The cycle of abuse was apparent almost as soon as the relationship began. It started with verbal abuse, and him “snapping” or “blowing up” at me. Even in healthy relationships, a person may accidentally display an annoyed or hostile tone when surprised by a partner’s actions. But Quais would start fully shouting me down over minor inconveniences, and unless I found a way to deescalate the situation immediately, he’d evolve into a completely different person that was blind to everything but one or two goals at a time. And the goal tended to be forcing me to stay in one place and listen to him, followed by forcing us to make up through physical intimacy after he succeeded in “feeling heard.”

The best term I could think of to conceptualize this state he entered was “fixation” or “hyperfixation,” because something about the way he kept repeating the same phrases and motions just seemed pathological to me– as if his brain had genuinely stopped registering the things I was saying or the very obvious consequences for his actions, and pure emotion/obsession was in the driver’s seat. Whether I promised to discuss things later, fought to get away from him, or surrendered and curled into a ball, almost nothing could make him stop until he was good and ready hours later.

After he calmed down, we’d talk it out the next day. He’d apologize for his role in the conflict and inform me of my role. He told me that unlike my own inattentive-type ADHD, his ADHD featured major issues with emotional regulation and impulsivity, but that he was making improvements with his therapist and trialing new medications that should directly impact the anger issues. But also…. that I should have known better, and could prevent this situation in the future with XYZ communication strategies. Sometimes he’d describe an incident in his past that made him sensitive to the thing I said or did, and asking me to change my own behavior and meet him halfway became a lot more palatable to me when he framed it as a kindness instead of an accusation— “I know you shouldn’t have to, and I’m sorry, but please do XYZ when with me.”

This went on for a while, because each debriefing felt like progress. And I also knew my own behavior wasn’t perfect. For example, like a lot of girls, I’d developed a habit of skimming 2-3 of my dates’ fries with a flirty grin. But one furious outburst later, and I learn that’s seriously crossing a line– Quais had issues with food insecurity from childhood, so I’d have to always ask first. Okay! Of course I’m not entitled to someone else’s food, you’re right. I’m really sorry. I interrupt his video game with too many questions while tidying his room for him. Okay! If it’s a live MMO match, that frustration makes more sense. I’m really sorry.

But then the outbursts kept happening. And the situations became more inexcusable— even ridiculous.

I didn’t warn him in advance that I planned to fall asleep as the little spoon, and his arm went numb. That was inconsiderate and selfish.

He briefly left me in his car to run an errand. I changed the radio station, but we didn’t remember which station to change it back to. That was inconsiderate and selfish.

He fell asleep with a floss pick in his hand, and I slowly wiggled it away and tossed it before getting ready to join him in bed. But allegedly, my only motivation for this was to avoid rolling over the floss pick myself— five cents wasted because I was inconsiderate and selfish.

If you think those are absurd (bordering implausible) reasons to start shouting at a partner, you’re right! But they really happened, and those were the reasons he gave in the moment.

As the outbursts started becoming more frequent and more serious, bridging into false imprisonment, he was less likely to take responsibility in our debriefings and more likely to try gaslighting me about it, and claiming that I was the one who’d verbally exploded at him. I had 100% resistance to gaslighting– I knew what I had said and done, especially considering how deliberate I became in my speech around him. But I had difficulty telling whether this gaslighting was intentional, or a product of that rage state / “fixation” messing with his perception.

So when I eventually started recording arguments and false imprisonment, it wasn’t with the intention of getting him in trouble– I wanted to prove to him that these behaviors had appeared, because you can’t fix a behavior that you don’t acknowledge.

As you might imagine, all of this was exhausting. Leaving him for good didn’t feel out of the question, and I did try several times before he’d show up at my house again. But it seemed like we were learning more about each others’ boundaries and triggers and communication styles with each fight, so a stable understanding couldn’t be too far away. Oops, found a new trigger for Quais, but that should be the last one. Oops, found a new social convention he was never taught, but that should be the last one. I thought I understood the cycle of abuse on paper, but this didn’t feel like we were trading a bouquet of flowers for amnesia. We were analyzing, introspecting, having epiphanies. We were making progress.

And I had my own emotional needs and reasons that I’d fallen for him. I’d perceived him as thoughtful, intelligent, funny… he was a 6’3” MD/PhD trainee that would get a gleam in his eye whenever he talked about becoming a doctor, and people that demonstrate a drive to improve themselves and the world through humanitarian careers, self-directed learning, going to therapy, etc. are exactly my type.

And we just clicked, spending over twelve uninterrupted hours talking on some of our first dates. He was a natural at making me feel loved through my preferred ‘acts of service’ and ‘words of affirmation’ languages before things started getting really bad, and before I think anyone could dismiss all of it as intentional honeymoon period manipulation. He told me on our first night together that I was “moonlight on newfallen snow.” He baked me cinnamon rolls on Saturday mornings and made extra icing from scratch. He listened to me lament my inability to french-braid a protective style before bed, and spent weeks studying YouTube tutorials to surprise me and start braiding my hair every night.

Who would want to let that go?

Quais and I started dating, unbeknownst to our coworkers, after my long-term partner and I decided to try opening our relationship. But both of my partners soured on the idea almost immediately– and Quais was particularly explicit in demanding “him or me.” So by mid-February, feeling torn between them, I chose Quais.

But becoming exclusive didn’t end up solving his insecurity in the relationship, to which he had attributed many of his emotional outbursts. The realization that he was abusive didn’t take long at all.

Quais had been expressing paranoia that he, as a med student, could get in trouble just for being in a relationship with a coworker, regardless of whether that relationship became hostile or impacted the workplace. So he demanded that I send him an email waiving his responsibility for the relationship from multiple angles, just in case it were to become pertinent later on.

I was irritated at this— this whole idea seemed suspicious and put me at legal risk where there was none before— so I slipped in some sentences undermining points that I disagreed with, and figured we could workshop it later. But as you can see, he did not react well.

And in hindsight, considering that the physical abuse began shortly thereafter, this was an even bigger red flag than I realized at the time. People with clear consciences and no history of abusing their partners don’t demand unilateral letters like this, or feel paranoid that private correspondence with their partners will be shared with administrators in the future.

This argument was an example of emotional abuse, not physical (to my current recollection), but it’s relevant because it factors into the “feeling heard” phrase that features in later videos of false imprisonment. Many of the early episodes of him trapping me involved him trying to extract apologies from me for his feeling that I hadn’t broken up with my ex quickly enough or that I still wasn’t prioritizing him enough.

On Feb 29th, I decided to go to a community theatre show that my now-ex was in. He’d been in rehearsals for it during the end of our relationship, and I resolved that it would be the last play of his I’d attend-- it just kinda felt like closure. Our friends and I planned to get drinks afterward, and I assumed that my ex was more likely to go to a cast party instead, but figured I could just give him space if he did join.

I had conveyed all of the above to Quais. He wasn’t thrilled, but didn’t try to forbid me, and we agreed that I’d spend the night at Quais’s house right afterward.

My ex did end up coming out with the squad, and everything went as expected: I briefly congratulated him, and we ended up in different rooms at the bar for the rest of the time we were there. I sent Quais a photo of myself wearing a friend’s silly glasses and a funny tweet I saw while scrolling during a lull in conversation.

I arrived at Quais’s house, babbling about my night, and was met with a brick wall when I went to hug him. Looking off into the distance, he asked if my ex had come out to the bar, and I immediately and honestly disclosed “oh, yeah, but we didn’t really talk or anything.”

But that wasn’t enough for him and sparked a huge argument— he claimed that I should have reported to him immediately upon my ex entering the room. And that the silly selfie I sent him was suspicious– since I hadn’t done that before, I clearly was being overly sanguine to try to cover for something.

[This date is unverified– just trusting a date estimate in a later text from Quais.]

I confronted him about the constant verbal/emotional abuse that he had been subjecting me to, and the impact it was having on me. I told him that my depression, which had been in remission for the last few years during my happy former relationship, was coming back, because I had simultaneously lost my primary “support person” and entered a situation where I was being shouted at multiple times a week for infractions as minor as skimming a few fries from his McDonald’s bag.

I described experiencing persistently low mood and “mild suicidal ideation,” and was very specific in my language, knowing that ideation and intent are different concepts. The thoughts I attributed to “ideation” were fantasizing broadly about getting to sleep forever and avoid all of my emotional and tangible problems, but I was very clear in assuring him that I didn’t actually want to kill myself or plan to.

This conversation is important, because he subsequently embellished my statements and used them to justify holding me captive at any time for any reason– he could just claim to others afterward that I was going to hurt myself, and it was for my own good.

This is the first time I managed to record him in the act of unlawful imprisonment: his hand is on the back door as he’s blocking me from leaving, and he smirks and drops it when I point the camera at him. But moments after this video was taken, I realized a problem: I was parked on the street in front of his house, and the back door led to his fully fenced backyard, where the fence gate was broken and the detached garage on the other side was locked. So I would have been trapped in the yard overnight if I left that way. But when I tried to leave through the front door instead, he changed his mind about letting me go, and here we see the videos of cartoonishly evil false imprisonment that I sent to OSU.

Neither his demeanor nor words [“you can even lie to me to make me feel heard”] reflect concern for my mental health or safety– he was demanding for his own emotional needs to be met.

He eventually broke into my car, and continued arguing with me there. The embedded data from another small video I took establishes that this confrontation lasted for another two hours at least.

The next day, March 10th, I sent Quais a long text breaking up with him. I expressed my inability to forgive him for holding me captive, but was also bizarrely apologetic about my inability to meet his emotional needs whenever he was trapping me somewhere.

Instead of responding genuinely, he put on an HR-safe performance of denial, rejecting my “libelous statements,” claiming that my “emotional and cognitive instability” caused my “inability to see events as they actually occurred,” and claiming vaguely that I had subjected him to every type of abuse.

I responded by telling him to cut the crap and demonstrating that I had video of his unlawful imprisonment the night before, so I certainly wasn’t remembering that incorrectly. This prompted him to storm over to my desk at work, where he started hovering over me and hissing at me to go somewhere private to talk. When I refused, he sat down next to me and began sending me over a dozen Venmo requests for any unreimbursed food that he’d bought for me or that I’d eaten at his house during our relationship.

I originally rejected the requests and tried to return to working at my computer, but he kept re-sending them, staring at me and lightly kicking my chair wheels every so often to keep my attention. When I told him to leave me alone– that we could talk about this after work– he insisted that he wouldn’t leave until I paid him.

To be clear, this financial demand had zero relation to the text argument we’d just had– he just wanted to punish and intimidate me. And I was indeed wildly uncomfortable, especially since one of our coworkers was feet away and also looking uncomfortable. Since Quais refused to table the matter until after work, I eventually gave in and slunk away to be yelled at in an empty room, in order to stop him from drawing attention to us.

This set of evidence also disproves two major lies he told during the hearing:

He admits in these texts that I “did not designate a plan” to kill myself. But during the hearing later, he goes into an extremely detailed fabrication that I said I fantasized about getting into a car accident.

He later claims that I made up allegations of abuse against him to deflect blame from myself for March 23rd, but you can see in the texts that I was describing his actions (and especially unlawful imprisonment) as “abuse” before March 23rd and before OSU got involved.

By March 13th, I’d taken him back again, and we got into another argument at the auto shop as I was picking up my car. After getting home, I kept rejecting his calls, so he sent me texts implying that he was in a car accident to lure me outside.

He was waiting in the parking lot as I walked to my car, and eventually convinced me to talk it out more in his own car with him. But this round of the argument wasn’t going to his satisfaction either, and when I tried to leave, he started grabbing my wrists and different parts of my body to prevent that. I’d entered his car shortly after 6pm, but this spiraled into a huge altercation that lasted until long after nightfall as I tried to escape his car. The large left ankle bruise was caused by him reaching over and slamming the passenger door on my ankle as I was kneeling and facing backwards in the passenger seat.

After an argument, I had exited Quais’s apartment and entered my car with the intention of driving home, despite leaving groceries that I had purchased in his fridge. The videos show him unlawfully restraining me from leaving by planting himself in front of my car, pretending not to hear my requests for him to move, and disassembling my windshield wipers for good measure.

Yet again, neither his angry demeanor nor words [“I can’t hear you.” and “Get the milk.”] reflect concern for my mental health or safety. He’d been commanding me to go back in the house and get the groceries I had left there, yet rejected my off-screen suggestions to either keep the food or bring it out to me. So this wasn’t about selfless concern for my pantry either– he just wanted to lure me into a place where he could physically control me better to resolve the argument, and I was refusing to leave the car because I’d recognized that immediately.

[I later took photos of some of the applesauce that he had doodled on and literally dated before the argument that day, so he can’t claim that the groceries are a myth and the “Get the milk.” was misheard.]

This impasse eventually resolved when our argument meandered to the topic of social support, and he broke down crying in the street about not having friends anymore. I cautiously stepped out of the car to comfort him, then kept giving an inch until I was spending the night again.

So to be clear, I had woken up at Quais’s house literally the morning after another one of his false imprisonment episodes. So it’s not too surprising that it happened again, this time at work that evening.

In short, when I tried to break up with him after an argument and leave, he cornered me (like before). But this time he kept insisting that he was worried that I planned to hurt myself. Nothing I said or did could convince him to let me go (like before). The ensuing scuffle (initiated by him grabbing me as I tried to get away from him, like before) resulted in me biting his arm while it was wrapped around me to try to get him to let go, and it ended when I tore my MCL. I filed a police report with OSUPD about it over the phone, but asked them not to press charges, and he went down to the station to state his piece in response. He submitted photos of his injuries that night, while I had to wait for a doctor’s appointment in order to document mine, but the officers told me they’d keep the report open until then.

The narrative play-by-play (that I wrote shortly afterward) of what happened on 3/23 is attached here if you’re eager to read it now, but all of the evidence files and analysis proving this story are on their own page:

The next day, I was woken up by call from my supervisor demanding to know what happened, because she had just gotten a call from HR. Then I saw an email from The Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) offering me “supportive resources.” It had never been my intention for Quais to get into permanent trouble, and the officers I’d spoken to had promised me that nothing would go up the chain at OSU, so this wasn’t welcome news.

I jumped into action and spent the next few days making calls to figure out if an investigation was taking place and by what department, trying to make sure the right person was told that I hadn’t meant to initiate a complaint and to nip it in the bud before Quais could get in trouble with his MD/PhD program. I scribbled notes to keep track of the call order and told Quais that I was doing this, all the while having no idea that OSU had actually opened the investigation into me instead. They’d seen the bite marks I left while trying to get away and made a snap judgment. So when OSU’s investigator finally reached out and informed me that there were allegations against me, my confusion was apparent.

Note that my reactions– both my automatic faith that the person who had kidnapped and seriously injured me was the one in trouble, and the steps I was taking to protect him anyway– are not responses you’d expect from the guilty party.

And for good measure, we see in the email to my boss that key details of my description of 3/23 remained consistent from the day after the incident through today.

We had been broken up since the night of March 23rd, and zero contact after the few texts I’d sent saying that I was covering for him, until the awkward moment when he entered the lab mouse storage room I was working in. He asked a work-related question, and after I struggled to paraphrase an email from a different department, I just handed him my phone to read it. He was touched by that display of trust, since stealing my phone to prevent me from calling for help was a major feature of the 3/23 incident, and decided to turn the conversation to private matters about the OIE investigation. How he was sorry, but he had gotten a lawyer (which I couldn’t afford) and all sorts of insights into OSU’s process and intentions.

I, consumed by existential dread over OSU attacking my career and desperately lonely after over a month of COVID-induced isolation, decided to hear him out. Which inevitably progressed into taking him back.

In essence, I was forced to turn to my abuser for safety and comfort against attacks by the Title IX office.

I also discovered in that conversation the reason my windshield wipers had been looking so much clearer lately: after urging me to replace them when we were originally dating, he apparently just drove over to my house while we were broken up and replaced them for me. So… kinda stalkery, but I focused on the positives.

In any case, this rekindled romance wasn’t without restrictions– Quais was insistent that if OSU knew we were back together, they would consider us to be at high likelihood of reoffending, and any hope of our jobs surviving the investigation would be dashed. So I was no longer allowed to go to his house, where his roommate could see me. And I was no longer allowed to text him, as OSU could hypothetically subpoena that– he instead implemented a process called “foldering,” wherein we would log into the same email account and type and delete drafts to each other.

I didn’t screenshot the vast majority of the messages; in the absence of any threatening content, that felt like it would be an unnecessary violation of trust, so I just saved some cute ones. The earliest one establishes that the relationship had to have resumed before May 10th.

However, the sweet moments were few and far between, as he fell back into the habit of escalating minor conflicts to verbal abuse to unlawful restraint. Whenever that would result in us breaking up for a few days or weeks, the hiatus would always end with him stalking me: showing up in front of my house, knocking relentlessly until I let him in, or forcing his way inside when I cracked the front door to just talk.

Quais had been sitting in my bed with me, refusing to let me end our argument and refusing to leave my apartment until almost 6am. When I started recording to pressure him to leave again, him saying “there’s something that you need to work out” and pointedly looking at my phone was an allusion to his typical demand that I delete the footage in order for him to leave. So after this, I quickly exported this video outside of my Photos app before letting him check, which is why I still have it.

The discussion in the first half of the video preceded us sending parallel informal resolution requests to the investigator later that day. Compared to the other recordings of case discussions, he wasn’t nearly as hostile or demanding here (but the situation still reflects a power imbalance).

Quais then squitched gears to apologizing for a hostile environment he’d created in the lab recently– he’d started yelling at me for shifting a few items on his workbench in order to wipe the counter underneath them. And then he had called our supervisor to whine about me, which is why I commented in this video that “we’re not doing a good job already” in regards to coworking peacefully. In either case, our supervisor and the HR folks they consulted afterwards had “actual knowledge” of those hostilities.

Quais’s schedule was busy that week, and he became fixated on trying to schedule a day to help me clean and pack my apartment (as I was moving within the month). That might sound cute on the surface, but it was 6am after a long night of arguments, and he was using this as a pretense to refuse to leave.

This argument thoroughly demonstrates him having either zero understanding or zero regard for basic consent principles and physical boundaries, at one point responding to, “You have been violating my consent while begging me. Do you understand that?” with “Yes, I do, and it's wild.”

And of course, “The problem is- is you have a recording of me now, and so you can either delete it and I will walk away, literally right now, literally without talking about it. Or you can call the police.”

This was another case where I exported the video and showed him a clean phone.

(these videos are 6 minutes apart)

Shortly after we’d been informed of the opportunity to issue corrections to the Summary of Evidence (interview notes) in the investigation, Quais came over to my house to talk about next steps. But he had already arrived agitated that day and was turning it into an argument, so I retreated to the bathroom for some reprieve. When he refused to stop talking through the door, I figured I should probably record this.

He’s seen here insisting– loudly– that the way to get OSU to close the investigation was for both of us to minimize the drama and “aggravating factors” as much as possible. And this was an argument he’d already been making for a while, as the reason we had to keep our rekindled relationship a secret.

What this demanded in context was not defending myself and the facts of the case as robustly as I wanted to, which is very much against my nature, so I couldn’t help but argue. But the record shows that I ended up acquiescing to him, submitting less than a page of clarifications to the record and an equal amount of space in reassurances that we’d be able to work together just fine. Quais, however, went behind my back and submitted a 12-page document full of fabrications and drama.

It’s exactly what it looks like. Quais had arrived at my apartment with spontaneous gifts of new pillows, frying pans, and a letter of recommendation template for me to edit and forward to my former supervisor. I was immediately suspicious that he would be expecting sexual activity in exchange for the kind gesture, and sure enough, he proceeded to prod me for it while I was trying to focus on editing the letter. Once he finally realized that I wasn’t being coy and that my ‘no’ answer was firm, he began yelling at me that I had been leading him on, refused to leave, and started reaching for my laptop to delete the Word document. I ran upstairs, locked myself in my bedroom, and immediately started recording, leading to the events of the video. The door opened at the end when Quais utilized a trick he knew to open locked doors with a credit card, and he swiftly and silently applied pressure immediately after popping the lock. We see in this video the same type of behavior he exhibited on March 23rd, 2020, where he’s fixated on gaining physical control and bizarrely deaf to anything I’m saying.

During the hearing a year later, he acted repentant, but claimed that it was still my fault– that he hadn’t exploded in anger until after ages of begging for me to return his clothing, wallet, and keys that were locked in the bedroom with me and necessary for him to leave.

But this is patently untrue, as I already described. You can hear how fixated he was in the recording, refusing to engage rationally with anything I said and never so much as mentioning necessities left in the room– as far as I or my phone picked up, it was all about demanding the gifts back as punishment for refusing sex.

And furthermore, if you slow down the ending frame by frame, you can actually see the blue credit card he used to pop open the lock. If his wallet was in the room, how did he have his credit card on him?

I took these photos of massive bruising on my leg after yet another physical restraint/assault in my own apartment, although I honestly don’t remember which incident it was that left these bruises in order to confidently describe said incident. Could have been the time he cornered me in the bathroom, the time he hurt my dog (by shoving him off of an elevated surface onto his back), the time both of our glasses ended up broken, etc.

The evidence/timeline is limited, because as is well-established by now, he had a habit of wrestling my phone from me.