I was 21 years old when I arrived in the USA, from Moscow, Russia. It was my first time living away from family of origin, in an English speaking country. I primarily cared about how well I spoke English and how gracefully I conducted myself. I did not pay attention to the fact that a married male professor 28 years older than me instantly befriended me and started showering me with positive attention. His wife is 5 years older than him.

Initially it was social - my friend in Moscow was a friend of the eldest son of the American couple.

Eventually the Professor would share mild sexual thoughts with me, hint at sexual desires, describe the bodies and, less frequently, faces and hair color of women he liked. For instance, he would frequently talk about how happy he was when he had worked at Stanford (before moving to his current state), because young people on Stanford campus were close to naked thanks to good weather, and often blond.

Eventually he grew to be in a state in which he could not take his eyes off me (and I have dark hair, so I found it funny and innocent that he would speak non-stop of blonde women but not be able to take his eyes off a non-blonde one).

His wife was visibly pained when he talked of how he'd like to be Marylin Monroe's husband or when he recalled his happiness seeing close-to-naked bodies on Stanford campus. It seemed to me that the professor was sadistic towards the wife - it seemed that he intentionally talked about his desire for other women to cause her pain.

She, in turn, would berate him for liking actresses in movies. She also recruited their teen twin daughters to berate and ridicule him for liking actresses in movies and to protest when he would describe the body of a woman he liked as "zaftig".

Eventually he invited me to audit his classes, suggested better universities for me and wrote recommendations on my behalf, first for universities and then for summer employment. When the relationship was already very intimate but not yet sexual, and I was auditing his classes, he shared that another male faculty member recommended a nurse to him and that the nurse was a blonde sex pot who cooed over him. He was visibly please recalling how the male faculty member friend and he "shared" the affinity for the blonde nurse.

When he and his wife went away, I house-sat and his male faculty member friend propositioned me, and I rejected him because I did not want to hurt the feelings of the Professor. When he eventually learned of my "faithfulness", he both acknowledged that he would have been upset seeing us together, saying that his friend, admittedly, liked women, and claiming that he did not feel entitled to my faithfulness.

It was clear that he would not speak of the cooing blonde nurse to his wife.

Essentially he assigned to me the role of a woman whom he could at the same time:

- adore,
- put on a pedestal,
- admire,
- "love bomb" (this is a new expression I learned reading about narcissists - I suspect that the Professor is a narcissist without empathy)
- desire sexually

AND share his admiration of other women with, in contrast with his wife.

At that time, being very young and liking him a lot, I welcomed that role, but now I see that he groomed me for a secretive somewhat-sexual relationship that followed. I also see that his conduct fits the description of sexual harassment in retrospect.

Oh, and he always spoke critically of women who complained of sexual harassment, as if it had not existed.

Does this type of "grooming" - pervasive, persistent (a sexual or near-sexual allusion at each meeting, with meetings at least once a week), but welcome-in-real-time innuendos - qualify as harassment?

Years later, working through issues in therapy, I realized how pernicious his conduct was. In March of this year, things he said on the phone (after several years of leading up to it) caused me to overdose. So I no longer recall his pitting me against his wife as young, "so sexy", and un-strict (yeah, bring your sexual desires for other women to me - both you and I know very well that it is me whom you desire the most) as beneficial to me.

In fact he's quite a dangerous manipulator.

Thanks for guiding me!