[jstarfish]

I investigate these complaints for a living. Please don't date anybody you work with. We'll both be happier for it.

The fun always starts after a breakup and the other party doesn't want to see you at work anymore. There is usually no penalty for falsely reporting anyone to HR for harassment "in good faith," and there are likely anti-retaliation policies protecting malicious claimants from punishment for "misrepresentation" of any situation. Your side of the story will be recorded for the sake of appearance, and ignored. The system is completely broken.

If you're sure they're your soul mate, changing departments is not enough, leave now, on your own terms. You do not want a common HR department acting as a mediator for your domestic disputes. You're asking to be made unemployed and homeless.

[anon78901]

Happened to me. Utter, utter nightmare. As she seemed to winning she got overconfident and started making claims that were easy to objectively disprove. She was thrown out. She broke down and confessed, after it was too late. Not a work situation though. I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho. It really turned my life upside down for awhile. I wanted to quit anyway, to get away from the whole thing.

[jstarfish]

Sorry to hear it buddy. Not the first time I've seen that.

I'd say it gets better but it is genuinely traumatic to be attacked out of nowhere for no apparent reason. There's literally nothing you can do to avoid random acts of violence. Even becoming a hermit isn't a solution; now you're that creepy guy who lives in a van by the river who gets blamed for diddling all the kids.

Nomadic life is safer, as long as you don't draw attention and move along before anybody learns how to exploit you.

I hope you find peace and have since landed on your feet.

> I don't know why she did it, we weren't on bad terms or anything, I guess she just felt like it. Just a total psycho

Also not the first time I've seen (or experienced) that either.

I'm seeing more instances of this sort of behavior exhibited by the borderline personality disorder crowd without consequence in popular media. Awkwafina does it in one of her shows, Pete Davison does it in "King of Staten Island," both in relation to getting rid of potential step-parents in publicly-humiliating manners. It's happened to me too in this context. It's really disturbing behavior to see promoted, and now I see it being leveraged at work too as a means of eliminating undesirable colleagues.

Acts of social terrorism, we grant the euphemism "cancellation." There's really nothing you can do but live in fear of it, because there are no rules and our institutions have no integrity.

[lazide]

It’s not just work - it’s any community venue that other party considers ‘essential’.

Church, Dr’s offices, the gym, even a grocery store (if they ‘need it’) is a potential social ‘war zone’.

Oh, and Reddit too.

[baobabKoodaa]

Quitting a gym has lower cost than quitting a job, though. Especially if the "quitting" does not occur in amicable circumstances.

[lazide]

You wouldn’t get a chance to quit either one, probably.

The job might fire the accuser - they might have an incentive to investigate.

At the gym you might get arrested and then banned, with no one interested in doing followup to figure out the actual truth - just have you released after it was clear it was fake. The gym wouldn't want anything to do with you either way afterwards.

[baobabKoodaa]

I don't disagree with any of that. I'm just saying the repercussions for whatever things like that happen, they will be lower at the gym compared to the workplace.

[lazide]

I think you might want to re-read my comment.

[baobabKoodaa]

I have now re-read your comment. I did not find anything there that I would've misunderstood. Can you explain to me what you feel I misunderstood?

[jstarfish]

Of course. It works at every level, all the way down to family. Other advice here suggests joining groups to meet people, but anytime you two are under the same reporting umbrella, you're vulnerable to malicious claims when they want to be rid of you.

It's a sad state of affairs; I don't have a solution. Private citizens have no business running tribal justice systems. They used to call this form of abuse triangulation (but that term has a wildly different meaning with this crowd).

https://www.healthline.com/health/narcissistic-triangulation

[lazide]

Near as I can tell, the way this usually works out is each gender ends up 'policing' itself to prevent the worst abuses.

In most environments, the older women police the younger women, older men police the younger men, etc.

Good luck doing that online though, or even in the current dynamic.

[golly_ned]

About “asking to be made unemployed and homeless”: do you take punitive action against coworkers who are together or broken up?

[jstarfish]

They're never together at the time of the complaint, but I don't see it mattering-- if a dude is sending dick pics to anyone while on the clock then it's an issue.

So these investigations usually focus on verifying whether he sent them at the time she said he did. Timestamps get forged or omitted in phone screenshots and personal phones are beyond our forensic purview. It's all hearsay. If I can't discredit the evidence, it stands, and the accused is usually terminated. Welcome to Kangaroo Court.

I ate some shit recently when a guy was accused of emailing dick pics to his ex from his work email. I believed her story (men are pigs, right?) until a colleague looked deeper at the email headers; she saw that the ex was the one sending the pictures to him. The social media narratives we're told and the shit I've seen in the last decade could not be more opposite. Men do some seriously gross shit at work for real, just not anything surfaced by the reporting process. That pipeline has just been a torrent of bullshit.

For what it's worth it's not always a romance thing. Bad complaints are always filed by women, but their targets are evenly split across men and women. False claims ensnare bosses and colleagues just the same as icky exes.