Trust is a fragile thing in any relationship, especially at work.

One woman always felt like an outcast at work, facing repeated bullying from her co-workers. So when her one confidante went behind her back and exposed her deepest insecurities, she retaliated with a pointed HR complaint of her own.

Read on for the full story.

AITA for reporting my coworker to HR after she kept on trying to reconcile with me?

I work in an office building where I am pretty much at odds with everyone else. I understand why.

In fact, I’m a loner with bad hair due to stress and fatigue at 25 and slightly overweight after dealing with depression for many years due to the death of my father and my two brothers which I’ve started to get over.

Jan 2020, I got a job in an office setting.

Unfortunately, in spite of the pandemic, I’ve been on mandatory in-person shifts for months now.

The culture at her job left a lot to be desired.

When I started, I tried my best to gel with everyone and make friends but pretty much everyone rejected me.

They called me names as I worked behind the desk from their little cliques. Ignored me when I approached them.

Some even blatantly insulted me for my hair and weight when I didn’t even bring it up.

This was from everyone, even guys who I thought would be more accepting than the women were mean as heck to me too.

After months of mistreatment, she finally found someone she could lean on — or so she thought.

There was one woman, J, who is about the same age as me, who was different though from everyone else.

I really thought that this one woman who acted so kind and genuine towards me (and who I liked as more than just a friend back then) was my only “friend” there. I mean, she was inviting me to hang out with her alone after work.

I bought her drinks, we talked and texted regularly after work for several months.

But soon came a heartbreaking realization.

A few months into our friendship, I was added into a group chat where I saw she was crap-talking me about secrets I confided in her — mainly insecurities about my height and my physical attributes such as my hair and weight.

All these worries about my future. All my fears. I told them all to her and she exposed me really quite hard.

That did hurt. It broke my heart actually.

This made her even more uncomfortable to come to work.

But from then on, I understood never to trust anybody at that division and ignored her when she approached me, and she figured out that I had caught on to her exposing what I told her privately to her friends.

From then on, we never talked to each other outside of work matters. I thought that would be that. I would avoid everyone outside of work matters.

But nope.

So when her friend tried to come crawling back, she wasn’t having it.

Very recently, J approached me soaked in tears after work.

She told me that she missed my company and wanted me to be there for her after one of the people in her friend group “treated her like trash”.

I figured it was some drama with regards to her love life and told her that no, I don’t want to and never want to speak to her.

But when she wouldn’t take no for an answer, things got even uglier between them.

She persisted, again and again and again. Approaching me at work to start inane convos, texting me after it and so on.

It was getting irritating and I snapped at her one day to leave me alone, calling her a “stupid *** *****”.

I admit, a mean insult. But I just don’t like her and I don’t want to speak to her.

She just bawled and left me alone for a bit.

So finally she decided to get HR involved.

But she started up harassing me in person and from text again, and I’ve had to talk to HR to stop her harassment.

J was placed in a separate part of our division and sent me an angry stream of texts lambasting me.

AITA for reporting her like that?

Sometimes the only way to protect your peace is to take a firm stand.

Redditors weren’t exactly sympathetic.

This commenter doesn’t think she’s going about this the right way at all.

Maybe some of these issues could be better addressed in a therapist’s office.

This user is a bit dubious of some of the details in this story.

Maybe she has more to do with this than she’s letting on.

No matter what Reddit says, no one should tolerate ongoing harassment, especially after such a painful breach of trust.

She was right to seek help and put an end to the bullying.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.