Mel Tucker Suspended Without Pay, Hearing Pending

Also at the time she was a contractor and he was an authority figure on that contract. That alone makes this wrong. The details make it terrible and I doubt anything further that we learn will make Mel look any better than we all see him at this moment (which is pretty bad). 

First of all, no one is "shaming" anyone. No matter what the truth of the matter is, Tucker is the villain here, not her. But just because Tucker is in the villain, it doesn't mean her account should be taken completely at face value.

I would understand her "freezing" explanation in the case of some kind of physical, in-person encounter. Hell, I might even understand that explanation if it was a Zoom call. But a phone call? Just hang up! There is absolutely no logical reason why she would stay on the phone for 36 minutes listening to him stroking and grunting and shit. At some point, you gotta just call a spade a spade.

Deleting the text messages might make slightly more sense, but is also eyebrow-raising. If this dude sexually harassed you and at no point did you ever reciprocate his advances, then it seems like your instinct should be to preserve all evidence of that harassment, especially if you specialize in empowering victims of sexual abuse. 

If she had said she was was emotionally confused by Tucker's advances and that she reciprocated his interest at various points but didn't reciprocate at other points, no one would fault her because hey, shit happens, life is complicated, and it's still on Tucker to keep it in his pants given the power dynamic in the relationship. But her claim that *every single one* of the sexualized interactions in their relationship were *entirely* without *any* reciprocation from her is not consistent with her behavior.

I'm sorry that happened to you and also that it's almost certainly a common story for many women

If people can understand how hard it can be for survivors to have to take years to even report an incident, it's disappointing how hard it is for them to understand how it could take till the end of the incident for afflicted party to react in situ to the incident (if not longer).

I witnessed a girl being sexually assaulted (groped) in high school and for whatever reason I couldn't get it through my head to take action and/or to report the incident. That's no excuse and I will never stop wondering how I could have failed to take action as soon as it happened. I wasn't even the party that suffered from the assault and disgustingly enough it took me a long time to finally take action. The girl who was assaulted immediately reacted to the incident and I have great respect for her to being able to do what I couldn't.

I'm very sorry this happened to you.

Having said that, you hung up as soon as it became fully apparent to you that this call was not what you thought it was. Everything in your account of these questions and your reaction to them makes total sense. It seems like the tipping point was when this sleazebag tried to blackmail you. And as soon as things reached that tipping point, you hung up. Seems to me like you handled it the right way, despite the fact that you were only a teenager at the time.

The moment at which it became apparent to Tracy that the man she was speaking with on the phone (via voice only) was pleasuring himself, and he was hundreds of miles away and had no ability to intimidate her into staying on the call, that moment would seem like a pretty logical tipping point for her to hang up. And yet, she didn't. And unlike in your case, there was no allegation that he threatened her or tried to blackmail her. And not only is she a grown woman and not a teenager, but she works in the field of advocacy for victims of sexual assault and understands how victims think and how abusers operate. So the idea that she didn't hang up when he started masturbating because she "froze" just doesn't add up.