Look. Look.

I don’t know you. I’m 21 and my longest relationship has been three months. I can’t imagine the kind of bond you believe you share with this man. I can’t imagine being sure someone loves me like that.

What I do know is this. Two years ago, I was assaulted by a man in my college class. The thing itself I dealt with, eventually. What fucked me up, over and over, was the secondary and tertiary social fallout: being told by our mutual friends that I’d misread what happened and should give him the benefit of the doubt, including, in one horrifying conversation, being told by a male friend “we’ve all done something like that”; seeing him surrounded by friends, laughing, safe, protected, untroubled, fine. The time a year later I sat behind him in a lecture and saw a picture of him with his girlfriend on his phone.

What I am telling you is this. I do not want my accuser to be jailed, harmed, beaten, killed. I want him to be alone, at least for a little bit. That is the price you should pay for harming someone the way he harmed me. You cannot grow and change without consequences. I want him to lose the respect of his friends, to be forced into loneliness and self-examination, and to wander in the dark until he is different.

I believe these women who have accused your boyfriend. False accusations are rare, and six different false accusations against the same guy with no one going to the police is implausible. Knowing that your boyfriend is a rapist, every day that you stay with him, you are acting to keep him safe and unchanged. Never mind the way the women he hurt must feel when they see you holding his hand, smiling, telling him you love him. People do not change without consequences, and if you do not leave him then he will believe what he’s done isn’t severe enough to merit it. You’ve been put in the position of administering justice, and that sucks for you, but I don’t care. The police aren’t going to help, because that’s not how the world works. All we can do, for this crime without recourse to law enforcement, is send these men into the dark ourselves. Not forever, and not irredeemably. But they must lose what they hold dear- friends, girlfriends, social capital- because that’s all that we as a society are in a position to enforce. So that’s got to be you.

I’m sorry. It sucks. But you are where you are.