The man, who published the article anonymously, says it all began as just another night at the club.
“I was standing at the line in the bar,” the man begins. “I walked past the line of guys waiting at the well to order a drink and squeezed in between. …I got my drink and noticed him sitting on the barstool staring at me. I asked if I could sit down and he spread his legs in his seat and I literally plopped myself down.”
After some flirty banter, the man got back up to go and join his friends. It wasn’t until closing time that he saw the guy again, waiting for him outside the bar.
“As I exited the bar he was just standing there on the curb with his hands in his pockets. He told me he was just visiting town, he was here for work and was staying just for the night at a popular hotel just a few blocks away.”
The two agreed to go back to his room for a nightcap.
“We kissed in the elevator and we kissed in the hallway of the hotel right before he opened the door with his key,” he writes. “As soon as he shut the door behind me he flipped the lock on the top of the door. I wondered instantly: Why?”
Things quickly turned violent.
“If you do leave here in one piece,” the guy threatened, “you will be the first of many others who never got to leave. If I decide to let you live, if I decide to not disfigure you, if I decide not to kill you, you will be the first.”
Terrified for his life, the man resolved to simply do what his attacker wanted.
“It was not fun, it was not easy, and it was not by choice,” he writes. “I followed through with the games, with the threats, with the hair tugging.”
“That popular hotel was on my route to work everyday,” he writes, “so for years I took the long way to work. If I mistakenly drove on that street even close to the hotel, my heart would start beating out of my chest, my hands would shake and my mouth would get dry.”
“I was raped,” he concludes. “I knew it then and I know it now.”
“It changes you.”
