Dear Joshua, I Need to Share My Truth, Even if Nobody Believes Me

Dear Joshua,

You raped me. You stole my virginity in your car. I was fifteen. You were nineteen. You parked between our school and the police station— bold choice. It was raining. I remember pulling my sweats up in a panic, not wanting to stain blood on your seats in your new Chevy Cruze. I stepped out onto the cold, wet concrete in just my socks, dazed, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

You must have known I was unraveling because you wasted no time. “That wasn’t sex,” you said as you drove me to the library. You were right. It wasn’t. You raped me. But I didn’t understand that then. I was fifteen.

You dropped me off and even had the audacity to hug me goodbye. I ran to the bathroom, shaking. I couldn’t even process what I was feeling. Fear? Pain? Heartbreak?
Betrayal? I knew what had happened-I saw it, I felt it. But then you told me it didn’t. So what was I supposed to believe?

Then I walked out of that bathroom, and there was my mother. The speed at which I had to put myself back together, act normal, pretend I wasn’t breaking-that was almost worse than what you did to me. That was the moment everything inside me started to rot. I became someone else that day. Someone quieter, angrier, lonelier. Someone my mother no longer recognized.

When I finally found the courage to tell my best friend, she believed me-at first. But then she “asked around.” Our friends asked you. And suddenly, she changed her mind. “I think you’re lying,” she said. He was a Soccer Star. Joshua would never do something like that. Because Joshua had a girlfriend. Because Joshua was a “good guy.”

And that was it. No one believed me. And for years, I let that silence me. I let it convince me that maybe I really was to blame. That whatever pain or regret I felt was my own fault. That I should’ve known better. But I was fifteen, Josh.

And you weren’t done.

You texted me like nothing had happened, and I was so mortified that I played along. I let you gaslight me into believing that maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I had imagined it. So when you asked to go for a walk that summer, I said yes. We were neighbors, after all. No car this time. No place to hide.

We didn’t even make it back to my house before you found another dark corner between two buildings. You kissed me. Then you pushed me down to my knees and forced yourself on me again. I felt sick. I was shaking. I was only fifteen.

And then you walked me home. Like nothing happened.

Joshua, you changed my life. Not in the way people usually mean that. You shattered me. You stole things from me I can never get back. You took my trust, my voice, my self-worth. You made me doubt my own reality. You made me carry this weight alone for thirteen years, through every failed friendship, every dark thought, every therapy session that never quite fixed what you broke.

And now? Now you have a wife. Kids. A whole life that I doubt carries even a whisper of guilt for what you did to me. I wonder if your wife knows who she married. I wonder if your children will grow up believing their father is a good man. I don’t wish pain on them. They don’t deserve to carry the shame that belongs to you.

But I do hope that if they ever find this—if anyone who still believes in you reads this—they at least sit with the possibility that I’m telling the truth. And if they don’t? Well, it won’t matter anyway.

Because I know.

And now, so do they.