AITA for publicly calling someone my abuser years after I mirrored his behavior and went mad?

This is a long one. Sorry in advance.

Back in 2017, I had my first queer crushes (the book illustration of Harry Potter and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man, if that tells you anything). I came out accidentally to a classmate. She came out accidentally to me. We became friends. That part was actually very sweet.

Then I met R.

Our friendship started when he found out I had a crush on him. We connected fast, too fast. He had old bruises he never explained, glasses that kept changing, and long silences that probably should have warned me. He also had a girlfriend, D. I ended up being the third party in their very messy relationship.

Then came the breakdowns. R would threaten to hurt himself and sometimes me too, in vivid and graphic detail. Then he’d apologize. It all happened online. I was young, confused, and stupidly in awe of him. I started copying him: his symptoms, his behaviors, even his emotional outbursts. It wasn’t malicious. I genuinely admired him and thought I was being supportive. I mirrored him so hard I started to lose track of who I was.

Then it stopped being pretend.

I began developing real symptoms. Hallucinations. Delusions. Dark thoughts. I fell apart. And when I did, I became the scapegoat. They cut me out. He kept his mask.

I tried to do the unthinkable. Someone called my mom just in time and saved me. But even after that, he used my recovery against me. He told D I was manipulative, attention-seeking, unstable. He got me isolated. They eventually broke up. He told me he was going to hurt himself again. I told him I didn’t care. Maybe he did. I never found out.

Eventually, I left. I started calling him what he was: my abuser. A manipulator. My groomer. All of it true. But a part of me still feels like I abandoned someone in crisis.

Years later, I watched the same dynamic play out between two people I care about. Let’s call them V and E. I projected my past all over it. Then I stopped and realized: this wasn’t about them. It was about R. And me.

So I wrote it all down. Because I realized something. I owed R the truth. Not out of kindness. Not out of guilt. But because he once saved my life. So I destroyed mine to protect his name. I took the fall. I played the lunatic. The liar. The cautionary tale. I did it to bury him. Not with grace. But with silence.

I never wanted to ruin him. I just didn’t want anyone else to suffer like I did.

They say gazing upon the gods brings ruin. But no one talks about what it costs to kill one.

I do. I lived it.

So: AITA for cutting him off, for calling him abusive, for still struggling with whether I abandoned someone I once loved, even if they hurt me?