Is this verbal abuse at work?

Ignore it and don’t get caught up in that game. Remember that honesty is always the best policy, so stick to your guns.

If it continues, and your boss can’t give you some reassurance, go to your HR department, and file a complaint. And document everything. Writing out the history of what has happened now will help you process it, and it will give you a paper trail.

If the company is unresponsive and it continues, find an employment lawyer. You do not have to put up with this.

You are somehow invested with this person and time to withdraw whatever it is. Move forward do not look back. Do NOT give this passive aggressive power to affect you. It’s that simple.

he said, she said. Devilishly hard to prove.

Good luck, but I doubt anything meaningful will happen.

Unless you have stuff in writing or the guy admits to his wrongdoing, like @elbanditoroso said, it’s hard to prove, if not impossible. It may help if you have coworkers who are willing to put themselves out on a limb and go forward on your behalf, but chances are, they’re not going to want to get involved to the extent where it goes to HR or management.

“In February he broke his silence and told me he was making rumors up about me and another friend.”

In all of my experience with the rumor mill, usually on the victim side, I have never once heard anyone admit to the victim that they simply made things up for no reason.

I would love to know how that conversation went.

I would guess that more than 50% of the jellies here first experienced this phenomenon in elementary school. Most of us learned after a very painful process that our value was not determined by the mean spirited words of others and these kinds of things say more about the attacker than they do about the victim. That being said, those of us who successfully emerged from a school culture of bullying rarely consider ourselves victims any longer. We have learned who we can and can’t be vulnerable to and have also learned to be empathetic when we witness this continuing with others in adulthood.
If you are one of those who have never experienced bullying (and your username reflects that you may very well be) you might need to seek out the advice of some of the invisible outcasts around you and ask how they deal with it. You are probably not the first person he has harassed and you probably won’t be the last.

Pursuant to what @Judi was saying:

I was an outcast. I was at the last minute removed from the Senior Superlatives page of the yearbook. The teacher almost didn’t catch it before it went to print. My title? Write-in candidate for the write-in title of “Person Most Likely To Blow Up the School”.

I was a geek in high school in the very early oughts, before being a “geek” was cool, but after internet access became fairly normal (still 56k though…). I was playing with learning HTML coding, and helped run a couple of fandom-related websites on Angelfire and Geocities.

Anyhow, someone overheard me telling a Freshman friend about stuff going on on the website, and the rumor mill turned it into me having a website on which I planned which classmates I was planning on executing or something. Really horrible stuff for a 16 year old with few friends.

It got really bad really fast, and there wasn’t anyone helping me fight the rumour.

Eventually I made a list of all the people who had said something about me, that I knew about, and I did make a website.

I listed every person who said something mean to me. And next to their names I wrote one positive thing about them.

Underneath that list I wrote a letter explaining how hurtful the rumour had been, how untrue it was, and what I did for my hobbies was my own business to share with the people I chose to share it with, and I would not turn it over to people who thought of me as lowly as they clearly did. I apologised for any harm I caused them, and left it at that.

I handed the URL to one of the kids in my English class, and by the following day everyone had seen it. A few people thanked me for the things I said about them. Most just ignored me the rest of the year, which was a vast improvement.

Anyway, there are lots of ways to skin a cat. Sometimes it’s by feeding them exactly what they’re asking for, with a different flavor.

verbal abuse at work: first of all I am sad after reading this I am going to tell you 3 things.

1st: be more productive focus on work he will himself feel sorry.(sorry means I won’t repeat it again, realization means end of negativity), so you dont need his sorry, focus on your job,leave him.

2nd: leave the past live in your present and prepare for your future, If you are financially strong leave the job move forward.

3rd: sue him and teach him a lesson but in limits, men have dominated women for eras so be safe.
thanks hope it helps