u/Homunculuster

I want to share my experience with online grooming, because it’s weighing on my mind and I just want someone to talk to about it.

I met this guy named Dio over Discord. We were in a mutual server for a show we both liked. We interacted a lot in it, and over time became friends. At the time, I did vent a lot of personal issues there and was open about being both queer and mentally ill, which (besides my age role being 13-15) is how he knew I was a vulnerable individual.

After a while, he invited me to a private Discord server he had made for him and his friends. Of course, trusting him, I accepted the invite. It was great at first, there were of course a few rules, but I got to share my art, talk about things we all agreed on that the main server would’ve had a fight over, and he even had a drama channel specifically so we could talk shit about other members (which is the kryptonite of any angsty teen). This is how he slowly built trust with me.

After a while, he invited me to staff chat, which was specific to trusted members and close friends. This is where he removed all rules, which was part of how he tested and slowly pushed my boundaries. This was also one of the ways he made me and others feel special, because he told me that being staff meant he considered me closer to him than others were.

When I became a staff member, I also became part of his “family”. He was one of those “internet dads”, and he would use this to have power over us. I remember him using it against me by saying I was his “second least favorite child”, because I was still friends with people who had cut ties with him, which in turn caused me to remove them as friends, and a ton of people he didn’t like, which is one of the many ways that he isolated me from other people.

The whole “family” dynamic also had another layer of weirdness because I distinctly remember multiple times where I was fake flirting with my friends there who were around my age and he got mad at us because we were “siblings” (even though neither of us really cared for the family unit thing), yet, he felt free to pretend (or in the case of others, genuinely) flirt with us, even though we were his “children” by his logic. He made a lot of incest jokes with that, to the point where I do genuinely suspect he had a bit of a fetish for it.

Moving on from that, he often had us vent about very personal stuff, share secrets with him (for some younger members, they even shared their names and what towns they lived in), and allowed bad behavior such as talking shit about people or calling people slurs (which he later used against them to get them banned from shared spaces after they broke off from him and wanted to tell people what he was doing). He essentially made it so people were scared to speak up about him because he gathered dirt on them.

After a while, I was pretty much desensitized entirely to his inappropriate behavior. He would constantly talk sexually about characters or people he found hot, would flirt and make sex jokes with whoever he was e-dating in front of us, would almost constantly involve us in fights or arguments he was in (to the point that it was bad for our mental health), and would use us as emotional dumps for his mental health.

Dio groomed and manipulated all of us into different things. There was one girl, Colby, who was 13/14 when he was 17 (which, he claims it was 14 and 16, but I’m not inclined to believe him, and either way his behavior towards her was still predatory). He dated her, and would constantly make jokes about topping her, domming her, or doing other sexual acts. He even talked about wishing he could fly out to the state she lived in to come see her.

After they broke up, he then manipulated the rest of the group into thinking she was the groomer, and sent us very select screenshots of her participating in sexual behavior with him. However, looking back on it, he was using DARVO. When she pointed out his behavior, he denied any wrongdoing, attacked her and talked about her behind her back, and then tried to flip the script by making her seem like the abuser, even though he was the instigator and taught her to act sexually with him (not to mention, she sent me multiple screenshots of her asking him to tone it down, and he just kind of refused by saying it was his love labfuste). He used his mental illness (which Colby was also mentally ill) as a way to make himself seem like the vulnerable party when, in actuality, he was a 17-year-old talking about how much he wanted to fuck a 13-year-old.

I was one of the luckier ones because he never tried to date me, but he did groom me differently. Out of the group, I had the best literary and research skills. Whenever he was fighting someone that he was losing to, in trouble with moderation, or in any situation where he had to make a case for himself, he would ask me to fight and research for him. I did that because I felt it was my duty as his friend, but it genuinely exhausted me to constantly be fighting people.

He also made me do some stuff that was uncomfortable. There were some people he stopped being friends with whom he had a rivalry with (which he also used as a way to isolate us and make us feel special by giving the group an us vs them mentality). He made me stalk the Twitter profile they had linked as a connection, as well as the AO3 fanfic linked in their bio for anything nsfw. Sure enough, I found out that the fanfic they were writing had nsfw elements. He used this to get that person banned. I feel really bad looking at it, because that person was trying to tell me how bad of a person Dio was, but Dio had convinced me he was the creep instead because Dio showed me screenshots of them asking him to progress his fic. Looking at the timing though, they had only asked him to read safe for work parts, as no nsfw content had been posted yet.

It was like this for months, and the only reason I snapped out of it and left was that he cut off one of my close friends. He thought he was genuinely dating her, while she thought the flirting and stuff between them was a joke (which, to be fair to her, even before he thought they were dating, he still joked about that stuff with her constantly). I gathered screenshots of some of his behavior and sent them to the mods in our shared server, who promptly banned him.

I feel much better, and I am getting in a lot fewer fights and way less trouble now that I am free from him, but I still feel violated, and really upset (especially since I don’t really have anyone in real life to talk to about this who wouldn’t just dismiss me).

This has been weighing on my mind recently because I saw the bio of one of my friends, and they had “Dio is my bestie” on it. They are 19, and I sent them a ton of screenshots of Dio talking dirty to someone who was barely allowed to use discord, but they dismissed it by insinuating that the victims I got them from were possibly lying and said they “couldn’t see the grooming behavior” (regardless of whether they could, they still saw a 17 year old telling a 13 year old innaproproate shit, which should’ve been the end of their relationship with him). I had to block that person, of course, and it makes me sad that people around me who I was vulnerable with were simply ignoring it in favor of a friendship with him.

Sexuality labels:

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Genders:

Girlness:

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Boyness:

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Androness:

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Nullness:

https://pin.it/2oUkUXwGr

Disability:

(includes suspected and diagnosed):

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I’m scared I’ll never figure out what’s going on with my gender. I’ve never found a label that feels 100% right, and I’m just really Godamn confused 💔

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