Man Confronts Girlfriend About Cheating in Incredibly Humiliating & Public Way

Cheating is never good. We all know this. It's awful. It's awful for the people being cheated on and the cheater. But it happens. And it happened to one girl, who got caught in a majorly public way. Apparently she was seeing two guys at once and one of them found out. The guy decided to call the other guy, tell him what was up, and the two of them surprised her together. They called her a slut, many times. All the things you would expect. But they also filmed it and put it up on YouTube. Humiliating. Payback, I suppose, for the humiliation the guys felt as well.

I have my own version of this when I caught an old boyfriend cheating on me many years ago. But the outcome was very different.

I was in college and thought I was exclusively dating a guy we'll call Joe. I had suspected something wasn't right, so I snooped in his wallet and found a phone number. There were no cellphones back then. Well, there was, but only drug dealers had them. I wrote the number down and called it after Joe left my house for work as a pizza delivery guy. (Cue the extra anchovies jokes.)

A girl answered the phone and I told her that I was Joe's girlfriend and found her number in his wallet. She was on the other line, so she told me to hold on while she finished that call. When she returned, she told me that she thought she was Joe's girlfriend. We sorted through the timeline of our relationships and realized he had been dating the both of us for at least a couple of months. He had told her — Barbara let's call her — that I was his crazy ex who wouldn't leave him alone. Barbara was cool, very sweet, and hatched a plan. She wanted me to come to her house so she could order a pizza from Joe and we'd both be there to surprise him. Apparently she used to order pizza a lot from him so they could see each other during his work shift. I remember that making me feel really awful.

I went. We first met in a diner parking lot and she was driving a forest green Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer. The very car and color that Joe used to tell me was his favorite. Awful again. I left my car there so Joe wouldn't see it in her driveway and we went to her place. She was pretty and so nice to me that there was no way I could hate her. It wasn't her fault, it was Joe's.

The plan was for me to hide in the closest when Joe arrived and she was going to ask him about his ex and then we'd get his answer and I would come out of the closet. When that moment arrived, I felt sick and was crying. I heard Joe say I was his crazy ex who wouldn't leave him alone, and there was my cue to come out and show myself. He called us both crazy bitches. Neither Barbara nor I said anything as awful as the guys in that video said to the girl, but we did tell Joe how hurt we were. We wanted to know how he could do this to us, and why? He continued to berate us and left.

There are other parts of the story that are hazy, but I do remember crying when he left. Barbara hugged me and said that neither one of us should get back together with him — that he did this to us and we didn't deserve that, that he didn't deserve us. There I was crying to the girl who my boyfriend was cheating on me with; a stranger who was giving me the best advice. I listened to her. I haven't spoken to her since, but if she's reading this … thank you. I have so much respect for you. Joe … bygones.

I'm not sure if cellphones were around back then like they are today that we would have filmed the whole thing. We were both too hurt by the situation, humiliated. Hurting and humiliating the cheater by outing him to the world with a video isn't a healthy way to resolve things. And even though I understand the pain these guys who made the video felt, I can't help but feel bad for the cheater, too. She's clearly upset. I get them wanting to confront her together, but filming it … that just goes too far.

What do you think? Do you think it's okay for the guys to have filmed it and posted for the world to see? Do you have your own breakup/cheating/confrontation story?

Image via Kate Ter Haar/Flickr