I'm feeling slightly sick
 

I have just discovered that a past boyfriend (about a 3 year relationship, around 15 years ago) has been convicted as a serial child sex offender. Victims include immediate family members and it has been going on since WAY before I knew him.
So far so bad, and I am appalled and so so sorry for the victims and their families.
What is really making me feel sick, however, is that I recall that he asked and I let him completely shave my fanny once before lovemaking. I thought it odd, but clearly it was a symptom of his sexual preferences. In a strange way I feel violated, but I cannot share this with anyone because ... well, TMI for my current partner, or anyone else I know IRL.

:vomit:

Owwww. Yeah - that's kind of icky.

Oh wow. I can absolutely see how you feel sick over that. Here is something that might mitigate it (not his crime, but your yuck factor): maybe he was trying, in his own weak way, to stop what he was doing. Maybe by getting you to shave, he was trying to recreate his kink with an adult woman in a way that would be satisfying enough that he could stop doing what he knew was horrific. He only did it once because obviously it didn't work. But maybe he hated himself, as many pedophiles do, and wanted in his heart more than anything for you to be enough to magically "cure" him.

Or it could be he just prefers shaved or found it to be otherwise interesting and all that other stuff has nothing to do with it.

That just makes me want to cry, Clodfobble. And yes, Undertoad, that is what I thought at the time.

Some time after we split (because I can't transit from lovers to friends without a break) the culprit and I became friends again and he was very kind and helpful to me at a very traumatic point in my life. You could not imagine a less devious, kinder person, less likely to put his own interests over those of others. Or so I thought. So I am also grieving for the loss of a friend.
And then I find myself in church this afternoon (not my belief system, but an obligation to others took me there). It is the culprit's belief system and I begin to wonder how you square off the two in your head. He was, by all accounts, full of remorse and basically gave himself up at the first indication of the accusations; is now imprisoned for four years (at least two), with corrective treatment and a ban on contacting the victims for life afterwards. And then there is all this talk of forgiveness around me and I think: "Poor bastard. He has lost his family (all of it), friends, job, everything. What he needs is a friend". Part of me wants to be that friend - who has continued to see all the good in him (which there was).

I would say there's nothing wrong with being that friend, assuming you have no children. You are not at risk of being victimized yourself. And you're certainly not going to legitimize his behavior. And if everyone else leaves him, the only people he will have left when he gets out are people who would legitimize the behavior, and he will end up in their company eventually. Better to be a checkpoint of sanity for someone who needs it, if you think you're up to the task.

How does your current partner and everyone else you know IRL fit into that?

There you go dragging logic and reason into it.

;)

The only bit I cannot share with my current partner and friends IRL is the fanny-shaving episode because, well, TMI.
Partner knows all of the people involved and the whole story. I have mentioned continuing the friendship to partner, and we're both thinking about it, but his initial reaction was neutral-to-sympathetic.
As to my other friends IRL - very few of them know culprit so I don't see that as an issue, and there are even fewer (one, in fact) that I would even think of discussing it with. Among my acquaintance there is a victim's parent (also an ex-partner of culprit, and who told me of these dreadful events), and that victim. But I do not see these people at all frequently and it would be easy for me not to share with them my continued friendship with culprit. Indeed victim's parent expressed, amongst many other things, pity for culprit, but I still would screen them from my contact with culprit, if I chose to get in touch with him.

Sounds like a catch 22. To make an informed choice, you need to answer a key question. To answer a key question, you need information that you may not be able to get because it constitutes TMI. Did culprit; or, did culprit not shave his other ex-partner's fanny too?

You seem to have missed the fact that the conversation has moved on a bit from the fanny-shaving. More central to my thoughts now are whether or not to extend friendship to culprit.

Au contraire, the conversation has moved on to acceptable substitute behavior that may help culprit stay on the wagon post incarceration. Why else extend friendship to a registered sex offender if not to that end?

I'm not offering him, nor interested in his, "acceptable substitute behavior". I'm offering friendship.

Ah, a passive enabler, of course.

Have you considered that culprit may be better off without your friendship. It didn't previously work for him with his affliction, which is central to his life now, even if in other ways it worked for you.

Umm....different context and an entirely different relationship founded on entirely different expectations and levels of self-knowledge and for an entirely different purpose.

Which establishes the MO here of: that person may have criminally abused others; but, they were nice to me so we can still be friends.

It is good that you are encouraging me to examine my motives carefully, sexobon. I do not believe that I am a passive enabler, and it certainly has crossed my mind that culprit may prefer a complete break with all of his former life. In which case not answering any initial contact from me would achieve that.

That's not my line of thinking. It's more along the lines of culprit committed crimes and did dreadful things for which he is now a) being punished and b) receiving treatment. He has lost absolutely everything, and may be in need of a friend.
It seems to me that you believe that culprit does not deserve to have friends because of the severity of his crimes. If that is the case, we will have to differ on that point.

Sure. Right, exactly. And so what?

We behave this way all the time. Lots of people have been convicted of crimes, and are later befriended. So what? Restrict the pool of possible friends to perfect, flawless people?

It seems you want the reader of your post to infer that a criminal conviction is grounds for permanent disassociation--or permanent condemnation.

It seems you want to keep at least this conversation very narrowly focused on his crimes. That's cool, if that's what interests you the most, but it seems that anonymous has a wider range of aspects of this person that are important, including friendship-worthiness and an informed understanding of the person's past, likely among other aspects. No person is only the sum of their criminal convictions. Choosing to qualify or disqualify a person as a possible friend usually includes a lot more than that.

@anonymous:

Culprit is highly skilled at deceiving friends. That's not going to change because of a stint in the pokey. If you are still friends with culprit without being open about it, you will be deceiving others as well (a lie of omission is still a lie). Culprit may come to rely on that. If culprit relapses, your hidden involvement with him will be uncovered and your credibility will fall with his. The case is that there are bad ways of trying to do good deeds that can end up causing more harm than good. They occur when someone wants to be a good Samaritan; but, also wants to take convenient shortcuts. You may not be right for this.

Anon said her partner does know about the proposed friendship. It's only the specific detail about their former sex life which has not been discussed, and doesn't need to be in my opinion. Partner obviously knows she did have sex with Culprit as a logical part of their previous relationship; no one is being deceived by simply leaving out graphic details.

I don't find that relevant to my statement having to do with a former significant other coming back into her life and her not being able to disclose it to any of her other friends except for one and that one is only a maybe.

I question they assumption that shaving your pussy was because of his predilection for children. A awful lot of guys like shaved women. I doubt you were aiding and abetting by complying with that request. :headshake

Agreed. It's guys like him that give pussy shaving a bad rap.

But seriously.
Personally, I wouldn't befriend him. There are some shortcomings, peccadilloes, and foibles one can overlook with respect to one's associates; this isn't really one of them, I'm afraid.

A cow orker once told me about a guy he grew up with who beat a guy to death and threw him off a train bridge because the guy came on to him. My cow orker said the murderer was basically a good guy. WTF?


Unless you plan to go full Mother Theresa you might want your friends and associates to share your values.

I'm sure most of you will be relieved to hear I had a "Well ... DUH!" moment today. Current partner is a teacher, so there is no way that I could imperil that by offering [continued] friendship to a [now] convicted pedophile. So that's that decided.
@sexobon - certainly your comments about his skill in deception, and that I may not be the right person to do this are very fair. The argument that he might be better off without *my* friendship, without any sort of link to his previous life is, I think, a strong one. As regards *me* being deceptive - I have very few conversations about my relationships with "friends", I have very few friends, most are acquaintances, so this would have been a topic which simply did not come up, rather than one I was actively suppressing. Also, I don't understand what you meant by "convenient shortcuts" but it hardly matters now.
Thank you all for your input - it has been very helpful in clarifying the situation. I can thoroughly recommend the anonymous account for getting things off your chest discreetly.