Miranda

I think we started rehearsal at the beginning of the school year, which would have been August, and the show went up around Halloween.

So from like August to October-ish.

It was around this year for sure.

He would start to text me after a lot of rehearsals because I was formally a part of the department.

He personally made all of my class schedules for me or would offer advice on what classes I should take and who I should take them with.

He would text me a lot and send me unsolicited emails.

But the play was for sure, I think, the inciting incident.

I think that a lot of this play was him testing my boundaries to see how far he could really get with me, and the answer was pretty far.

The play was the beginning of him having permission to text me outside of school

and to contact me about things that are not necessarily related to school.

We would talk about music, books, and poetry, and things like that.

I think that that's really when he began to think of me as potentially someone that he could actually groom.

I always compare my relationship with him to his relationship with Olivia, who was my best friend and still is.

We were both in

incredibly close with him but in very different ways he would see both of us individually and private for various reasons but for her he had decided that he was a bit more of like a father figure he had started to develop this relationship with her

When she was a freshman, when I started my sophomore year in the department, he definitely pushed for us to be friends in a lot of ways.

And I think part of that is because he needed her to convince me that he was a good person so that I wouldn't have any red flags or warning signs ignite in my brain when getting to know him and when he would begin to groom me specifically to be sexual with him.

Traveling was really important in the way that our relationship developed as well.

My sophomore year, I was invited to go with the theater department as a whole to KCACTF, which is Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and it's regional.

So it happens all over the United States, and proctors come to watch our show, and they identify people who are really good in the region.