Woman Considers Pressing Charges After Boyfriend's Marriage Proposal Prank Goes Very Wrong — 'I Can’t Stop Thinking About What Happened'
If your idea of a joke is punishable under the law, your sense of humor might be a little off.
Icons8 via Canva, Alta Oosthuizen / Shutterstock, Reddit There are myriad ways to propose marriage, from the sweet and romantic to the over-the-top and memorable. And then there's what one woman's boyfriend did.
He decided to mount a marriage proposal prank to make the big moment as memorable as possible. But as his girlfriend detailed in a post online, it went so wildly sideways that it may land him with a legal entanglement of a different kind.
A woman's boyfriend had her kidnapped as a marriage proposal prank.
It ended up being about as funny as it sounds. Normally, a marriage proposal prank is something like hiding the ring at the bottom of a glass of champagne or getting on bended knee at what turns out to be a surprise gathering of all your friends and family. Instead, this woman's beau told her he was going camping for the weekend, and while he was gone, he had his friends terrorize and traumatize her.
The woman was so terrified by the prank that she soiled herself in the car.
The incident went down while the woman was taking her nightly run. "I noticed [am] SUV that kept popping up," she wrote in a post originally shared on Reddit.
In hindsight, she realizes it was the car of one of her boyfriend's best friends. But in the moment, that didn't compute, and she began to get scared. "I sent a message to my sister saying to stand-by & shared my location."
"Right after sending the message I looked up and the SUV was right beside me and someone jumped out and grabbed me," she writes. "It happened so fast I even dropped my phone on the pavement." Inside the car were two more men in masks and gloves who covered her eyes. She immediately began fighting back.
"I freaked out and resisted like crazy, screaming and kicking," she writes. "All I could hear was these guys laughing." They began holding her body down and she started begging for her life and crying. "I even admit I peed on myself," she says. "They pulled me out of the car and I was screaming for help until I was pulled into a house."
When they arrived at the house the kidnappers took her to, her boyfriend was there to propose.
"When the mask on my head was removed, I was on my knees in front of my bf of 2 years," she writes—and her boyfriend didn't seem to know what exactly was happening. "He was staring at me with a confused look before he started to angrily ask his friends what was going on."
As she looked around the house, covered with "romantic decorations," she slowly began to realize what was going on and collapsed into sobs. "I probably had a 5-minute panic attack in that car on my way there and another one sitting in the entryway to his house. I was sweaty, wearing soiled yoga pants, flushed with fear, scared for my life."
Her boyfriend tried to help her but she told him to leave her alone and took a shower. While there, "I heard yelling and commotion downstairs," presumably as her boyfriend laid into his friends for taking things way, way too far. "I can’t stop thinking about what happened," she said.
Only afterward to she begins to truly realize just how "too far" things went.
The woman is considering pressing charges against her boyfriend and his friends for the marriage proposal prank.
It wasn't just the kidnapping in the end. Her boyfriend's friends also sexually harassed her. As she calmed down and began remembering more of the incident, she recalled that "they were snickering and teasing me...about what they were going to do to me." She also recalled that they began groping her, "caressing my thighs up and down into the inner area."
Another of her boyfriend's friends kept bumping his face into her chest whenever the car would brake, while the driver of the car "kept trying to diffuse the situation." That turned out to be her boyfriend's childhood best friend, who "was in tears when he voluntarily arrived at the police station for a statement."
The other two men involved turned out to be more recent friends of her boyfriend's, and it seems they turned what was "supposed to be something more innocent" into an all-out trauma.
"The original plan was for them to pop out of this car in their funny kidnapping attire and hand me a letter that explained I was being summoned by bf and resistance is futile," she wrote. "Seems like the plan changed as the 2 new friends wanted to shake me up a bit more and make it feel more real." The police plan to investigate the incident as involuntary imprisonment if she decides to press charges.
People were horrified by the marriage proposal prank and urged the woman to press sexual assault charges.
"Honestly I’d end the relationship," one person on TikTok wrote. "He had his friends sexually assault her and traumatize her for literally no reason." Others felt the two friends obviously had deeply sick ulterior motives the entire time. "They definitely assaulted her," another commenter wrote. "The 2 'friends' did [it] on purpose so they could do creepy [things] to her and play off as part of the act."
"Those 2 guys wanted to act out THEIR awful fantasy in a 'legal' way and caused her irreparable damage to her psyche and relationship," another outraged commenter wrote.
Others were reminded of a recent viral TikTok in which a man had his girlfriend abducted and held hostage in Lebanon as part of a marriage proposal prank.
As for the marriage proposal itself? Almost no one was pulling for the woman to still marry her boyfriend. "Honestly I'd end the relationship," one TikToker wrote. "Do not marry that man," another commented. "The friends need to be imprisoned and then gtfo my earth." A word of wisdom to any gentlemen considering a marriage proposal prank—stick to baking the ring inside a cake, for the love of God.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers social justice and human interest topics.