The Tea Girls Said I Was Dangerous. Now I Am.

There are two types of hell. The one you earn, and the one gifted to you by a girl with a group chat.

I didn’t cheat on her. I didn’t hit her. I didn’t even ghost her, which, in hindsight, might’ve been the more humane option. Instead, I broke up with her the regular way: "We’re not working, I need space, we’ve grown apart, etc." She cried. I hugged her. She asked to keep the sweatshirt. I said okay.

Then came Tea.

If you’re unfamiliar, imagine Reddit, but exclusively for anonymous girl-victim narratives. You post screenshots, blurry photos, vague timelines, and enough emotional affect to trigger mass sympathy. "Warning: This man hurt me." It doesn’t matter how. The pain is the proof. Comments are disabled. Facts are optional. Screenshots are cherry-picked. Eyewitnesses are her sorority sisters. Dissenters get banned.

It started with a post.

“He told me I was safe. I wasn’t. Warning: this man is dangerous.”

No name. Just a candid photo of my side profile at a party from a year ago. The same dumb floral button-up I wore when I met her.

Then her friends chimed in. They all had a story. I "made them uncomfortable." I “coerced” someone by asking if she wanted to come over. I “displayed narcissistic traits.” I was, they decided, a rapist-adjacent narcissistic abuser with sociopathic tendencies.

The hashtags made it real.
#BelieveWomen.
#DoBetter.
#MenAreTrash.

Within 48 hours it was on Twitter. My name. My face. My workplace. “Why is this predator employed at Sentinel Analytics?” someone asked rhetorically, tagging my company. A verified account quote-tweeted it:

“Fire him. There are thousands of decent men looking for jobs.”

HR scheduled a Zoom.

I shaved. Wore a tie. Smiled through the panic.

The Director of People & Culture looked like a Pixar mom…wide eyes, soft voice, big glasses. She said they were “taking the allegations seriously.” I said there weren’t any allegations, not real ones. She said the optics were troubling. I said what about the truth? She said, “This isn’t about truth, it’s about trust.”

I was let go.

That week I met with a lawyer. Some family friend. Faded pinstripe suit. Fingers too fat for his keyboard. His office smelled like boiled carpet.

I told him everything. Showed him the Tea post. The retweets. The screenshots. The screenshots of the screenshots.

He nodded slowly, like a man pretending to understand blockchain.

“You could sue,” he said, leaning back like he’d been holding in a fart for 20 years. “But you’d probably lose. Women have the public’s favor. Tech companies have protections. You’d spend five years in court and get five grand in damages—if you win.”

I asked what justice looked like.
He laughed. “Justice? You're in the wrong century for that.”

That night I sat at the bar, halfway through a whiskey I couldn’t afford, when I saw her. Big eyes. Big thighs. Bigger tits. Blouse with tiny red hearts. Blonde, but the roots showed ambition. She looked at me the way girls used to, before everything.

I raised my glass. Smiled. She never broke eye contact.

I took a deep breath. Walked over. Voice steady, the way you do when you’re pretending not to be broken.

“Can I get you a drink?”

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing.

“You’re that guy from Tea, aren’t you?”

Time slowed. My pulse became a metronome.

“What?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

“You tried to rape your ex. You’re disgusting.”

She stood up. Loud. Intentional. Eyes turned. I felt like an animal cornered under a strobe light.

I clenched my fist. My brain whispered do it. Just once. Just to make something feel real. But I didn’t. I dropped cash on the bar and left.

I called my mom on the walk home. Straight to voicemail.
“Hey. It’s me. Just wanted to say I love you. That’s all.”

I sat on the edge of my bed. The same mattress where I’d slept beside the girl who’d lit the match. I opened the safe. Took out the gun I’d bought after the first break-in back when I lived in Eastwood. I loaded it. Set it on the desk.

But first, I needed a drink. Halfway through a bottle of Jim Beam, I did the only thing left: scrolled. Twitter. Instagram. Reddit. Out of habit. Like checking your own grave.

Except this time it was different.

Top post wasn’t a takedown. It was an obituary.

BREAKING: Tea app hacked. All user data leaked.
Names. Faces. GPS data. The works.
Posted on a torrent site.
Some nerd even made a Google Map.

I clicked the link.

And there it was. A map. Pins. Every user who had been dumb enough to verify their identity for an “anonymous” gossip app. Click a pin—see a profile. Selfie. Full name. Geolocation data.

I expanded the map until my city stretched across the screen and then started working my way through a sea of blue pins.

There she was.

Her new apartment, too. Someone had uploaded her driver’s license. DMV photo. Home address. Birthdate.

There were thousands like her. The friends who backed her. The commenters. Every last self-righteous coward hiding behind a username like “abortwhitemales” and “radfem22.”

The gun was still on the desk. Loaded.

But now it wasn’t pointed at me.