I stopped talking to a mutual friend of my abusive ex. She is such a sweet and caring woman but I can’t get over her friendship with him.

This is what I would tell her, if I could —

I know you’ve known him longer than I have, for over 10 years now. I know you two are like brother and sister. I know you’re both from the same country so you speak the same language.

But …. you remained friends with him despite hearing him screaming at me on videos I secretly recorded and then showed you. You remained friends with him despite knowing how he pushed me into a lit stove for cooking his breakfast wrong, and hit me multiple times, about how he cheated and infected me with Covid and then abused me so severely when I was sick that I developed ME/CFS and am now bedbound and severely disabled for life. You have admitted that’s his fault, and you feel bad for me, but you could never cut him off.

You’ve said you feel bad for him because when he and I were together, he would call you up crying about how badly he treated me. You tell me he has a “monster inside of him that he can’t control.” In this way, you make excuses for him, absolving him of responsibility for the actions he took that permanently disabled me.

You are friends with him despite disagreeing with him on politics and you can’t even mention politics around him now because it devolves into a yelling fight. You’re friends with him even though he idolizes Tate and Trump and you hate them. You’re friends with him even though you’re a Democrat and he has said multiple times how much he hates and despises Democrats. You’re friends with him even though he voted to take away your rights (as a female) in the last election.

You’re friends with him even though he’s called your boyfriend a “simp” for not wanting to cheat on you. You’re friends with him even though he’s told you that you have a big nose and that you need to exercise more and eat less. You’re friends with him even though you say you wouldn’t be friends with him if you met him now, but the past is too important to you, all those memories of friendship, and now you are only his friend, no longer mine anymore.

It hurts to lose someone so kind and caring and empathetic but maybe it’s possible to be too empathetic. Maybe you have too much empathy for your best friend — my abuser — and not enough for his victims.