2 years ago, I met this guy who I knew was trouble, but when we started talking, he would always act nice to me and make me laugh. I used to think I could make him change and turn him into a better person; a few months later we started dating. After about 3 months, we started getting into fights all the time and I kept telling him that I thought we should break up but he always came up with reasons why we shouldn’t, since t was my first relationship I just went with it and didn’t do anything. Soon after, he coerced me into having sex with him even though I had repeatedly told him I wanted to wait until I was a junior or senior in high school at LEAST (we were 15 and freshman).

After 6 months (April 2016), he started to talk down to me, tell me I was useless, and get mad at me for everything. I told him I wanted to break up with him and that he was emotionally abusive, but he pinned everything on ME and made me feel like it was MY fault everything had gone downhill so I stayed with him. Our relationship would work so that for a few weeks we would work really well together and the next few weeks we’d be fighting constantly. In June during one of our good weeks, we decided to have sex at this abandoned bridge. He drove us since I wasn’t able to drive yet. When we got there, I was laying on my stomach and he was going to enter from behind, but when he did it hurt extremely bad and I started panicking and telling him to stop. He didn’t, so I began screaming, louder and louder “STOP PLEASE IT HURTS!” I tried to turn around to get him off of me but he was so much heavier I couldn’t do anything. Then, I started trying to kick him between his legs and hit him in the head, anything to make him stop, but again, I was on my stomach and he was laying on top of me. It doesn’t exactly work well, and so he then pinned down my arms and legs while continuing to rape me. I was still screaming and crying at this point. But then I realized that there was nothing left to do. I was alone, he wasn’t stopping, my boyfriend, who I trusted and loved, was RAPING me, and no one was coming to help me b/c we were in the middle of nowhere, so I just broke down. I couldn’t even cry at this point I just sat there whispering for him to stop, for it to just end. When he got down, I was silent and We began walking back to his car. He totally forgot about the incident later and acted like it never happened and I repressed the memory and didn’t even remember it until this past summer. After that summer, he continued to sexually and emotionally abuse me to the point where I tried to kill myself twice. Any time I tried to break up with him he would threaten to kill himself, and later got addicted to opioids because he was so mentally unstable. He would even send me pictures of himself covered head to chest in blood after he had cut to try and prevent me from breaking up with him.

We broke up about a year ago, and I found out a month later that he had been cheating on me for 3 months. I have been in therapy for almost a year, have taken antidepressants for around 4 months, and had to get evaluated at a mental hospital because of him. I know he has done this to at least 2 other girls, should I file a lawsuit or get a restraining order? We broke up in January of this year and but he had still managed to contact me despite me blocking him on every platform possible. I ’m only 17 and I’m still in high school, I’m trying to save for college and I don’t know if I could even handle school and a court case involving him, but I’m so afraid of him and what he would do if he saw me.