A close friend betrayed me (and also betrayed another friend)

[Lorem]

First, I’d like to say I’m not fluent in English yet, so maybe there are grammar mistakes there.

Second, I wrote a big text venting.

So, the story is:

I had a close friend that I met in High School (at around the beginning of high school). I’ll call him John in this post (this isn’t his real name).

For context, the school that I study is a high school + a technician school, so I’m learning common high school subjects but also IT subjects. I don’t know what people abroad call this type of school, though. Anyway, I’m in the last grade (the 4th grade) and there’s a subject called Project, where people have to write a document called report (with Introduction, Problem, Objectives, Justificative, Theoretical Reference etc.) and also create some solution in the study area (IT, for me). Project is the subject that scares students the most because it’s hard. I’m doing my project with another friend that I’ll call Matt.

Thursday evening was the deadline to submit the Project’s report, so I did it (there’s a website to submit it) and, after that, I messaged John to know if he got to do it too and also to know more about his project (I was curious). It was almost midnight when he sent me his report and I also sent mine to him.

So, I started to read John’s report.

You have no idea how surprised I was when I noticed that he had plagiarized my report. I started to think “maybe I’m too sleepy and I can’t see it correctly” but I couldn’t believe it. I sent John's report to Matt and he also was surprised (John and Matt were friends too). Like, John’s report has some topics that are literally a copy of mine in every word. And I know for sure it’s plagiarism because there are topics I wrote that were plagiarized by him. So I know what he did and he knows what he did.

When I messaged John about it, he replied that he had made it using ChatGPT and that it was all a coincidence (bro, he literally used the same image as me in the report, an image that is self-made). Then, in school, he lied in front of me saying again that it’s a coincidence and that he didn’t copy from me (he still claims he copied it from ChatGPT). I just stopped talking to him, I was pretending he didn’t exist every time he tried to talk to me.

He stopped being my friend and also stopped being a friend of Matt.

I felt terrible (I’m still feeling terrible) and Matt too. It was like getting a stab in the back. I can’t describe the feeling very well, it was a mix of anger, sadness, disbelief and anxiety. This is what a betrayal feels like, apparently. The worst part is when the traitor lies to you, in person, and you already know he is lying.

Anyway, Matt and I already have a lot of proof that John had plagiarized our work, so we won’t have problems with the professors. But John for sure will.

I’m just talking about it here because I would like to vent a little. 

[Holmbo]

That sucks! I'm sorry this happened to you. Did he read your report before or how did he copy it?

[Lorem]

32 minutes ago, Holmbo said:

That sucks! I'm sorry this happened to you. Did he read your report before or how did he copy it?

months ago we sent our report to him because he was having difficulty formatting his document and he wanted to know how Matt and I had formatted our report. We sent it because we didn't suspect he would plagiarize us 🤡

[Holmbo]

11 hours ago, Lorem said:

We sent it because we didn't suspect he would plagiarize us 🤡

Of course you didn't