“I am a victim.” Those four simple words have been echoed in recent months as dozens of people have begun to come out in the entertainment industry, putting a spotlight on a culture of sexual harassment that has plagued many. Most of these victims are women, but a few men like Terry Crews have come out to tell their own stories.

However, for most men those words carry an unapproachable weight that is too heavy to lift. There is a stigma for male victims that doesn’t exist for women. When one thinks of the word victim, it almost certainly conjurers an image of a crying woman, afraid and at the mercy of a male aggressor. To be a victim means that you must have been victimized, it means you must have lost a fight, and most of all it means that you stopped being a man. Masculinity dictates that men can never be victims, and that even if they lost a fight, they are to soldier on stoically, never crying, never doubting. You are to walk with brave certainty into the next battle, ignoring the pain of your scars.

A lot of ink has been spilled discussing the toxicity of this pervasive view toward masculinity; but truthfully, little has really been done to change it. We still make light of male domestic abuse victims. Recently on Saturday Night Live, I saw a skit where a string of bizarre customers accosted a customer service representative at a fake retailer. The scene portrayed a man being abused by his significant other. This woman was controlling and cruel, and in the end, he acquiesced to her demands — all to the audience’s laughter. This skit was sandwiched between others that poked fun at President Trump’s sexism and exalted feminist values, yet when the man was the victim, he was the butt of the joke. It was sending a clear message.

That’s what happened the first time I ever opened up about my history, too. Laughter. I opened up about my relationship with a previous girlfriend who had convinced me to move away from my business and friends to a larger city to live with her sister. The moment I was cut off from my social network, my life turned upside down. The woman who claimed to love me began to resent everything that made me who I was. She hated that I was a nerd; she openly mocked my hobbies and habits. None of them fit her version of what a man should be. She became controlling: at first it was just yelling, then threats, then eventually she started hitting me.

But she warned me to never fight back. She put it to me plain: if I were ever to so much as raise my voice in defense or terror, the police would side with her straight away. She was right, because there’s only one way society sees this. Men are the abusers, women are the abused. Before it was all said and done, she tried to steal my car. The officer that was called demanded that I turn over my keys to her or he would arrest me. I only managed to get it back after nearly going to court for it, but not before she had tossed me on the side of the road, cold and alone, in front of a roach motel with only a fraction of my belongings.

The worst part, though, was that I was the only one working so we had a joint bank account. As the relationship soured, I had stopped sleeping with her. She was furious about this. That’s when she withdrew the money in fury and refused my access to it unless I had sex with her. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I had been taken away from my home, my business, and my friends. I had nowhere to go and she controlled my only resource for escape. It was only years later that I even recognized it as the abuse and rape that it was.

Yet when I told one my best friends about it, he laughed. “Sounds like you were truly pussy whipped, man.” I was stunned. “You have to stop being a pussy. Let’s be real, you let her walk all over you, and you totally deserved it. You have to stop being a pussy and man up.”

I want to stop you right here and point out that there’s likely a significant number of you who have read this and thought the exact same thing. Do you notice how we strip the masculine features away from a victimized man in an almost literal sense? You cease to be a man once you admit to being a victim. That says a lot about how we view victims, both male and female. It means that this society thinks that there is something intrinsic about victim-hood that is feminine, because only women are weak enough to be victims. It enforces gender inequality in so many ways to the point where it’s almost impossible to count them.

I learned several valuable lessons from that experience. That I am alone. That if the state ever gets involved in a dispute between myself and a woman, that I can and will lose anything and everything including my own freedom. That if a woman wants to do anything to me including physically assault me or rape me, that she can and will get away with it. And lastly, that society as a whole believes that this is just and fine, that I am ultimately the bad guy no matter what I do or say, and that I should, above all else, stay silent or risk losing all credibility and respect.

Opportunity later came to me by chance. I happened by a small private college with one of the best and most well-connected Japanese programs in the region. I applied on a fluke, and to my surprise, I was accepted. That’s when I discovered my knack for academia. I’m a poor boy from a small town in the south who, in their own words, “don’t have time for any of that uppity, book-learning bullshit,” but my professors called me one of their best students.

The university started to feel like a haven. As I had spent the last few years cooped up writing full time, the social life on campus brought me to life. I had suddenly found myself socially awakened for the first time in a long time on campus. Retro was in, and I was authentically retro. People liked me and the university started to feel like a haven. I found myself to be very popular in a way I had never been before. Sure, back home I ran the local I.T. shop, but that kind of popularity was all business. It seemed like now, for the first time, people wanted to truly know and care about me.

One day, my age caught up with me. To deal with the commute, I was sleeping in a friend’s closet so I could get to class on time, and it caused my back to give out. Thankfully, I hadn’t done any real damage, but doctor’s orders were to stay off of it for a while. I found myself back at my house in bed, but I still needed to make it to class. My fiancee was less than enthusiastic. Cold couldn’t describe her response to my calls for help getting out of bed, getting dressed, and trying to get into the car. Without real help, and with my new cane stuck in the dangling seat belt, I became frustrated. That’s when I committed a terrible sin. I raised my voice, mostly in pain. She was furious, and she reached over, put her hand on the passenger side door, and slammed it into my back several times. She had set my rehabilitation back. It wasn’t the first time she had been physically violent, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the previous woman.

Sometime later, we both sat in the living room and I asked her if there even was a relationship anymore. We both agreed that we drove each other insane and that this wasn’t working. Soon afterwards, I got an opportunity to live closer to campus, and I moved away from the home I had built with her.

This new arrangement was dependent on me making sure two other traditional students stayed out of trouble in the dorms on campus. For a small private college, there was quite a lot of drugs and partying going on, even beyond the typical college experimentation. I was sought out because my new circle of friends was aware of my terrible home life, and also because I had experience living in rougher areas. Their parents hoped that I would instill some life skills into them. This also put me on campus 24/7, and more and more of the traditional student body began to look to me for guidance where they couldn’t find it through the resources on campus.

That’s when the cracks in this place I called a haven began to show. I began to hear horror stories of numerous rapes being buried by the administration. There was a “rape trail” behind Greek Row. The drugs were much harder than I had only heard about: heroin, coke, X, and LSD were common. There was a heroin OD one night, and, instead of calling 911, an administrator personally took the student to the hospital to avoid any records of the incident and had other staff clean up the mess (it is common for heroin OD victims to evacuate their bowels during the process). At first, I thought it was mostly exaggerations, but as I attempted to push people onto the campus’s official resources, I noticed how little was being done. Still, it appeared as if I had fostered a good image among the administration for handling some of the work they didn’t seem to want to deal with.

In the middle of all of this, I managed to find a new romantic interest. As she was a senior, and again we had more in common than even my recent ex-fiancée. She was the Japanese tutor, and I needed her help getting caught up with the rest of the class. She was flirtatious, and it wasn’t soon after that that I had discovered that she had cyberstalked me and found out a lot of my personal info. However despite this, she seemed far more emotionally available than what I was used to, and soon we began dating. After a while, I began to open up to her about my experiences with my previous partners, and many other stories about the awful mess I grew up in. She didn’t judge me. For the first time I felt like someone on the other end really and truly cared about me.

About 6 months into the relationship, I had gotten to the stage where I had met and was regularly hanging out with her friends. It seemed to be going well, but she wanted to keep what we were doing a bit of a secret. That’s when I found out she had another boyfriend. She had told me he was an old friends with benefits sort of deal when I had met him once, but that was a total lie; she was cheating on a long-term significant other of more than four years. She had told me he was an old friends with benefits sort of deal when I had met him once, but that was a total lie. I didn’t want this to be complicated. I wanted a straightforward and healthy relationship. When she refused, I broke up with her.

That’s when she began stalking me. She broke through my apartment complex’s security and sat outside my door for hours. She begged me to continue the affair. As much as I knew it was a bad idea, I really wanted it to work so I stupidly went along with it. I was blinded by many red flags, but I ignored them. I had no idea how far south this thing would go.

One night at my apartment, while we were both intoxicated, she forced herself on me. She was aggressive, and I had to pry her off of me. I sat her down next to my bed and she began crying like she had just been attacked. I had no idea what to do, but my first instinct was to comfort her. I ended up walking her home and considered what had just happened compared to what has happened every other time in the past.

I also had the opportunity to share what happened with these new friends I had cultivated, and the choice seemed clear. I needed to end this before I got hurt again. That’s exactly what I did, but she was persistent, and obsessive. She had kept a table of all of the gifts I bought her in her dorm room, and relegated her other boyfriend’s picture to a small dark corner of the room. I attempted to let her down easily, but she continued to call and text. One of her friends told her boyfriend about the affair, and after that, the whole thing exploded. She went from being obsessive about continuing the relationship to being intensely angry. I will never forget her dead-eyed stare when she said, “I am a young, pretty girl way out of your league. I don’t understand why you couldn’t just enjoy fucking like a normal guy and keep your mouth shut.” I realized the huge mistake I had made. I was so desperate for someone to connect with I had ignored all of the warning signs of someone else who was extremely abusive. She was a psychopath, quite possibly in the clinical sense. It wasn’t me she felt anything for; it was the idea of the affair that she was getting off on. I was an older man, I was paying for everything. She liked the chase and the thrill, and she was obsessed with the idea of this guy with a dark past, but she may not have even seen the human being underneath. She continued to call and text, often attempting to manipulate me into giving her emotional support.

Eventually it began driving me insane, so I told her that I had to completely cut her off. That’s when her true colors revealed themselves. I suddenly went from one of the most popular people on campus to people not being to look me in the eye. It was subtle at first, so subtle I missed it until way later. People began avoiding me. I was in need of emotional support after what had happened and I still shared a class with her, so I looked for someone to confide in. Suddenly, I found few willing to listen. Looking back on it now, almost everyone I had met over the past two years had begun acting strangely, and became very distant.

Her demeanor changed in class. Officially, we had broken things off amicably, however to my surprise most of her friends picked me over her. I’d told them not to do this. I was this older outsider that came crashing in, and many of them were friends with her boyfriend too. However, she had a history of doing crazy stuff like this that I had not known about it, and they were all sick of her. A lot of midnight phone calls were about how she felt isolated on campus, and how she didn’t have any friends anymore. But now she seemed both more happy, yet she refused to look to the front of the class when I gave a presentation.

Then, I made a huge mistake. During a play put on by the theater department, she kept stalking around me again. Right at the tail end of things, she had pulled done something similar where, at an event, she hovered close to me in my peripheral vision while I hung out with some of her (now former) friends. She did the same thing now, only this time a mutual friend pulled her aside and told her to cut it out. Still, after the play she appeared at the local bar I was at and sat right behind me again. Everything else was a blur. I found myself soaking wet after I had apparently slipped and fallen into a pool drunk, ostensibly trying to get away from her.

That’s not how this was interpreted. I was made to see the campus shrink and told her what happened. I was to write up a little story about what happened and why I might have attempted suicide. I did exactly that, and then was instructed to share it with some of my close friends to deal with my depression and PTSD. At first, the reaction was very positive, but I noticed that a lot of the group had completely ghosted me at this point.

That’s when I found out about the plan. I accidentally bumped into my leasing agent and was told that the lease wasn’t being renewed. I contacted my roommates’ parents and they had no idea what was going on. It turns out that the two other students I was living with were frustrated with my continued attempts to cut down on the drugs and alcohol. They wanted their freedom back in the dorms, and instead of talking with me, they attempted to blindsided everyone because they knew their parents wouldn’t go for it. I ended up telling their parents about the incidents I had let slide to keep the peace, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

One of the group informed me that this wasn’t being done in isolation. My ex-girlfriend and my roommates had gotten together and, for months, had been spreading stories that I had sexually assaulted her and that I was violent, dangerous, and schizophrenic. She wanted to isolate me like she felt I had isolated her, and it worked like a charm. I was provided proof of this conversation and more from multiple sources, and I lost my cool. I blew up at all of these people. I was so betrayed. Over the past two years, I had shared my stories about my sexual assaults and more.

The truth was, they didn’t believe most of them. Not only were my stories from my hometown hard to imagine for a bunch of kids from the better side of the tracks, it was impossible for them to see an older man as a sexual assault victim. I must be lying to cover up something, so I must be a sexual predator.

I didn’t say anything close to threatening to these kids, but they called the cops anyway. Thankfully, they didn’t do anything, and at one point scolded one of the roommates for wasting their time, but they didn’t stop there. When I found more drugs and homemade alcohol in the apartment, I knew I could wind up in trouble regardless if it was mine and the police had previously entered the apartment. Thankfully, they didn’t do a search. So, to get out ahead of this, I informed the leasing agent of what was really going on and a police officer came again to check this out.

That’s when the dean of students arrived on my doorstep. Conveniently, she came as a drug search regarding the other students was going on. I was told I had two days to sign out of my lease and leave or I would be expelled. I had no idea what to do. I was rushed to the therapist who asked bizarre questions about my mental state, only for her to clear me and call in the dean to try to listen to me. She wouldn’t. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I was then whisked to the leasing office where my leasing agent already had the papers ready. I managed to get a week, not two days, but then I found myself completely homeless.

I had nowhere to go. I bounced from place to place until I eventually found some temporary stability in the basement of another adult student. I had missed two weeks of classes, but and when I tried to apply for some kind of aid I was rebuffed. The administration treated me like they believed the other students, hook, line, and sinker, and they never bothered asking my side of the story. However, officially I was never sanctioned for any wrongdoing. I was simply told that if I couldn’t make it to class I should withdraw from the university.

I managed to find a way back to class, but that’s when the true nightmare began. I was thankfully informed ahead of time that the group would try to further destroy my credibility by launching false stalking allegations from other students. Prepared, I turned off all of the privacy settings on my phone and began recording everything. The irony was thick; while I was a tech blogger, I was a strong privacy advocate against smartphones having this kind of capability. Now it was the only thing saving my life. I also kept myself around physical alibis as much as possible.

Their plan almost worked. My Japanese professor initially believed the stories until I broke down crying in front of him in his office. He may be the only person who didn’t turn me away. I managed to prove my innocence with him and the rest of the faculty, and several of them went to the administration about what was going on. This was targeted harassment, and against the school’s conduct code. Nothing was done.

The students weren’t deterred. They continued to lob false claims against me, none of them sticking. Eventually it escalated to the students calling in a false gun threat on me, like I was or could be an active shooter! The head of security tried to have something done about this, but he too was rebuffed. I was told in no uncertain terms that the fact that I was homeless was seen as a boon to the administration because economically edging me out would likely make me just go away. They had no intention of punishing any of the other students.

Eventually they drafted their own story supposedly written by me. Some kind of rape fantasy story in a cabin. Again, I was tipped off, and with this in hand one of the administrators relented and had me file a Title IX against the students. I was assured that the Title IX coordinator would investigate it fully, and that if they needed to punish the students they would, but otherwise they would make them stop. Then, nothing. I was called into the dean’s office, this time with a full confession from the ex-girlfriend as she had broken down previously and admitted to everything in chat.

Yet when the dean took one look at the folder with the printed out confession, she slammed it closed and accused me of coercing this out of her somehow. She claimed that there was no way I could have obtained a confession of this nature normally, and that even if it were true it would look bad for the school if they had a group of mostly young girls apologize to an older man after accusing him of sexual misconduct. I told her I feared for my safety as the girl had been bringing other students into the classroom to intimidate me. I was told that as an older man, I should be able to handle myself and that my safety wasn’t the school’s concern. I was then kicked out of her office.

She was allowed to graduate despite violating four expulsion-worthy conduct codes. She and the other girl who accused me of stalking both made large donations to the school shortly after graduating.

I lost the basement soon afterwards because my time ran out. The pedometer on my phone logged over 800 miles of walking between shelters as I wandered around Atlanta for weeks. Work wasn’t forthcoming. I did some freelance work that was all slow to pay, if it paid at all. I lost almost all of my possessions. I was attacked twice, once in a shelter, and once on the street with a box cutter. I lost nearly 30 pounds. Eventually, before the next semester started, I found myself back at the university where I begged for some kind of housing aid. Instead, the dean used a text message conversation where I begged the girl who lied about the stalking to come clean so this madness could end as an excuse to deny me any help.

I broke down crying again. I had walked so far just to beg for help. I was given a soda and some power bars and sent on my way. I found a friend’s apartment an hour and a half away and managed to convince him to let me stay on his couch. I made this trek on foot nearly every day during the next semester, defiantly attempting to stay in school.

This place that was once a haven was ruined for me. Everywhere I went, people eyed me with suspicion or hate. The rumors spread fast. People opted out of classes because I was in them. Those who were friendly with me one day would suddenly be afraid to talk to me the next after running into a member of the group.

That’s when I was given a set of chat logs from my former friends. It turned out they were relaying my location on campus in real time. Jokes were being made about me being shot. These weren’t even made by the same core people from the previous semester. The destruction of my character was so total that entirely new groups of people had dedicated themselves to hating me. Furthermore, there were regular open readings of the rape fantasy story in the dorms, drinks and snacks provided.

I was starving and broken, physically and mentally. I tried to reach out online for assistance on Reddit, only to discover that my account had been doxxed and the students pleaded with people not to help me claiming I was schizophrenic. I filed a police report over the stalking and harassment, yet still nothing was done. I sent emails to the president of the school and the most that was done was that one of the students was sanctioned, but she wasn’t even removed from my class. The students believed that two Title IX’s had been filed against me, and when I had all of the paperwork pulled and proved that the opposite was true, people went ballistic again.

That’s when I found out that the Title IX I filed hadn’t been investigated at all. This was in clear violation of the Department of Education (DoE) laws on the matter. It showed a clear message. No matter what end of a Title IX you were on, if you were a man they didn’t work for you. I filed a complaint with the DoE Office of Civil Rights, and that has pushed the school around a little, but so far, it hasn’t borne any fruit.

But I discovered something through this process — the one thing that everyone who has hurt me, during this event or in the past, was afraid of was the truth. Everything was done to the end to hide one fact. One dirty ugly truth no one wants to admit. That I am a victim. That I am their victim.

I have had people plead with me and yell at me for taking on that label. The informant that gave me the info on the rape fantasy story told me I couldn’t call myself a victim because I was a man. I was told, almost verbatim, that I absolutely must let them kick me while I was down, and that I had to take it because I was a man by a school official. That I shouldn’t scream, that I couldn’t cry. Those are the same things a rapist would say to any woman as she was being held down.

There were no battered shelters for me because I am a man. There are few advocacy groups, and they don’t have many victories under their belt in this fight. The one weapon I have left is my voice. I am not the only one out here suffering like this. By the time you finished reading my story, hundreds of men are being sexually and emotionally abused by those closest to them. We are taught to suck it up and stay silent, but that’s the worst thing we can do. We have to talk about this. We can’t stay silent anymore. I can’t stay silent anymore.

My name is Zachary Freeman. I am a victim, and I’m not afraid to talk about it anymore.