Hello everyone. I’m looking for some guidance in how to help me and my family deal with a toxic situation involving my half-sister and her family. We have already cut off all ties with them, but we have overlapping social circles and they have done their level best to destroy our reputations. Short of moving away from the area (which is absolutely on the table if interest rates ever come back down), we cannot completely rid ourselves of them and their influence. I suppose for everyone to understand, I need to give some background. I’ll try to summarize as best as I can, but you might want to buckle up because this is quite the wild ride. I’ll try to condense it as much as possible, but this is a situation that has been going on for over a year now, so there’s a lot to unpack.

My wife and I have been married for 23 years and my half-sister and her husband have been married for 20. When they got married, we lived 2000 miles away so we honestly weren’t around them very much. In 2016, we moved to the same town they lived in because I needed a different climate. Up to this point, our interactions with my brother-in-law were limited, but usually less than positive. He has repeatedly, over the last 20 years, shown that he is unconcerned with how his behavior and actions affect others. I can point to many occasions during visits where he would suddenly change plans without telling us, leaving us wondering what was going on and where they went. He would make snotty comments to me or my wife or to others about us. His behavior never sat well with us, but for the sake of keeping peace we overlooked it every time. My wife and daughter have always found him “unsettling” and I’ve never been comfortable with him either.

This situation got ugly last summer when my wife and I approached them about how they were treating the son of a friend of ours. They went nuclear because we dared to say anything about their behavior. They spewed hatred and venom at me for days. Perhaps there may have been a better way to discuss this with them, but we did the best we could at the time.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that their daughters were bullying mine. This caused them to take that bullying to the next level. They stopped speaking to all of us, even to the point of pretending we didn’t even exist if we tried to interact with them. They took friends away from my daughter. I watched them literally interrupt a conversation she was having with someone to pull that girl away from her. They have yelled at my daughter and lied to her and about her. They made her want to cut herself. Fortunately, she’s been very open with us about how she’s feeling and she will soon be seeing a therapist to help deal with the trauma of it all.

I have met with my brother-in-law two more times over the last year to try to resolve this. I have even brought “neutral” parties to mediate and try to help make peace. Each time, he has made some very heinous, false accusations against me, which I’ll get into in a moment. During this time, they have gone around to the friends in our social circle and influenced them to the point that these people will barely speak with us anymore. I have lost two of my best friends over this, likely due to these accusations. What they have told people about me is by far the worst thing anyone has ever done to me. So, here’s the backstory:

For a few years now, we have been helping my daughter’s friend, Katie (name changed). Katie lives with her mother and grandmother. Her father has been in and out of prison her entire life (or in rehab). When he is around, he is emotionally abusive. Over time, I have come to love this kid like she were my own. We have supported her materially and emotionally. We have taken her on several family vacations and anytime she needed something that her mother couldn’t afford, we paid for it. I think of her as my adopted "daughter". She also happens to be friends with my nieces. Last fall, after months of a stalemate, my sister and her husband told Katie’s mother (whom I will call Linda) that the reason we were helping them out so much was because I was after Katie. Meanwhile, my nieces were telling Katie the same thing.

I need to point out that this girl has never had anyone take care of her. She has no relationship with her father, nor does she want one. She once told her mother that she has no idea what a father-daughter relationship should be like. But despite that, she was starting to see me as a dad. She trusted me and would ask me for advice on things from time to time. These are things she has never done with a male figure in her life. So, then these people come along and basically tells her that the first man in her life who has ever shown that he truly cared about her was only doing it because he wanted to get in her pants. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I have never wanted anything of the sort. She’s a child, and one I think of as my own. Now, you can imagine what that did to her. It’s bad enough that they said this about me, but they undermined her emotional wellbeing for their own ends. Fortunately, she has a great therapist who has been helping her, but it should never have come to this.

They provided no evidence for this accusation, but they continued to push this on Linda for some time. Once they finally had her questioning my motives, they tried to get her to report me to the authorities. The things is, she wouldn’t do it. So then they did. Of course, this meant I got hauled into an investigation and raked over the coals. Fortunately, after speaking with me and Linda (separately of course), the investigation determined that I had done nothing wrong. So that was a weight off of my shoulders. Since that time, Linda and I have worked things out since she realized that it was all a setup. Katie unfortunately is still not wanting to be around me, probably because she’s still hanging out with my nieces.

But that still wasn’t good enough for them. They have told many of our friends that I was grooming a 16 year-old girl, causing most of them to no longer speak to us. We have had to find an entirely new circle of friends who don’t know them and haven’t been influenced by them.

Over the last year, I have desperately tried to understand why they would do this. I have watched this man lie to my face in the most despicable ways possible. I have seen them manipulate so many people. They used Linda and Katie as pawns in their sick little game to ruin me. He has lied and said “We never said anything to Linda” only for my sister to message me later and admit that they did. But of course, she refused to take any responsibility for it. But most of all, they abused my daughter and manipulated my other “daughter” into thinking I was a child predator.

So I guess what I’m looking for from this community is some help understanding why, why would my own family do this to me? I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on the Dark Triad and I think there may be something there, but my psychology degree comes from a Cracker Jack box, so I’ll defer to people with more experience. The other thing I want is to get my kid back. I know that will take time and there’s nothing I can do to get her away from their influence. I guess I just want some reassurance that perhaps, someday she will realize how they have used her and then maybe we can start over. We will probably never have what we had before, but I can’t quite give up on her yet.

Does all of that make sense? I’m sorry it’s so long, but honestly I could write an entire paper on this situation.

Thank you in advance for listening.

Earendil