My friend betrayed her friends for the sake of her trauma.
So, the full version of this story is far too long for me to post on Reddit, however I have this link here to a Google Doc with the whole story.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiTwsQ72pwOm1MYt77-_cJl-cJrpu3Dlsf8miDQU670/edit?usp=sharing
For those who don't want to read a 14pg document, here is an oversimplified brief of what happened.
I (M, 31) had a friend (F, 30) for 13.5 years who, in late 2018, got into a long-term and abusive relationship with a man who would eventually become the father of her only son. In the 5 years of their first relationship, he would verbally harass her, emotionally manipulate her, deny her privacy, hold her financially hostage for at least a year, sexually assault her, and possibly also forcibly impregnate her. That relationship came to an end in August of 2024 after her abuser attempted to take his own life, failed, wound up in the hospital, was assigned a psychologist, and was finally convinced it was in the best interest of saving his life to just let her go.
Despite having wanted to be out of that relationship for at least a year and getting professional mental health advice on how to move on and heal from it, my friend decided she was not interested and would rather keep her trauma and go back to living with her abuser for the rest of her life. But rather than make that decision with any amount of confidence, integrity, or honesty, she opted to keep it a secret from her friends and family, proceeding to withhold information from us, and lie to us. Naturally, when her relationship began falling apart again, she came to the conclusion that the only way to keep it together was to open the relationship and get more people involved.
My friend then began lying to and manipulating a number of her close friends in a desperate and futile attempt to hold onto this relationship. She lied to her best friend, who was also in an abusive relationship, telling her that she was planning to leave her abuser, and then promised once she had, she would help her out of her relationship so they could be together, when in reality, she never planned to leave and was using her friend's abusive situation to force her compliance and her discretion. She set up an innocent woman with her abuser, so that her abuser would comply with the open relationship, and made no effort to warn said woman about the true nature of the man she would be getting involved with. When her abuser began to take a greater liking to the other woman, she began flirting with and lying to a number of her close male friends (myself included), promising an interest in a physical or friends with benefits type relationship, when in reality she was just collecting evidence that she was wanted by other men so that she could make her abuser jealous and force him to behave, after which point she would drop them all and gaslight them into believing it never happened. When that plan backfired, and her abuser revealed he had made up his mind to leave her for the other woman, she then jumped into a new relationship with one of the men she was leading on that looked the most like her abuser in an attempt to use him to replace her abuser. When that man wouldn't surrender his boundaries after 2 weeks of dating she then cheated on him with her abuser.
When she let go of most of her pawns, she began gaslighting them into thinking either it was all in their head or that they had misunderstood what was going on. When that failed, and she was asked to take accountability for her choices and actions, she threw a tantrum and ended the friendships. If she found out that anyone was still talking about it afterward, she verbally harassed them in an attempt to bully them into silence.
It has been almost a year since I last talked to my friend (July 2025), and since then she has refused to express remorse for the way she treated me or others, nor has she recognized or worked on her serious mental health problems. In fact she has moved onto lying to and manipulating a new girlfriend while still holding on to her relationship with her abuser.