ChemX · @imChemX
2nd Jul 2020 from TwitLonger
My relationship / experience with RockCrock
I am incredibly scared to post this because I have seen the backlash that other victims have received upon outing their abusers. I don't know if I will be able to handle the backlash or handle knowing that other people will know about what happened besides those I’ve personally confided in. However, I have been sitting on this for years and people deserve to know their favorite player is not the person they seem.
I met RockCrock in my freshman year of college in 2012; I was 18 and he was 23 at the time. Did this bother me? No, in my naive state I thought it was cool an older guy was interested in me and we began to talk. We hung out at our local video game club and also a board game club before meeting each other outside of the university programs. Early on I should have seen the red flags and I regret that I didn't whenever I think about it. Before we made it official he told me he was talking to another girl at the same time but he decided to go with me even though he found me kind of plain compared to the other girl. I was hurt by this but because all my past "relationships" before him were awful, so I somehow managed to justify him choosing me as a victory. We became an official couple and this would be my first actual serious relationship.
During my relationship with him, he did the following:
- Would tell me how to dress, my tops had to be low cut so cleavage was showing and usually bright colors.
- Would tell me what makeup I could or could not wear. If I wore lipstick it had to be pink because he liked pink and therefore it was the only color I could wear. It couldn't be "too much makeup" either, eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick was all I was allowed to wear.
- Told me what I could eat, how much I could, and the speed of which I eat. He actually would watch me eat to the point where now I eat much slower than most people. I have had to apologize to future partners after him about eating slowly and it's so embarrassing.
- I had to stay in his house for weeks on end despite having a dorm room of my own. I was isolated from my friends, I thought this was normal. I somehow managed to convince myself that the person I was seeing just didn't want me not by his side. I was so delusional he told me I "made it seem like I didn't want to go back to my dorm room". I remember having to beg to go back to my dorm room because my RA told me I didn't he would report it to the Housing Authority on campus because my dorm roommate said she hadn't seen me in a month.
- One day I found out he had some weird relationship with a teenager, the girl wasn't older than 14/15 at the time (she is not a part of the smash scene fyi). I confronted him about it personally and he told me that she didn't act like a teenager and they got along well. I told him I found it disgusting that the girl was a teenager and he was well above the age of 20. He said he thought it was fine and at this point, we were dating for well over half a year that he had such a good grasp on my mental health that he turned it around on me and blamed me for finding it out.
I would also like to state that during our relationship we took a break for a period of time because and I found out that he had reached out to the same girl who was still underage to communicate. I would then go on to post on a throwaway account on Reddit about this because he had isolated me from my friends that I had nobody to reach out to. They all told me I was being gaslighted and that he was a predator but my rose-colored glasses were so tight on my head that I let him convince me that I was to blame for our relationship not working out and this teenage girl was better than me and it was my fault. Do you know how shitty it feels to be jealous of a teenage girl? It was sickening, to want to be a minor that was also being preyed upon? Keep in mind I was still just 18 at the time and barely an adult myself. This would not be the last time he would make predatory remarks, there was a time we were at the mall in our local region and he pointed out two teenage girls and made comments about how their physical attractiveness compared to mine was better. I stated that they were underage and he brushed it off as me being insecure. I kept quiet because he truly ingrained in my head that somehow this was just another shortcoming of mine.
- Honestly, the thing that has held me back the most from making this public is when he sexually assaulted me. We were in the act of a sexual encounter and I had changed my mind and stated that I didn't want to do it anymore. It didn't matter, it happened anyway. I wish I could tell you all I wanted it, I wish I could so it would be easier to make it all go away. I didn't though, I laid there staring at the ceiling until he finished and I remember thinking that it was my fault and that I did it to myself. You never think one day it will happen to you until it does.
We broke up months while, unfortunately, my rose-colored glasses were still on tight. He dumped me by stating he couldn't handle my depression anymore and that he was sick of my bullshit. I tried to salvage the relationship by initiating a FWB relationship, but it didn't work out and I was so far from having any friends or my own sense of identity that I became suicidal. I knew if I didn't see a therapist I would truly just end it all. I ended up seeing a therapist for over a year, I cried in her office so many times asking her what I did wrong that made him leave me or what did I do in life to deserve any of the shit he did to me. It took so long to build myself back up and come to terms with what happened to me. I would see a car that looked like his on campus or in public and I would get tense and immediately watch my surroundings, this happened for months while I was with a previous partner.
I tried to remain friends with him throughout the next 6 years because I felt like I had to. Nobody would believe what I had to say because it would be the infamous Melee Ganondorf player and the girl he had dated in the past with no title to her name back then. This is not the case now, I spent years building up my region, I am a known tournament organizer in my own right, nobody can take that from me. It is my fucking job to protect my scene and the people at any event I work from people who will do what happened to me to someone else. That can't happen unless I am open and honest with what happened to me. I wish I could go back and tell myself at 18 to please not date him but I can't, it happened. I'm 26 now and I am still affected by what happened to me; I don't want pity. I just want abusers and predators out the fucking scene that I love, please.