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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being arrested in public often has much more far reaching negative consequences than the accuser being fired, and you not being arrested.
Assuming work is going to actually investigate before acting of course. They do at least have some incentive on that front - if they need you more than the hassle it creates.
The current society propaganda is society doesn’t need men, so if it’s a woman doing the accusing, don’t expect society to want to investigate. Unless you’re in an area which is ‘anti’ that and the cops think they can manage it. They’re very unlikely to actually pursue charges of false accusations though, that opens a giant can of worms almost everywhere.
It takes a really compelling and provably nasty situation for someone to be willing to risk the backlash from a pretty woman crying and wailing - who you know is more than willing to make false allegations.
Women’s ‘power’ is their beauty - aka the drive others have to make them want them. As to if it’s manipulation or influence depends on the degree of intended mutual benefit in it.
Men’s ‘power’ is their physical violence (which can allow them control over resources), aka their ability to physically force someone or something to ‘comply’. As to if it’s warlord style or ‘community policing’ depends on the degree of intended mutual benefit in it.
Women are more used to the how and why behind false allegations and have the social tools to deal with it better, where most men are going to be powerless except in specific circumstances (Cops, and gay men, maybe - depending on the venue).
There is a reason society has been shitting on cops lately, btw. It hasn’t escaped their notice, I assure you.
Look at how much of the population supported amber heard during the trial if you don’t believe me.
Usually they’d just ignore it after it was obvious what was going on, and threaten the false accuser with a criminal charge - but not actually charge her.
HR is used to more ‘active’ management than the gym. If they’re under a lot of public pressure though, they might want to burn you even worse to appease the folks squeezing them.
Depends on the leadership incentives, and how much ‘force’ the other party wants to apply.
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).
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.
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.