Just found out something disturbing about one of my (31m) best friends (29m) past, I think I might need to cut him off, what do I do?

I'll try to keep this as brief as possible. I've known a guy, lets call him John (29m) for about ten years. We went to the same high school and had a lot of mutual friends, but never hung out. We really started chilling together after high school was over- we went to a lot of the same events and parties together.

John has always lived life on the edge- He comes from a very wealthy family and honestly has never had to work for anything in his life. He drinks and smokes almost everyday, does drugs pretty consistently, goes on multiple vacations every year etc. While he can usually handle his stuff, occasionally he gets blackout drunk and does dumb things, nothing crazy though. He also likes to embellish a lot of details about his life - he brags about how he sells drugs and makes $12000 a week (when in reality he delivers pizza), will make up insane stories that you just know never happened ("I was driving and saw a 3 car crash, had to give cpr to some dude, saw someone die man crazy night"). Enough "once in a lifetime" events happen to him on a weekly basis to make his stories suspect, and there is never anyone with him to verify anything.

I have looked past all of this for years because he is a friendly guy, always makes everyone around him feel good, loves dogs, and is always down to do just about anything, at any time.

Within the last year, a couple people in my circle started hanging out with another group of girls. In that group is a girl, lets call her samantha(32fm) who John dated 7 years ago. Me and some of my friends really hit it off with this other group, to the point where i've seen them more in the last year than John and his crew. Its well known that John and Samantha weren't on good terms, and no one invites them to events together.

At a recent party with Samantha and her friends, I ended up talking to one of Samantha's friends about Sam and John. I wanted to know what happened.

I found out that John got really drunk one night, got in a fight with Samantha, and tried to strangle her. She got away and started running around her house, but John followed her throwing furniture at her while she was running, including a full dresser. To make this worse, Samanthas's daughter , Jen (13f) who was 7 at the time was there and witnessed the whole thing. To this day, she is still terrified of John, and Samantha gets nervous if hes in the same room with her. When they're in the same room, he tries to talk to her constantly.

I was in shock. I knew John had a temper at times, but hearing this completely floored me. I honestly don;t know how to move forward from this.

Do I completely cut off my friend of 10 years, who is entrenched in a lot of the social circles i'm in? Is 7 years long enough to write this off as a terrible mistake on his part that won't be repeated? I'm leaning towards cutting him off, and taking the social fallout but I could definitely use some other opinions here. Thank you if you took the time to read this.

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TL;DR Long time friend tried to strangle his girlfriend 7 years ago, I just found out, where do I go from here?

Submitted August 03, 2021 at 07:31PM by badwife132 https://ift.tt/3ijR1cu