I (29M) am friends with an ethnically South Korean woman named Angela (35F). I’ve known Angie ever since I was 5 years old! Before the events that are described in this post, she used to love me like a younger brother (not sexually), and she always saw herself as my older sister. She's also much taller than me, and just as a cute gesture, she likes to rest her chin on the top of my head sometimes lol.
Many of my male friends have sexual feelings for Angie. Indeed, she is conventionally very attractive, and she looks like a really elegant female anime character. She’s got shoulder-length black hair and thick bangs. She looks totally feminine, but she’s actually a complete tomboy. Angela loves sports, and has played basketball in university. Even nowadays, she goes running every day after work. Also, most of her friends are men.
This past July, Angela and I went on a hike with two of our male friends, who are now both 28 years old. It was an extremely hot and humid day, so Angela took her shirt off and left it in the car. For the entire day (the disastrous hike lasted hours beyond what we planned for), she wore a very low-cut, spaghetti strap sports bra and basketball shorts, while I and the other two guys were fully clothed. She never wore any backpacks at all or had any bags on her, as we (I and my male friends) took care of that, so my friends started off making light jokes about her being “the princess” which she took pretty well. But it didn’t take long before one of my friends started making comments about Angela’s tight shoulder blades and back. She never takes sexual comments very well, so she just kept her mouth shut and looked nervous as she walked. Eventually the guys played some “prank” on her by yanking the back of her sports bra and almost causing it to rip, and at that point she screamed and started crying. I got us all to stop and take a time out, and I dared my friends to hurt Angela once again. I grabbed her arm and took her away from the idiots to a secluded area, and we had a heart-to-heart moment. She did that gesture where she rested her chin on my head, and then she just sort of collapsed on me and sobbed on me. I put my hands on her shoulders and eventually got her to calm down successfully.
At around 2 PM, we realized that we had no clue where we were and that we were lost. Angela pulled out her phone and saw that it was dead (zero battery) and when she saw it, she started crying again. From this moment on, she couldn’t stop crying, and she never regained her composure for the entire day. She spent several hours sweating heavily too no matter how much water she drank. My friends became deeply remorseful of their earlier sexual comments about her and their little prank, but Angie remained terrified of them, and she visibly kept her distance from us (me and my friends) for several hours as we tried to re-orient ourselves. She kept on muttering and begging us not to touch her, which I thought was heartbreaking. With that being said, she was of no assistance in getting us out of our predicament; I and my male friends had to figure it all out while we just dragged her along with us. We didn’t expect to be stuck in the mountains through the night, and when it fell dark, we relied on our phone lights to lead the way. She spent a lot of time crossing her arms tightly around her breasts as if she was scared that we might touch her, and she screamed whenever we angled our lights away from her (because she didn’t want to be in the dark). In this sense, she was a bit selfish. When we finally got back down to the car, Angela collapsed onto her knees and she was inconsolable.
Nowadays, Angela claims to have been traumatized by our hike. She and I are no longer on speaking terms. She definitely wants nothing to do with my two friends who accompanied us on the hike either.
Is Angela's trauma genuine, or is she just being a crybaby/spoiled brat?