Dad And Daughter Refuse To Attend Family Trip Over One Person: "Really Need A Wake-Up Call"

To find out more about this situation, we got in touch with the father who made this post, Reddit user Natural-Mountain-641. He was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda and share what's happened since he reached out for advice online.

"I wouldn’t exactly say there’s a full update, and I have not spoken to my sister since this conversation happened," he revealed. "Her husband, who has been in my life for 25 or so years and I truly consider a brother, sent me a message that said that they’re figuring something out and left it at that. He always doted on my daughter, and he and I have had extensive conversations about disliking Jeff, so I was finding it hard to believe that he just went along with this with no complaints."

We also wanted to know if the dad was still feeling pressure to attend the trip. "My entire family wants me to go, though some are more willing to disinvite Jeff than others," he shared. "I do want to make it clear; everyone found out about Jeff going when I put in the group chat that I would no longer attend because of his presence. Most of my family was just concerned with me still attending, at first, and it wasn’t until the initial conversation cooled down that people started making their opinions known."

"My mother and my sister in law are the only people who think that we should come without complaint to keep the peace, and are still trying to convince me to do so," the dad continued. "My father, brother, and my other sister and her husband have made it abundantly clear that they think it’s abhorrent that anyone would consider bringing Jeff along, for no other reason than the issues my daughter has been having with him. I have a lot more people in my corner than I initially thought."

Next, we were curious what Emily's cousin thinks of Jeff's behavior. "It’s really difficult to tell," the father noted. "He speaks out against it, just not hard. It’s usually something like 'come on bro, that’s not cool' or 'dude chill' or some other casual way to mildly condemn him."

"He and Emily are close in age and grew up like siblings, and they generally treat each other as such," the author added. "He knows how Jeff acts, and he’s apologized to Emily on his behalf, though it was sort of a half-[hearted] apology. He has known Jeff since they were probably 8 or so, and the bullying didn’t start until a year and a half ago."

As far as what he thought of the replies to his post, the father said that they were surprising. "Most of them were helpful, giving me ideas that I hadn’t thought of or helping me realizing certain things," he shared. "I’m really thankful for the different perspectives I received when I was so high-strung that I could barely think."

"When I made this post, I really thought I was taking away from a kid in a terrible circumstance just to protect my daughter from something that my sister had told me was 'made up danger,' that Jeff wouldn’t act that way in front of us. I realized pretty soon after that that wasn’t the case," the dad added.

But, unfortunately, not all of the comments were kind. "There was one in particular that said something like, 'What kind of father even needs to ask? You’re a failure.' And that really got to me," the author shared. "Another comment I got a lot was about involving a lawyer or the police. I stopped replying to these comments because I wasn’t sure what I was able to divulge given that I have reached out to a lawyer (who was called a dud in another comment because I mentioned he was getting his ducks in a row) and did not want to mess anything up there."

The father noted that he also tried going to the police, but they were "less than helpful."

"I keep seeing comments that say I haven’t done enough at the school, as if they can base that on my Reddit post where I purposely withheld information so that it wasn’t possible for anyone to tell it was me," the father continued. "It was a bit frustrating to feel like I couldn’t defend myself because I wanted to keep some semblance of privacy."

"Also, on a less serious note, I was surprised by the amount of people that thought this was AI. Their reasoning was that I was getting constant messages and my family was split, which is so cliché, and that I used too many big words," the dad added. "Also, somebody said 'disinvite' wasn’t a word and that uninvite was the word I should have used. It threw me off."