The morning after, everything was black. The soles of my feet when I stepped out of bed. The tissue I blew my nose in when I reached the bathroom. And almost all my memories from the night before.
“I tried to wake you up and you kept saying you couldn’t speak Portuguese,” my housemate told me when I eventually padded downstairs, only making me feel more discombobulated. Things got worse after I turned my phone on, sparking a series of texts from numbers I didn’t recognise. One had been saved under an unfamiliar name, let’s call him Billy, with a kiss next to it. I blocked them all.
This was in 2020; I was 26. I’d had blackouts from drinking when I was younger but not like this. By the afternoon a series of flashbacks started playing in my head like deleted scenes. Kissing a man with long hair I’d just met in the bar I’d been to with friends. Shivering in a taxi next to him and realising my friends had gone home. Being in the bathroom of a stranger’s house party; feeling a sharp pain and realising the long-haired man was having sex with me. Returning to the party and talking to a different man who insisted on putting his number into my phone; this must have been Billy. Feeling dizzy, uncomfortable and tired. Getting up to go home.
I never heard from the long-haired man again. But Billy continued to contact me on separate platforms even after he’d already been blocked on others. Months later I received a phone call. “Hey, it’s Billy. We hooked up last summer.” I didn’t understand: Why contact me after I’d already blocked him? Whose phone was he using to call me? And what did he mean by “hooked up”?
“We slept together at yours,” he clarified. All feeling left my body: I had no memory of going home with anyone, let alone having sex with them. And yet Billy correctly named the area where I lived, joking that I’d “begged” him to stay when he left. I pleaded for more information, explaining I didn’t know any of this had happened. He then turned cagey and hung up. I called back but I’d been blocked. That’s when I rang the police. And that’s when I was told I’d been raped that night. Twice.
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“Sex requires consent, and nobody who has blacked out is able to give that,” says Ciara Bergman, CEO of Rape Crisis England and Wales. This is reflected in the law: according to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a person can consent only if they have the “freedom and capacity to make that choice”. Crown Prosecution Service guidance states that this capacity is hindered by alcohol: “If a person is unable to give consent because they are drunk, drugged or unconscious, it is rape.” Hence why the police encouraged me to file two rape reports.
• We face a crisis in sexual consent among the young
Knowing how difficult it is to pursue a sexual assault case (in 2021, 3.6 per cent of all recorded adult rapes resulted in a charge), I was reluctant. I didn’t remember consenting to sex with the long-haired man but I could recall kissing him, and based on history — an Irish rape trial in 2018 famously saw the victim’s lace thong being used as evidence of her consent — I suspected that would be used against me. So I let that one go. I persisted with Billy, but after a case officer told me I had almost no chance of getting a conviction given the lack of evidence, I decided it wasn’t worth it — 61 per cent of all rape victims drop out of investigations in England and Wales.
There is no specific data on how many sexual assault cases involve blackouts but anecdotally it’s rife. Out of my female friends I’d struggle to name one who hasn’t experienced something unwanted sexually when they’ve been drunk. In these circumstances the victim blaming that accompanies every instance of sexual assault is at its most visceral. After all we were the ones who drank too much. We put ourselves in that position. What did we expect?
For decades, pop culture has amplified this messaging. Take Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s Eighties rom-com, which features an entire subplot about a drunk girl being raped. Or two of Judd Apatow’s most revered comedies: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which sees the lead character being taken to a club and told to “tackle drunk bitches” to lose his virginity, and Superbad, which is based on the notion of men taking advantage of drunk women. “You know when you hear a girl saying, like, ‘Oh, I was so shitfaced last night, I shouldn’t have f***ed that guy?’ We could be that mistake!” Jonah Hill says in the role of Seth. Recently this has changed, thanks to writers like Michaela Coel and Emerald Fennell, both of whom masterfully tackle the nuances of blackouts and rape in their respective works, I May Destroy You and Promising Young Woman. But examples like this remain rare in a cultural canon with a long history of using sexual assault as comedic fodder.
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Maybe that’s why, at first, I tried to laugh off what happened to me. It became a pithy anecdote, something I’d wheel out in pubs to acquire greater social and sexual capital. Because when you tell your friends you slept with two men on the same night, they pat you on the back. When you tell them you were raped by two men in the same night, they ask questions you can’t answer. What happened? Why haven’t you reported it? And the very worst: are you sure?
None of this is helped by the fact that, scientifically speaking, blackouts are somewhat contentious. “There are no clear signs that someone is not storing their memories while drinking,” says Rose Marie Ward, professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. This means it can be impossible to prove consent was not obtained, leading perpetrators to claim they didn’t know the victim was in a blackout. This was a key part of the defence strategy in the Brock Turner case of 2015, when the Stanford athlete, 19 at the time, sexually assaulted Chanel Miller while she was unconscious. “I read that according to him, I liked it,” Miller said in a statement published on Buzzfeed after Turner was convicted — he served just three months. “I learnt that my ass and vagina were completely exposed outside, my breasts had been groped […] but I don’t remember, so how do I prove I didn’t like it?”
It’s only years later that I can see how that night affected me. The paranoia whenever I was alone with a man. The rekindling of an unhealthy relationship in pursuit of familiarity. It would be eight months until I could sleep through the night. My relationships with sex and alcohol remain complicated too; pleasure is hindered by fears over safety. I’ve gone through periods of abstaining from both.
Having written about being sexually assaulted before, I can pre-empt how some people will respond, criticising my behaviour over that of my perpetrators’. It might seem odd, then, that I would open up myself to that again. The thing about being raped is that no one could possibly judge you more than you judge yourself. And even though I know the answer, there’s always a malevolent voice whispering: “Were you asking for it?”
My first novel, Gold Rush, is very much inspired by this story — it’s about a young woman who spends the night with a famous musician she meets through work, only to wake up the following morning in pain, unable to remember how the evening ended. Without a conviction, putting these experiences into writing is the closest thing I can do to prove that I was not “asking for it” and make sense of the trauma that has followed. Because, like many rape survivors, I have no proof. But maybe words are a way of verifying to myself that it did happen. That it wasn’t my choice. That I didn’t want it.
Gold Rush by Olivia Petter (HarperCollins £16.99) is published on July 18. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
