Joseph – sorry, that’s not what happened here. I didn’t go into all the details, but he was very abusive (I definitely would have divorced him if I had been married to him, which Boruch Hashem, I wasn’t).
Any misunderstanding that took place was on his part and was a result of his listening to and believing motzi shem ra about me, and then hearing everything I said in the context of the motzi shem ra he had heard and believed.
By the way, that is one of the worst things about L”H and Motzi Shem Ra. If someone hears something about you that is either untrue or is technically true but the context is missing, the chances are they will believe it as it was told, and then they end up hearing things you say differently than what you meant because they are starting out with certain misconceptions.
That is exactly what happened here.
And he is to blame, because he should have:
1. listened to me when I told him that what he had heard about me wasn’t true.
2. paid attention to what I really was saying
3. Most importantly – not spent an hour at a time (literally – I timed it) screaming at me and saying really abusive things.
I did try many times to discuss it with him afterwards and to give him an opportunity to apologize which he didn’t do.
Personally, I think it is completely inappropriate for a teacher to scream at an (adult) student, especially if the teacher is a man and the student is a girl, and I think he should have been fired. The problem is that in that school, such things were considered acceptable, which I think is a serious problem.
The only one who deserved mussar and tochacha here was him.