>>2603140I worked at a summer camp at age 22 and got accused of being a pedophile when some of the girl counselors (three were 16, one was 22 and also the lead counselor) went skinny dipping without telling anyone and I was nearby the beach. One of them said they freaked out because I looked like the guy who had raped and impregnated her at 12 years old. I spent the next 3 weeks hiding my face under a big ass sun hat because she would start to visibly panic whenever she saw me, but after that 3 weeks she said she talked it out with her therapist. Also another of the 16 year olds got her mom to come yell at me but she got pissed because I wasn’t taking any blame.
The next week she spooned me in a tent, started talking about how cute our kids would look and then suddenly went off. She was back to panicking at my face, but it wasn’t the worst because I went off on a 3 day excursion. When I got back she tried to get me to say that I was a pedophile, and I also learned that she had spent the week telling everyone I tried to rape her. So the rest of it went on with me hiding my face whenever she was around until the summer was over and I went home.
I look back on it positively, even though as a whole it was a mostly miserable and even traumatic experience for me, because it prompted me to evaluate my life and what I wanted to do in the future.
Despite the misery, it was still pretty fun, and I made some great connections with some of the other counselors, even though none of them reached out or spoke much to me afterwards.
As an epilogue, I actually ended up going back there a few months after it had ended for another work project. I got the chance to speak to the Camp Director, who told me that she had spoken to the traumatized girl’s mom. Turns out, the girl was a compulsive liar and told everyone all kinds of made up shit, including me looking like her rapist, who was an elderly man, and not identical to me but 10 years older as she described.
