Hi Reddit! I have only posted one other story on here, and this has been on my mind for a few years now. I originally thought that this would be a bad move, but I do think I should,d while another part of me doesn't think it's my place to reach out.

Ages and names have been changed to protect identities. Trigger warning for abuse (along with sexual abuse and grooming)

For context, my parents have been divorced for years, and my mom remarried when I was in elementary school (when I was 6), and my stepdad has been in my life since I was 21. When my mom started dating him, he was finalizing a divorce to his previous wife and would say that she was crazy, her kids hated him for no reason, and when they divorce finally went through, all four kids cut contact with him and wanted nothing to do with him.

When I was around 8, my stepdad started sexually abusing and physically abusing my little brother (four at the time). When my mom questioned what he was doing, he said that it was nothing and that she was just being paranoid. Anytime my mom tried to get me alone to talk to me, he would barge in and say that he needed me for something and take me despite my mom's protests. I never realized how messed up it was and that the things he was doing to me were incredibly wrong. He said that as long as we didn't get caught before I was sixteen, we could continue to have a relationship. I was a hardcore romance enjoyer even at a young age, and he knew this. He told me that girls liked taboo relationships like these and it would be okay, it would be just like the stories older girls read in high school (and I desperately wanted to be seen as older).

He would hit my brother, telling him to toughen up and "I'm teaching him to be a man" while bashing our father (granted, he was a deadbeat and deserved every word, but I don't think two young kids should hear that from a man that's more than double their age). He would gaslight my mom, call her ugly when she wore her hair in certain styles, and say that her kind of people were too sensitive when it came to certain words. More than once, he called my family slurs and said, "Words don't have power unless you give them power" while getting mad if we said "cracker" (not even in a haha poking fun at white people way, but in any context).

My mental health suffered a lot, and I was isolated from my other family members and my friends. He constantly told me that none of my friends actually cared, and I believed him. Any time I had an argument with my friends, when they didn't allow me to explain my side of things or defend myself when they would make wild accusations, I would vent my frustrations to him, and he told me to cut them off. So I did. Soon, I had no friends at school and no friends online. He would use the internet against me, disconnecting me under the guise I was "addicted" and "needed a detox." Any time I tried to seek treatment for underlying issues or was prescribed medication to help, he would tell me that doctors only wanted my money and they really didn't want to help me because I was just a hormonal teenage girl. They make good money off of me because I was "hysterical."

He would act like a parent one moment and the next, he would treat me like his partner (albeit very shitty) and told me that we were a team and we needed to stick together. I was not allowed to question anything he said, from his cheating on my mom to his "cheating" on me, to calling out his hypocrisy, etc. I was not allowed to be a person or be smarter than him without him blowing up on me. He had ridiculous "boundaries," such as I was not allowed to tell my friends or any family members that I loved them because "it watered down the word" and "it made the love we had not as important as the love I had for my friends and family." When I came out as trans and asked for people to use they/them pronouns for me, he got angry and said that I had so many boundaries that he had to follow, but he was asking for one small thing, and I couldn't even follow it. He would purposefully misgender me when I asked him to stop. In turn, he would call me an emotional female, an it on multiple occasions, and I just just wanted to be different and my generation was shoving the queer agenda in his face. When I stopped fighting it, he said he knew that it was just a phase and he was happy to have his "little girl" back.

I was popular on TikTok a few years back. I did makeup tutorials on how to style clothes and had an impressive following before he got jealous. I was 18 at this point, and a lot of people were flirting with me. He got jealous and called me a thirst trap and said I was doing this for male attention. I am heavier in the chest area and argued that I was not doing it for male attention. I admit that I did like it when people flirted with me and called me pretty and how stunning I looked, but who doesn't like positive attention? I felt good for once since graduating high school, and I was amassing a lot of followers pretty quickly. I took down the account because every night, it became a daily fight, and he threatened to take away my phone and never let me see it again. I didn't want to lose my friends (I had no car, no friends in the local area, and was isolated from the outside world minus the internet, but I was too scared to tell anyone I was being abused because he always cried how it would ruin his life and his mom would hate him for what he had done.

When I turned 19, my mom and stepdad were in the process of a divorce because he had been caught cheating on my mom with her best friend at the time. There was a whole fight, and my mom ended up sleeping in the guest bedroom. He would try to pressure me to sleep with him, slapping me across the face and threatening me to go with him. I would fight him, and when my mom walked in on a fight, he made up a lie that I was getting emotional over him telling me to clean the kitchen or else he would take my phone. My mom just looked at him, but told me to go to my room and go to bed.

When I got my first job and I was out of the house more, my mom picked me up from work and said she needed to have a talk with me. She confronted me and asked me if there was something going on with my stepdad and me. I tried to deny it, saying there was nothing going on. However, she noticed growing up that I became more reserved, how I hated being touched, I was still wetting my bed even in high school, how I hated going to sleep, how I tried to run away twice, that I had a substance abuse issue, and so on and so forth. I broke down and cried, telling her everything that he had done to me. The sexual abuse, the manipulation, the isolation, the invading my friend groups so he could monitor my messages, the nights he would creep into my room and touch him, how he would threaten me with our relationship if I didn't follow his exact direction, how he would push me for sexual stuff, everything. I cried so hard that I ended up vomiting, and I was scared to go back home in fear that he would force me to sleep with him again. She took me over to my aunt's house and said she would take care of everything.

We sped up the divorce process, and my mom found us a new place within a few months. I ended up staying at my aunt's for the time being. He blew up my phone, demanding where I had gone and why I wasn't answering him. The text went from angry to desperate to paranoid to angry again. Once we moved out and we knew he would never bother us again, I ended up calling the police and pressing charges against him. I can't get into too many details about the case, but it has been ongoing for a few years now, and still in process.

I can't get into too many details about the case, but it has been ongoing for a few years now and is still being processed.

I remembered that his previous ex-wife and one of her kids is a girl. A part of me thinks I'm just protecting because he abused me for years, and I had no one to tell. My brother and I cut him off the minute we moved out, which leads me to believe he did something heinous to those kids as well for them to cut him off. He's always been good at manipulating a story, telling people that he is targeted for no reason, that he's such a good guy, and that he would never do something so evil to a person. He said his mother hated him for a long time despite her doing everything in her power to give him a good life, give him her old car, her old house, invites him over to family dinner, etc. I want to reach out and ask her if he had ever abused her or her kids, but I feel that would not be my place to ask her, but if he's done this once before, who's to say he hasn't done it in the past and she should be made aware of the person that was around her children?

WIBTAH if I contacted her and asked to sit down and talk?