I was raped by my ex boyfriend. His name is Scott, better known as Stryder7x. Here’s my story.

Before people begin shouting at their monitors about how “relationship rape isn’t real”, “Stryder would never do this”, “you’re doing this for attention”, or anything else, I invite you to read my story. I know some won’t, I know some will and still won’t believe me, and I know many will hate me. But above that, I know so many of Scott’s followers are young and impressionable. I am coming forward for them, and for the sanity of other girls he may hurt if I do not do this. I am sharing my full truth, and as is human nature, you may do with it what you will.

I'm gonna take another quick pause here to put out a HUGE trigger/content warning. I wanted to be as open and real as possible when I wrote this, and I do go into a fair amount of detail. I'm mostly hoping to open people's eyes to what falls under abuse, and help people in a similar situation to realize these things are not healthy or normal. So, if you have any trauma surrounding rape, abuse, etc, I do encourage you to either stop reading, or go ahead with caution.

Scott and I began dating in April of 2015(April 11th to be exact). I was 16 years old, and he was 19. We were already close friends, this was well before any YouTube or twitch fame, and I initiated the whole relationship. I’ve initiated most of my relationships, I suppose I’ve never been afraid of making the first move. We kept it a secret for a few weeks, in case things went south quickly, we didn’t want our mutual friends to be stuck in an awkward spot. But after about a month, our friends were let in, they were happy for us, and things were honestly amazing.

This was my first “serious” relationship, and I was a certified virgin. I had done my fair share of kissing/making out, and just generally being a teenager, but things had never gotten sexual with any of my little flings. Something you should know about me early on, is that I was not a desirable person in my youth. I was an outcast(as I’m sure most everyone on twitch was) so I fell all over myself for anyone that showed me interest, either platonically or romantically. I was also struggling a lot with my sexuality at this time(I was identifying most with bisexuality at this point). This all becomes extremely important later.

I remember the week where everything took a turn so vividly. My parents were on a cruise, and it was the first time they left my older brother and I alone for an extended period of time. Scott had decided this was the perfect time to begin asking for sexual favors over video/pictures/text, etc. I was incredibly uncomfortable with this, which i made explicitly clear from the start. I was underage, I had no sexual experience(he didn’t either), and I was honestly very uncomfortable with my body. Possibly TMI(this whole story is, but I couldn't really avoid that) but I didn’t even begin masturbating until I was around 16/17. I didn’t have a problem with sex, I just wasn’t comfortable with it yet.

This asking turned into begging which turned into fighting. After about a week of sending paragraphs back and forth and both of us being completely unrelenting, we got on a video call, and things turned sour quick. We were arguing about it once again, and he began crying. Claiming “this is what relationships are” and that this is what he “expected” out of a relationship. “How can you possibly love me if you aren’t willing to do this for me?!”. I was so hurt, confused, and scared. I wanted to be a good girlfriend so so badly. I wanted to do everything I could to make everyone around me happy, regardless of the cost to me(this is where I do accept some of the blame, although my therapist tells me that I was too young to fully understand and that I was being groomed). So eventually, I did remove some clothing. I should’ve ended everything right then and there, but I didn’t know how. I cried myself to sleep that night.

Thus begins the snowball effect. The things he wanted began to get more and more involved and intense and I had to move into my bathroom(the lock on my bedroom door is broken) to do the calls(I had not sent any photographs, once again I was underage). I would often have very severe panic attacks during these calls, with my camera turned on, so he saw it all. I’m talking completely immobilized on the floor, heaving, sobbing, unable to breath panic attacks. And he would always ask me to keep going once they were done. I will admit, because he argued this many times, that once I did tell him to push me out of my comfort zone and I should be okay, but I never(to my recollection) said to ask me to continue after a panic attack.

It was around this time that he began making disparaging comments about my appearance as well. I was to wear my hair down(I had very long hair at the time) during all video calls(even if they weren’t sexual), I should be wearing makeup, and he wanted me to lose weight. I’ve struggled with my weight since hitting puberty, as I was bone thin as a kid and became quite curvy at about 13/14. I also have struggled with anorexia and bulimia in the past, which he knew about. All of this, the comments, the calls, the panic attacks, goes on for about nine months until we finally saw each other in person.

AGDQ 2016. The worst GDQ I experienced. Scott and I roomed together, just the two of us, and any of my friends can vouch that we left the room maybe 5 times total the whole week. Which is so far from my normal GDQ behavior(I wanna see all my best friends, obviously). He claimed illness on the first official day(Sunday, so the day after we got there) and we spent the day holed up, watching shows on his laptop. He was desperate to do sexual acts. Mind you, at the time, he was very firm in remaining a virgin until marriage. But he wanted to do everything else. Both giving and receiving. He would at times perform oral on me for hours, because I was just too tense and uncomfortable to get into it(I would express that I wanted to stop, and we wouldn't). Every night, as we laid down to sleep(spooning), he would readjust himself to align his penis directly between my thighs. I would move, he would say it was the only thing that was comfortable, and I would wait until he fell asleep to move and not be in that position anymore.

I explicitly told him before this meetup that I never wanted to be woken up to sex or being touched. Never. He expressed that he wanted me to wake him up to it, which I never did, because I was uncomfortable with it. I did, however wake up one morning to his hand fully in my underwear, groping me and trying to insert fingers. This still haunts me when I sleep, and I wake up at least twice a week to a panic attack, feeling like I’m back in a hotel bed, with someone touching me in a way I told them I did not want. This happened a couple more times, even though I expressed that I did. Not. Want. It.

He spent a week at my house after that GDQ(I live about 2 hours from the old venue) and I honestly don’t remember much of that week. A lot of this was 4 years ago, mind you. I’m going to glaze over a lot of the time in between visits unless something notable happened, because it’s all the same with the calls, panic attacks, appearance comments, etc. I visited him in April of 2016 for about a week. I was on my period that week so I was able to avoid some contact, and his parents did not allow us to sleep in the same room together, so I avoided the night stuff as well. I do distinctly remember doing an act in his closet and breaking down sobbing on the floor after(if you thought the panic attacks were exclusive to on calls, you thought wrong. He saw them. In person) and him leaving me there. I felt like nothing but a glorified sex doll to him.

He visited me again in June of 2016, forgoing SGDQ 2016(which absolutely broke my heart) for about two weeks. Again, I don’t remember much, I know we still had not had vaginal intercourse at this point but were sticking to the same foreplay type things. He also liked to bring up our sex life to our friends. Asking friends in relationships if their girlfriends had trouble getting off, how often they did it, how they enjoyed sexting, phone sex, that kind of stuff. He would also talk to my friends about this, friends that he met when he came to visit me. I had told him it didn’t thrill me and I didn’t want it to be such public knowledge that I struggled with things, and he continued doing it.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I didn’t break up with him, tell someone, something! I get it, I feel the same way when I look back. Truth be told, I thought I was in the wrong. I felt broken. Girls are meant to like sex and provide sex, so why did I struggle so much with both. I thought it wouldn’t get better regardless of who I was with and that clearly he loved me and I loved him so it was okay right? Wrong.

I did try breaking up with him summer of 2016. Some friends had talked to me about how I clearly want to experiment with girls and that I’m holding myself back. I agreed, and I had my own reasons that they didn’t know about(literally everything above). I texted him after he had gone to bed, saying that I wanted to talk, and to text me when he woke up. I stayed up all night until I eventually passed out and was awoken to my mom shaking me, telling me Scott had texted her. He told her what I said and he was scared so he had her wake me. I called him immediately and told him all my reasons. He broke down crying, telling me that I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to him, that he loves me, that I’m all he has, and that he has no point in living if he doesn’t have me. He threatened his own life a few more times and we finally came to the decision that we would continue the relationship but he would stop demanding sexual favors. The demanding did stop in a sense, but he became much more creative in the ways he would pressure me into it. He would tell me of health ailments that could be remedied by me doing these things(porn wasn’t good enough apparently) and wore me down until I snapped.

October 2016. I remember this night in such great detail. I was doing my nightly routine(running the dishwasher, letting the dogs out to pee before bed, etc) and I completely broke down. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t see, I just laid on the floor with my dogs and cried. Everything just hit me all at once(I still at this point did not realize the depth of abuse, just that I was hurting) and I texted a friend. I told him I needed someone who wasn’t tangled in our(Scott and I's) friend group and that I just had to get the story out. He called me immediately and sat back and listened while I told him everything. I think I went on for 2-3 hours, stopping for his occasional question and my occasional panic. I’ll never forget the moment when I finished speaking and he said to me “Gab. You’re in an emotionally, mentally, and sexual abusive relationship and you need to get out. It could take a while, and you’ll need to be strong, but I’ll be there the whole time. You deserve so much more than this”. I absolutely lost it. I wasn’t crazy. I wasnt broken. I wasn’t to blame. This didn’t have to be the rest of my life. The weight that came off my chest was absolutely freeing. It’s a feeling that will be with me forever.

I called Scott after and I told him. I told him if he didn’t get his act together, that we were over. He was furious. He treated it as a betrayal of trust and said I should’ve come to him(I had. So many times). In the same conversation, he began crying, calling himself an abuser, and saying that he was just copying the behaviors of his own ex(whether this is true is neither here nor there. I’ve been in three relationships since this and have not once done anything like this to any of them). He swore to be better and I gave him a chance. That was another mistake on my part but I did love him, and there were good parts of our relationship. Not only that but we shared a friend group, and I didn’t want to lose the people that meant the entire world to me.

Fast forward to AGDQ 2017. Things were actually starting to look up. We had a roommate for this GDQ so we had more socializing, and he wasn’t nearly as pressuring at night because there was someone with us(the thighs thing was still happening. That never didn’t happen when we slept in the same bed). We ended up having sex for the first time at this GDQ, and I would call it consensual. The first time. It happened other times that I was not for it and I would disassociate midway through. Essentially I would forget who I was, who he was, where we were, what was going on, and I would just lie there, unable to do anything to stop what was happening. He knew this happened and would still continue. He stayed at my house again for a week after, and again, I didn’t remember it too much, but it was the same general stuff that had already been happening.

I’m gonna take a moment to go over some of the non sexual manipulation that happened. He has hacked into my email, my discord, my Twitter, my Skype, among other things, multiple times. How do I know this? My email told me the location of attempted login, and it was his hometown. At the time, the only person I knew of from there, was him. And they were all hacked within a week of each other. And the only person messaged on any of them? Scott. This was still before true YouTube fame(though his career was about to take off at this point), and he was only messaged relationship stuff, never anything else. When I brought all this up, he decided that I was paranoid and completely convinced me of it. I was afraid to leave my house for an entire week at one point because clearly I had a stalker and I should fear for my life.

One of the most frightening moments of my life was something he did. We often slept on calls together, since we would just talk until we fell asleep. He had already fallen asleep, and I was still awake. Suddenly, he woke up, talking, and telling me that “all i care about is sex and you don’t even provide that. I should just fucking kill myself because my girlfriend doesn’t even like me enough to have sex with me”, and things like that, for about 5 minutes. Then he went silent. I’m sure if you’ve watched his videos, you’ve noticed how deep his voice is. It was much deeper when he said these things. After he went quiet, I took a second to collect myself, then asked “what???” Over and over. He wasn’t answering. Finally I started shouting his name and texting him. He finally “woke up” sounding very groggy and asking what the matter was. I was pissed and wanted to know what his problem was. He claimed to have no idea what I was talking about. This happened 5 or 6 times.

He would also blow up my phone very often. I would go downstairs to hang out with my best friend/adopted sister, and he would be afraid that I wasn’t answering his texts. Usually he’d send me about 300 before he would text my “sister” asking her if I was okay. I obviously was, I didn’t have a car or my license and I didn’t do anything. This happened very often.

Okay, now that those are out of the way, lets go to April 2017. The last time he visited my house. He came for two weeks specifically to go to an indoor color guard competition and watch me perform/compete. I remember having a few panic attacks during sexual activities this week, and usually I would ask him to leave and finish or I would leave so he could. I’m not stupid, I know blue balls sucks(though he made it out to be much more painful than other friends have told me it is), but sometimes my panic attacks were too bad. He got really upset at me very early on in this week and threatened to not go to my competition at all. I also fainted at a point this week(I have low blood pressure) and when I told him that, he stayed in bed and got mad at me for making an excuse to not have sex with him. I distinctly remember stopping midway through some form of sex/foreplay, running to the bathroom, throwing up, and then staring at myself in the mirror while crying and telling myself that I was a lesbian(spoiler, I am).

After that visit, I told him I wanted to take a little break away from each other. We were still dating, I just didn’t wanna talk as much. He accepted at first, but quickly went back to texting and calling me just as much. I was getting very fed up at this point and I decided to give him one last chance, which brings us to this last in person visit.

SGDQ 2017. We spent a week there, then went back to his town with two friends to have an extra week of fun. SGDQ was okay-ish. He wasn’t too pushy about sex(I believe we had sex once while on that trip, and I did not want it, and that was known), we had a roommate again, and I did spend a lot of time with friends. I had already decided by the end of that week that it was over. I was sick of being forced into sex against my will(it didn’t come to my attention until much later that it was truly rape) and I wanted out.

The week we spent in his hometown was honestly the worst week of my life. I was desperately sick with a stomach bug, a vicious cold, my asthma had been acting up, and I was absolutely miserable with Scott. Problem was, I was depending on him for the whole week. I was staying in his house, he was driving me to the airport, etc. I remember him asking me multiple times that week if I was going to break up with him after I got home, and I did say no. I lied. Okay. I’ll admit that. I wanted out. But I didn’t want to get kicked out onto the streets or anything worse. I truly didn’t know if he would try to do something worse.

Two days after I got home, I broke up with him. The breakup was incredibly messy, I ended up dating one of our friends after briefly, which became a lot of drama, because nobody knew my side. To everyone else, I was this awful bitch that broke up with someone, then stole his friend. Really, this friend was one of the only people that truly knew Scott as I did, and he helped me immensely in that time(we have since broken up, and I came out as a lesbian, but we’re still very good friends and I still love him dearly). Scott made many threats to his own life, and possibly to ours in this time, and a lot of my friends did take his side(understandably). It wasn’t until March of 2018 that I told them my side on my private Twitter.

Nobody doubted that I was telling the truth. They all had to gently point out that it was rape. They all held me close and protected me and loved me, despite this monster I have in my past that haunts me daily. I struggle with PTSD, disassociation, and panic from this experience on a daily basis. It took me ages to be able to sleep next to someone else comfortably, without having a full blown panic attack. And I still do, often. All of my partners since have gone through many panic attacks with me, and never have any of them tried to pursue sex with me after. I’ve had to stop midway through sex sometimes because I become overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, panic, and I’m back with Scott, being forced to do something against my will. Someone not physically fighting back does not make something less than rape. Just because I was coerced into it, does not mean it was consensual. I was guilted into doing so many things that I am not comfortable with. I was raped. Repeatedly. And this will be with me for the rest of my life.

For anyone that’s ever been in a similar place, or maybe still is in a place like this, you are strong enough. I know how impossible it seems. It feels like the world is against you, and your abuser is so much bigger. It feels like the weight of just staying alive through everything is crushing you. Tell a friend, a parent, a teacher, a mentor, people you trust on the internet, anyone. You can make it through. And though my life is hard, and I struggle with my past daily, it is heaven compared to my life back then. I am a survivor. And I have my whole life ahead of me. And so do you. We are stronger than this. Thank you for reading.

Gab/Gabri/Gableda124