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PART 1:
As a predominantly gay and single twenty-two year old in London I use Tinder in order to meet potential dates, and yes, on occasion to find casual sex - a way to feel a bit less lonely in a city where a casual encounters are more common that eating fast food. I didn’t realise how a date could come with so many disastrous consequences.
I met my accuser on Tinder where we matched and messaged before he asked to come over to my flat and we set a date. However once the day of the date arrived I was feeling worse-for-wear since the night before I had a dinner party which had left me hungover.
Feeling as if it was too late to cancel, I went to meet my date at the tube station because he texted me saying he felt too scared to walk the two streets to my flat in Notting Hill, hardly a notoriously dangerous area. I imagined he wanted to ‘size me up’ before he made the commitment to come inside.
Once we were back at mine I offered him some wine and crisps left over from my party the night before. I noticed that rather than sipping his wine like I did, he waited 10 minute intervals and then guzzled the whole glass down in one. He repeated this process. I did find this odd, but passed it off as a quirk but did quickly realise he might be at best a one-night stand and was not going to become anything more. Between the two of us we probably drank about a bottle and a half of wine, most of which he poured for us both himself before stating that he hadn’t drank since New Years, two months previous.
We moved over from the dining table to the sofa where we kissed whilst listening to some pop music which we mutually enjoyed. He said it was fine to kiss him but I shouldn’t touch his face with my hand since he was wearing makeup to contour his face and didn’t want to smudge his makeup.
Eventually I led him casually by the hand to my room. We began consensual foreplay and ended up having consensual penetrative sex.
Once we had finished he told me he loved me.
I didn’t know what to respond and he backtracked by saying that “he loved me in the way he loves his cat”. I think not returning the affection made him volatile. I thought he knew it was just a casual affair, this should have been obvious at this point seeing as it was the first time we had met.
I broke the silence by offering him a cigarette, and we smoked in bed before foreplay began again. I noticed after a while he picked up his phone and started texting his friend. I kissed him on the chest until reaching a level head with him and stared at the screen where I read “HELP - come and pick me up”, something to that effect. He asked me to stop. I immediately stopped all physical contact with him.
He ran to the bathroom and I heard him throw up and start to cry. He came back out and lied back down in the bed, now the lights were back on and he said in a repetitive manner “I said no, I said no, I said no...”
I was freaked out by the statement which was false, since when we were fooling around again and he asked me to stop I did. I tried to comfort his agitation by offering him a glass of water and a pair of pyjamas. He said a friend was going to pick him up.
He also told me he was scared, I told him not to be and he later said to the police I told him he should be scared.
He left the flat and got into a car. You would imagine someone who would later claim to have been spiked would find it difficult to walk out of the flat, or be able to get out of bed when they wished to go to the bathroom.
With a feeling of unease, I imagined the police turning up at my doorstep but put the experience behind me and fell asleep feeling that either he was unstable and vindictive in which case I couldn’t do anything. Perhaps I was exaggerating the situation and he was harmless.
I soon awoke to hear police officers outside the bedroom window muffling words into their radios.
The front door pounded with an intensity that could only mean one thing. The police were there. I was right, he was falsely alleging that I had raped him.
Perhaps he claimed what he did because he told me that he loved me after we had sex and I didn’t say it back? Maybe it’s because he had a boyfriend and didn’t want to admit he had cheated, in which case why was he on Tinder, a dating app? Maybe he was a virgin and regretted losing his virginity to a one night stand?
Sometimes I wonder whether he became so drunk, since he was unused to drinking, that he truly believed his drink had been spiked. I doubt it though. After my arrest, he continued to ‘like’ social media of mine. His behaviour was bizarre, matching his earlier duplicity: he convinced me over Tinder that he was a full-time professional, not a 17-year-old sixth form student.
The police refuse to see the evidence I have that confirms this. How can we continue to live in a society that claims to “…prevent crime and support victims", a sentence which the Metropolitan police use to sign off their emails, when in this case my alleger was never brought to justice.
On our ‘date’, he spoke at length about a prominent figure in the fashion industry who is currently serving time for sexual assault, but has an injunction out to prevent it being spoken about in the press. It feels like he already had rape on the mind.
He also spoke about having two characters one for when he was in public and another private persona, and stated that in public he would probably ignore me even though it seemed we shared mutual acquaintances. I wish I had listened to my gut instincts that something felt off, made my excuses and asked him to leave.
I was also told that my alleger posted a status recently on his Facebook account accusing another person of being ‘#ABitRapey’. This seems a bit crass for someone who believed they had been raped to post, barely a month after the event. When I told the police about this after the case was dropped, they said it would be up to him to enter another accusation. Despite reinforcing that that was not what I meant, I was met with total disinterest.
Indeed, through the process I repeatedly felt that my valid questions were being met with totally robotic responses by the police, in a similar fashion to talking to your phone company about cancelling your contract. The synths on the recently aired ‘Humans’ series on Channel 4 were more feeling.
After being arrested at around 2am, humiliated in front of my neighbours and dressed in the equivalent of a hazmat suit/head-to-toe protective suit to preserve evidence, I was hauled into the back of a police van with handcuffs on.
I cried silently during the ride to the station. It felt so unreal: false allegations were something that happened to other people far detached from me. I couldn’t fathom what this man would stand to gain by lying. I felt detached from my body, I had surrendered to my helplessness and anxiety.
I’m not surprised that the accused admit to things they don’t truly believe under police interrogation – extreme anxiety can make it hard to reason rationally.
For this reason, it is vital to have a solicitor with you who will brief you on what to say - usually no comment. Every fibre of your body is telling you to give your side of the story under the illusion that the detectives will just go "oh that makes sense" and let you go on your way. Cuts to legal aid have made it more difficult to get a decent lawyer without having to pay extortionate fees and frantically try to find one before the interrogation.
A good solicitor will explain that it is the police's job to find evidence, not yours to provide them with and make it easier to join the dots in a way that you might not have perceived to be your own truth. Of course looking through the events that had happened I knew I was innocent, the fact that perhaps in the mind of my alleger he might truly believe I was to blame made me feel guilty and misunderstood.
In my case it later became apparent during a draining interrogation after a sleepless night in a cold cell, that he believed I had put something in his drink while on our first and only date at my flat, a location of his choosing, not surprising when it later emerged that he had lied about his age and wouldn’t be able to go to a bar, which would have been eventually been proved to be false by the police or they would not have dropped the case without asking for a recommendation from the CPS.
I was told it would benefit me to offer to be intimately examined by a physician; a process which includes taking samples of your pubic hair and swabs from your genitals. I am sure the process is similar for the alleger as well but I felt it was extremely invasive.
In my case the physician seemed to linger too long. The police officer in the room faced the wall. I didn’t feel like I could speak out about this at the time. The police should not have recommended that the examination would be in my interest for me before a solicitor could give me his opinion a further 8 or so hours later. My experience of the examination is backed up by a report by Baroness Stern “(physicians) demonstrate quite inappropriate behaviour at times, with poor clinical practice.”
Despite the lack of any evidence, bail was extended 3 times. Each extension meant the roller coaster of emotions continued, eventually making me numb and snappy. I was left feeling almost suicidal. Neither the police nor my solicitor was able to give me a clear timeframe or a probable outcome.
There were no official support groups to go to, whereas apparent victims of rape are guided to officially sanctioned organisations they can reach out to. I was facing a sentence up to life imprisonment, the usual sentence ranging from 5 to 7 years in a prison for sex offenders. Even in the rare case a prosecution is brought forward for a false allegation they are likely to get at worst a two year sentence if proved guilty.
I didn’t feel safe going back to my apartment. Not only because of the trauma, but out of fear that his lies would have got to his family and under the knowledge a protective and trusting family can be threatening. I tried to resume my normal life but was unable to work under the depression and anxiety that accumulated during the ordeal. As a result, I had to give up my flat and move back in with family who just simply didn't have the space. I spent my already sleepless nights bedding down on the living-room floor, staying up until all hours watching self-help videos and reading forums with the stories of men who had gone through varying levels of a similar experience.
I can now look back and feel grateful for the fact that it is over without having been wrongly imprisoned for an extended period of time, something many others have sadly had to go through.
During and after my ordeal, I struggled to make sense of events. I wanted to move on, but felt disillusioned knowing that everything I held dear could be threatened by events outside of my control. I didn’t know how I could move on without creating some meaning or purpose from the seven months of my life I spent on standstill. My experience on the forums of men in similar situations led me to read more widely around the subject. My findings shocked me.
Bail is where a suspect is released after custody with the condition of having to return upon a specific date. It used to be used for periods of up to 48 hours but it is now something that people can be on for years without a clear view of when the situation will be resolved.
Freddie Starr of Paffa, People Against False Allegations of Abuse, states that around 57,000 people are left “waiting in limbo” on police bail. Many, who were never arrested and not bailed, are STILL waiting to hear whether there is an NFA, no further action, or verdict of No-Crime. “When [the accused] is innocent this [can be] sheer torture for them and their loved ones… ”. He started a petition declaring “there is no legislation stating how long the police can keep somebody on police bail pre-charge, this meaning that they are under no obligation to carry out an investigation with speed. I would like a time scale set on how long the police are able to keep somebody on police bail”.
As a predominantly gay and single twenty-two year old in London I use Tinder in order to meet potential dates, and yes, on occasion to find casual sex - a way to feel a bit less lonely in a city where a casual encounters are more common that eating fast food. I didn’t realise how a date could come with so many disastrous consequences.
I met my accuser on Tinder where we matched and messaged before he asked to come over to my flat and we set a date. However once the day of the date arrived I was feeling worse-for-wear since the night before I had a dinner party which had left me hungover.
Feeling as if it was too late to cancel, I went to meet my date at the tube station because he texted me saying he felt too scared to walk the two streets to my flat in Notting Hill, hardly a notoriously dangerous area. I imagined he wanted to ‘size me up’ before he made the commitment to come inside.
Once we were back at mine I offered him some wine and crisps left over from my party the night before. I noticed that rather than sipping his wine like I did, he waited 10 minute intervals and then guzzled the whole glass down in one. He repeated this process. I did find this odd, but passed it off as a quirk but did quickly realise he might be at best a one-night stand and was not going to become anything more. Between the two of us we probably drank about a bottle and a half of wine, most of which he poured for us both himself before stating that he hadn’t drank since New Years, two months previous.
We moved over from the dining table to the sofa where we kissed whilst listening to some pop music which we mutually enjoyed. He said it was fine to kiss him but I shouldn’t touch his face with my hand since he was wearing makeup to contour his face and didn’t want to smudge his makeup.
Eventually I led him casually by the hand to my room. We began consensual foreplay and ended up having consensual penetrative sex.
Once we had finished he told me he loved me.
I didn’t know what to respond and he backtracked by saying that “he loved me in the way he loves his cat”. I think not returning the affection made him volatile. I thought he knew it was just a casual affair, this should have been obvious at this point seeing as it was the first time we had met.
I broke the silence by offering him a cigarette, and we smoked in bed before foreplay began again. I noticed after a while he picked up his phone and started texting his friend. I kissed him on the chest until reaching a level head with him and stared at the screen where I read “HELP - come and pick me up”, something to that effect. He asked me to stop. I immediately stopped all physical contact with him.
He ran to the bathroom and I heard him throw up and start to cry. He came back out and lied back down in the bed, now the lights were back on and he said in a repetitive manner “I said no, I said no, I said no...”
I was freaked out by the statement which was false, since when we were fooling around again and he asked me to stop I did. I tried to comfort his agitation by offering him a glass of water and a pair of pyjamas. He said a friend was going to pick him up.
He also told me he was scared, I told him not to be and he later said to the police I told him he should be scared.
He left the flat and got into a car. You would imagine someone who would later claim to have been spiked would find it difficult to walk out of the flat, or be able to get out of bed when they wished to go to the bathroom.
With a feeling of unease, I imagined the police turning up at my doorstep but put the experience behind me and fell asleep feeling that either he was unstable and vindictive in which case I couldn’t do anything. Perhaps I was exaggerating the situation and he was harmless.
I soon awoke to hear police officers outside the bedroom window muffling words into their radios.
The front door pounded with an intensity that could only mean one thing. The police were there. I was right, he was falsely alleging that I had raped him.
Perhaps he claimed what he did because he told me that he loved me after we had sex and I didn’t say it back? Maybe it’s because he had a boyfriend and didn’t want to admit he had cheated, in which case why was he on Tinder, a dating app? Maybe he was a virgin and regretted losing his virginity to a one night stand?
Sometimes I wonder whether he became so drunk, since he was unused to drinking, that he truly believed his drink had been spiked. I doubt it though. After my arrest, he continued to ‘like’ social media of mine. His behaviour was bizarre, matching his earlier duplicity: he convinced me over Tinder that he was a full-time professional, not a 17-year-old sixth form student.
The police refuse to see the evidence I have that confirms this. How can we continue to live in a society that claims to “…prevent crime and support victims", a sentence which the Metropolitan police use to sign off their emails, when in this case my alleger was never brought to justice.
On our ‘date’, he spoke at length about a prominent figure in the fashion industry who is currently serving time for sexual assault, but has an injunction out to prevent it being spoken about in the press. It feels like he already had rape on the mind.
He also spoke about having two characters one for when he was in public and another private persona, and stated that in public he would probably ignore me even though it seemed we shared mutual acquaintances. I wish I had listened to my gut instincts that something felt off, made my excuses and asked him to leave.
I was also told that my alleger posted a status recently on his Facebook account accusing another person of being ‘#ABitRapey’. This seems a bit crass for someone who believed they had been raped to post, barely a month after the event. When I told the police about this after the case was dropped, they said it would be up to him to enter another accusation. Despite reinforcing that that was not what I meant, I was met with total disinterest.
Indeed, through the process I repeatedly felt that my valid questions were being met with totally robotic responses by the police, in a similar fashion to talking to your phone company about cancelling your contract. The synths on the recently aired ‘Humans’ series on Channel 4 were more feeling.
After being arrested at around 2am, humiliated in front of my neighbours and dressed in the equivalent of a hazmat suit/head-to-toe protective suit to preserve evidence, I was hauled into the back of a police van with handcuffs on.
I cried silently during the ride to the station. It felt so unreal: false allegations were something that happened to other people far detached from me. I couldn’t fathom what this man would stand to gain by lying. I felt detached from my body, I had surrendered to my helplessness and anxiety.
I’m not surprised that the accused admit to things they don’t truly believe under police interrogation – extreme anxiety can make it hard to reason rationally.
For this reason, it is vital to have a solicitor with you who will brief you on what to say - usually no comment. Every fibre of your body is telling you to give your side of the story under the illusion that the detectives will just go "oh that makes sense" and let you go on your way. Cuts to legal aid have made it more difficult to get a decent lawyer without having to pay extortionate fees and frantically try to find one before the interrogation.
A good solicitor will explain that it is the police's job to find evidence, not yours to provide them with and make it easier to join the dots in a way that you might not have perceived to be your own truth. Of course looking through the events that had happened I knew I was innocent, the fact that perhaps in the mind of my alleger he might truly believe I was to blame made me feel guilty and misunderstood.
In my case it later became apparent during a draining interrogation after a sleepless night in a cold cell, that he believed I had put something in his drink while on our first and only date at my flat, a location of his choosing, not surprising when it later emerged that he had lied about his age and wouldn’t be able to go to a bar, which would have been eventually been proved to be false by the police or they would not have dropped the case without asking for a recommendation from the CPS.
I was told it would benefit me to offer to be intimately examined by a physician; a process which includes taking samples of your pubic hair and swabs from your genitals. I am sure the process is similar for the alleger as well but I felt it was extremely invasive.
In my case the physician seemed to linger too long. The police officer in the room faced the wall. I didn’t feel like I could speak out about this at the time. The police should not have recommended that the examination would be in my interest for me before a solicitor could give me his opinion a further 8 or so hours later. My experience of the examination is backed up by a report by Baroness Stern “(physicians) demonstrate quite inappropriate behaviour at times, with poor clinical practice.”
Despite the lack of any evidence, bail was extended 3 times. Each extension meant the roller coaster of emotions continued, eventually making me numb and snappy. I was left feeling almost suicidal. Neither the police nor my solicitor was able to give me a clear timeframe or a probable outcome.
There were no official support groups to go to, whereas apparent victims of rape are guided to officially sanctioned organisations they can reach out to. I was facing a sentence up to life imprisonment, the usual sentence ranging from 5 to 7 years in a prison for sex offenders. Even in the rare case a prosecution is brought forward for a false allegation they are likely to get at worst a two year sentence if proved guilty.
I didn’t feel safe going back to my apartment. Not only because of the trauma, but out of fear that his lies would have got to his family and under the knowledge a protective and trusting family can be threatening. I tried to resume my normal life but was unable to work under the depression and anxiety that accumulated during the ordeal. As a result, I had to give up my flat and move back in with family who just simply didn't have the space. I spent my already sleepless nights bedding down on the living-room floor, staying up until all hours watching self-help videos and reading forums with the stories of men who had gone through varying levels of a similar experience.
I can now look back and feel grateful for the fact that it is over without having been wrongly imprisoned for an extended period of time, something many others have sadly had to go through.
During and after my ordeal, I struggled to make sense of events. I wanted to move on, but felt disillusioned knowing that everything I held dear could be threatened by events outside of my control. I didn’t know how I could move on without creating some meaning or purpose from the seven months of my life I spent on standstill. My experience on the forums of men in similar situations led me to read more widely around the subject. My findings shocked me.
Bail is where a suspect is released after custody with the condition of having to return upon a specific date. It used to be used for periods of up to 48 hours but it is now something that people can be on for years without a clear view of when the situation will be resolved.
Freddie Starr of Paffa, People Against False Allegations of Abuse, states that around 57,000 people are left “waiting in limbo” on police bail. Many, who were never arrested and not bailed, are STILL waiting to hear whether there is an NFA, no further action, or verdict of No-Crime. “When [the accused] is innocent this [can be] sheer torture for them and their loved ones… ”. He started a petition declaring “there is no legislation stating how long the police can keep somebody on police bail pre-charge, this meaning that they are under no obligation to carry out an investigation with speed. I would like a time scale set on how long the police are able to keep somebody on police bail”.
after many delays even with the lack of evidence.
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