a trauma history with sexual non-consent).
These and the unwanted backrub are all things that, taken on their own, would maybe not be a big deal. But taken together, something bigger starts to emerge. And in hindsight, there's probably a reason I had a constant nagging gut feeling about them, that something was off, that I could never fully let my guard down when they were around.
But then again, I told myself, I never said anything. I didn't set boundaries. I wasn't clear enough. I was probably being unfair. So I waved those feelings off.
Here's me doing a Bluesky subpost about P, testing the waters to see if anyone would say I was somehow wrong for preferring friendships with people who I donāt often have to set boundaries with. Good news! Nobody did.
Let's time travel now to the summer of 2022. It was a perfect day, warm and sunny. P was visiting Chicago, we had just had a nice time catching up over brunch, and now we were going to the beach. I had on a new bathing suit, cute and ruffly and solid black. I called it my beach goth look.
One of the weirdest aspects of this thing that happened, to me at least, is that it happened within a few minutes of us getting to the beach. I don't know why I get stuck on that. There was no buildup or anything. Just like, arrival, boom, instant bad thing. I keep trying to figure out ways to write in more lead up to it, maybe add more of a buffer, because it feels strange having it occur so suddenly. But this is actually how it happened.
We found a spot and put our towels down. I asked them to put sunscreen on my back, which they started to do. And then I was frozen, my brain screaming stop touching me stop touching me stop touching me. Because their hands were down my bathing suit.
You may have noticed by now that, whether intentional or not, P has a knack for either going right up to the line, or just baaaarely crossing it, in such a way that makes you question whether a line was even crossed. In this case it involves an actual physical line. Never in my life did I think I would be forced to ponder such philosophical questions as "where does the lower back end and the upper ass begin?" and "where does the rib cage end and the side boob begin?"
Sorry. I do genuinely think that's funny, but I'm also using dark humor to cope with the fact that I was groped. Well, maybe groped. Like I said, I don't quite know where that line is. But what I do know is that I have a strong trauma response to what happened, including flashbacks where I'll randomly feel their hands on me. There were a lot of people on the beach that day, and I now have a lot of nightmares about being sexually assaulted in front of groups of people. My friends who I've told the details to say I was definitely groped. I think I was groped.
Also, I've had a lot of people put sunscreen on me over the years. Iām very pale, so I consider myself something of an āasking people to put sunscreen on my back because I will burn within 2 minutesā expert. And other than P, Iāve literally never had someone put sunscreen under my clothes. That's just not a normal thing to do, especially without asking first. I mean, you don't need sunscreen under there. That's the whole thing! You put on sunscreen to protect the parts that aren't protected by clothing! I wonder what P thinks causes tan lines!
A medical mystery
So. I just did the thing where I do (an attempt at) humor to make myself feel better before sharing something upsetting again. Because I also have a memory burned into my mind of seeing P in my peripheral vision while it was happening, pulling my bathing suit away from my body and looking down it. I don't think there's an innocent explanation for that.
Anyway, after that was over I did what has historically been my coping mechanism: I pretended nothing was wrong and hung out with them for the rest of the day, despite how completely violated I felt. And then I buried the memory as deep into my brain as it would go, because I didn't want to do anything to ruin things with my amazing little game audio friend group that meant so much to me. I didn't let myself think about what happened. I continued the friendship as normal. I even hung out with P again in person at a conference, trying my best to pay no attention to the deep pit in my stomach.
And on the rare occasion that it would cross my mind, I would just keep thinking to myself, well, P was a great person. Such an advocate for marginalized people. We were close. I trusted them completely, so much that I had told them about my past sexual assault trauma. The problem must have been me. I must have been misremembering, misunderstanding, wrong somehow. Because such a good friend would never do something so awful to me, right?
Right?
Same lake, different shore.
The ignoring everything strategy worked pretty well, until it didn't. In June of this year (a little less than 2 years after it happened, for those of you keeping track), my best friend invited me to the beach. As I was getting ready to leave my place to meet up with them, I had a panic attack. It was such a major one that I had to cancel our plans. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, until the memories of what happened with P came flooding back. And then I couldn't ignore it anymore.
This has been really tricky to navigate. While it's far from the worst thing someone has ever done to me, it IS the worst thing someone so embedded in my life and career has done. P is everywhere, they seem generally well-liked, we have a ton of mutual friends, and they objectively have a more successful game audio career than me. So no matter what I do, I'm afraid of what could happen. Every possible step feels like a misstep. I'm scared that people won't believe me, or maybe believe it happened but think I'm overreacting.
Even as Iāve been writing and editing this piece over the past week, I keep imagining people reading it and being like, āthatās it?! She wrote a big dramatic thing about THAT?! Thatās nothing! What a drama queen!ā
And maybe some of you will read this and think that. But I hope at least some of you will read it and agree with me that it actually is a big deal, that itās worth talking about.
This whole P thing has made it so that I now feel unsafe even in spaces that should feel okay, like spaces for queer and gender-marginalized people. Nowhere is 100% guaranteed to be safe. It's a hard truth to reckon with.
I'm going to be honest. I've thought a lot about just leaving the industry completely in these past 6 months.
But no, I refuse to do that.
I love my job, and Ramona loves being my assistant. If I quit, she loses her job too, and thatās just unacceptable.
And actually, what I said about there being no safe spaces isn't exactly true. I've been making a point lately of surrounding myself with the good people I know who work in games. The ones I can truly trust, who I know have my back. Who don't give me any weird uneasy gut feelings. Building my own little community.
They've been lifesavers. You know who you are. Thank you so much.
And thankfully I already had a wonderful therapist who was helping me through other trauma, so we just added this to the list of things we were working on. Summer was really rough for me PTSD-wise. And then things started to get better. I still get triggered sometimes when P pops up on social media or someone mentions them, but not every time. I'm healing.
I don't know what the point of this post is, exactly. It's not really meant as a callout (hence keeping P anonymous). I think it's part of the healing process for me. I'm trying to break my patterns. I don't want to keep pretending things are okay when they're not, to keep sweeping all the bad shit under the rug out of fear of ever rocking the boat, to keep letting myself be around people who have proven themselves to be unsafe. I want to treat myself with more care than that.
And I think it's also for anyone who finds themselves in the situation I was in with P. Maybe you know someone who makes you vaguely uncomfortable deep in your gut, who you feel a little weird and tense and twitchy around, or who makes you feel like you're somehow doing something wrong by not constantly setting boundaries. This is me giving you permission to remove that person from your life. If you stay friends with them, maybe it won't culminate in something so violating as what happened to me. But maybe it will. And even if it doesn't, I think the discomfort you feel is reason enough.
And to all my colleagues: we work in an industry where knowing people is key. It's drilled into our heads that connections with people are how you build a career, and that's mostly true. So if someone crosses a line with you, it can be easy to default to assuming you need to keep associating with them for the sake of your career. I promise you don't. Please don't make the same mistake I did; it caused me a lot of pain. This industry does have a lot of very, very good people amongst the bad ones. You can find them.
To anyone from my old friend group who might be reading this: I am so, so sorry that this is how you're finding out. And I'm so sorry I've been distant. I trust you all with my whole heart, but I also know that P means a lot to you all. I didn't know how to tell you. I didn't want to make things difficult for anyone. If you want to talk about it, please reach out. I want to keep being friends. I love you all so much.
To P, if you're reading this: you've proven yourself to be bad at consent, but I will try to explicitly spell this out for you. Never contact me again. Stop interacting with my social media posts, and that includes likes and shares. I'll be cordial if we run into each other at a conference or something, but that's all. If you break this boundary, I will block you everywhere and do away with the being cordial in professional settings thing as well. Please respect my wishes on this, and please do a whole bunch of therapy and soul-searching so you can learn to stop hurting people in this way.
I don't really know how to end this. Thank you all for reading it. It feels good and empowering to put this out there, like Iām taking things into my own hands this time. Like I'm reclaiming something.