When Krista met a man in a bar who was gorgeous and flirting outrageously with her, she was on a high. So when he asked for her number at end of the night, she wrote it down, hoping it might lead to something – unfortunately she had no idea what hell was about to be unleashed…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
Krista was celebrating.
Being a homeowner was something she wondered if she’d ever get to experience, but, somehow she and her sister had done it. They’d combined resources and that very day had bought their first home at auction. It felt surreal.
“It was massive,” says Krista. “So, yip, we were out having a few drinks to celebrate, that’s for sure.”
Early on in the night Krista locked eyes with a tall, handsome man on the other side of the bar.
“He was gorgeous,” she says. “I don’t know if it was just that, but I was drawn to him – there felt like there was this spark and energy when we looked at each other.”
A couple of minutes later, that man popped up next to Krista to introduce himself – his name was Peter – and to ask if he could buy her a drink.
Krista obviously said yes, and from there the two spent the next few hours flirting with each other.
“I was on a high – I’d bought this house, now this beautiful man was flirting with me… life was good!” she says.
They decided to all head to a different bar and along the way Krista found herself kissing Peter. He suggested they get in a taxi and go to her place, but she said no – she wasn’t interested in a one night stand.
“It could have been fun, but I also wanted to stay with my sister – and, hopefully go out with Peter again,” she says.
At the next bar, Krista and her sister felt ready to call it a night. Peter gave her a kiss on the cheek and asked if he could call her sometime.
“I’m not sure why I did it like this – but his receipt was on the bar and there was a pen right there, so I wrote down my name and my number on it,” she says. “Sometimes it’s awkward standing there giving your number, or taking their phone to type your number – I remember it feeling really fun.”
Except from then on, it would soon stop feeling fun.
After spending Sunday mostly parked on the couch, Krista headed to work on Monday still fizzing. She was excited to tell her work mates about the house – and she was hoping that she might get a message from Peter.
Instead, after she’d sat down at her desk and started settling in for the morning, her boss sent an email asking her to come into his office.
“My first thought was I wondered if he’d heard about the house and wanted to congratulate me,” she says.
But instead, her boss, John, asked her if she was familiar with the code of conduct clauses in her employment contract.
“I was so caught off-guard, but I said something like ‘I think so, but what is this pertaining to?’” she says.
John then asked if she thought her behaviour on the weekend was in keeping with the code of conduct.
“I immediately felt embarrassed and shamed, but at the same time, I wasn’t really sure what for,” she says. “I’d definitely had a few drinks – I’d kissed a stranger on the street – but how did that have anything to do with my work? I was trying to think of anything else but was stumped. I had a good, clear recollection of the night – I did have a few drinks – but not enough to forget any parts of the night. I knew my boss was quite religious so I did start worrying that maybe he’d seen me drinking or something and disagreed with it. But how could he bring it up like this if it was just me having a few drinks on my own time, where I didn’t do anything disreputable?”
Her boss then started to explain the situation – although it took a long time for Krista to understand what was going on, because for a long time none of it made any sense.
But essentially what happened – partly based on information Krista would later gather – John had received quite a disturbing email.
The email was from a woman, Yvonne, who had written to John to tell him about the outrageous conduct of one of his staff members: Krista.
Yvonne alleged that Krista had sought out and seduced her husband that Saturday night – potentially drugged him – and spent the night with him. Her husband had not returned home until the next morning and would not give her details because he had no memory, but she found Krista’s details in the pocket of his pants. Yvonne was shocked to discover Krista’s details, because Yvonne is an important client of the company that Krista works at. Now, after this “appalling” behaviour, she would be cutting ties with the company.
“I didn’t know all of that in the first meeting,” says Krista. “I could not work out for the life of me what was going on. I wondered if that receipt with my name on it – which I stupidly put my last name on – had somehow ended up in someone else’s pocket. I told my boss what happened – that a man had flirted with me in a bar and I had given him my number and that was it, I went home alone. He was furious though and told me to go home while he worked through it.”
Incredibly embarrassed, Krista headed home – on the way, before she called her sister, she started searching social media for Yvonne. It didn’t take long to find her and one of her profile pictures that was clearly a wedding photo of her and her husband. It was Peter.
“I felt so sick,” she says. “I called my sister, so upset, and she said she’d come over on her lunch break. It was horrible.”
Her boss emailed her to say she was not to come in to work for the rest of the week, that he was taking the allegations very seriously. Yvonne was threatening to get the police involved.
The next day she talked to her boss on the phone who suggested that it might be best for Krista’s reputation if she resigned.
“I had gone from such a high, to the deepest of lows,” she says. “In hindsight, I absolutely should have gone to a lawyer and dug in – but I felt embarrassed. I had told my side of the story, and John didn’t believe me. That piece of sh*t, Peter, had obviously not gone home, kept going and found some other girl to sleep with. Weeks and months later I would be so angry, but at that time, my boss made me feel so terrible and embarrassed and yuck, that I agreed to resign. I had no job to go to and had just bought a house. I felt like I might have a nervous breakdown.”
Krista says that before resigning, she tried to get in touch with both Peter and Yvonne, but had no luck.
Her boss, she says, was very good at twisting things back on her, telling her that she’d obviously put herself in a dicey situation, whatever the truth was. He’d also heard that she’d talked to one of her colleagues about it and how she had kissed Peter, which isn’t what she’d told him. He said her story kept changing.
Krista says she is kicking herself now that she didn’t do more at the time, because obviously, what happened was completely wrong.
“Many, many years have passed now, but over the years I’ve thought a few times about whether it is too late to take any legal action about what happened,” she says. “Peter and Yvonne got divorced a few years ago, but I still have no real understanding of what happened. I’ve pieced together that yeah, he must have stayed out all night drinking, or perhaps gone home with someone else. And then Yvonne found that receipt in his pants and put two and two together and instead got eight. She probably searched my name and then went on a rampage. It’s outrageous though that I’m the one who lost my job and that both he and her let this happen. And that my boss went along with it. I’m obviously glad I stopped working for someone like that, but at the time it was devastating.”
While it was a real knock to her confidence, both professionally and personally, Krista says it had no impact on her career in the end. Although she’d been worried she wouldn’t get a job in the same industry, and what might happen if they talked to her previous employer, she got another job for the same pay six weeks later.
“I don’t know what the moral of my story is – maybe it’s make sure you stick up for yourself in the workplace, or maybe it’s just to not give your full name to a guy you’ve just met? Or maybe it’s don’t assume that a guy isn’t married just because he’s not wearing a wedding ring and is flirting with you!”
