Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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The reality, of course, was that he was no underdog. He was just a sociopath, a serial sexual offender. He was the powerful one. I was his victim and the true underdog. But I couldn’t see that, for he had groomed me to see the world his way.

Graham had been very clever. After physically assaulting me, he didn’t come out and tell me he was gay. He simply referred to “people like us,” leaving it to me to connect the dots (a disgusting metaphor given what he had just done to, or rather on, me). He left me to process what had happened and reach my own conclusions. He hadn’t presented me with something I could reject out of hand. Rather, he positioned his own desire for a sexual relationship as an inevitable conclusion for me to reach myself, for me to conclude that I wanted what he wanted.

His implications that I too was gay, that people like us needed to stick together and support one another, that we needed to keep our secret, and that I needed to come back to him for his support all fit into the narrative that he had constructed from the information I had given him over the past months. Graham had slowly made his world my world, and my world was now being further defined by him as he wanted me to see it. In this construct, his physical actions toward me made perfect sense. He was bringing me out of my shell and showing me my true self. He was liberating me.