After a night out drinking, I laughed off my 'blackout sex'. Only later did I realise I'd been raped - by two men

The first thing I did upon waking, heart pounding, was look for my phone. To my enormous relief it was there on my bedside table. So far so good.

I was naked and, mercifully, alone. I could make out last night's outfit lying in a discarded heap on the floor by my bed, along with my handbag. My head was throbbing, my mouth dry and foul — yes, it had been quite a night.

How had I even got home? The first stab of shame struck as I realised I had ­absolutely no idea. I started scrolling through my phone for clues, my sense of unease and self-disgust increasing as messages appeared from numbers I didn't recognise.

Was I OK? Did I get home all right? Did I find my wallet? I didn't even know I'd lost my wallet. ­Frantically, I flung aside the bed covers and upended my bag. There it was, safe and sound, together with all my cards. I breathed in and out to steady my growing panic.

But then, as I crawled back under the sheets, I noticed the strange bruises on my legs. I'd been in pain last night, hadn't I? Something had happened to me. And then, like ash from a smouldering fire caught in a sudden gust of wind, images started fluttering back. Horrible, frightening, incomplete ones, like fragments from a horror film.

The evening had started well. I'd been out for dinner in London with a couple of friends and, afterwards, we'd gone to a bar. After finding no available seats, a group of friendly strangers invited us to join them.

I was already quite drunk when we left the restaurant. We'd got through quite a bit of wine with our meal, and I'd been drinking much more heavily than usual. I'd broken up with my boyfriend of two years just two months earlier and I wasn't in a good place emotionally. I needed to have a good time.

So, for whatever reason, when my friends got up to leave, I insisted on staying and ended up chatting to one of the men I'd just met. He seemed harmless.

The next thing I remembered was being in a taxi with him on the way to another stranger's party. I must have drunk more when we arrived because from there it all became incredibly blurry. I could recall ­kissing the man from the bar, though I wasn't sure when.

I recoiled as a memory drifted back of a strange bathroom, and then a bolt of excruciating pain as the man from the bar roughly thrust himself inside me. By the time I realised what was happening, I was in too much shock to react.

But after that? Nothing.

I tried to laugh it off. 'Lol, woke up to loads of messages from random men,' I texted one friend.

'OMG you're hilarious,' she replied. It made me feel better. Nothing that bad could have happened if other people found it funny, could it?

Hurriedly, I started deleting and blocking all the strangers from my phone, desperate to 'clean away' the stain of last night. I pushed aside all thoughts of STDs with a shudder. I had a coil fitted, so I wasn't ­concerned about pregnancy, but I'd no idea if he'd used a condom.

A few nights later, I even confessed to friends how I'd ended up having sex with some stranger in the bathroom at another stranger's party, and I watched as they laughed.

I wasn't known for being a party girl, let alone a promiscuous one; at 26 I'd only had a handful of relationships and never a one-night stand.

Maybe I was distracting myself from the reality of what happened by playing that part. It even felt like it made me more popular; that ­having sex with a stranger whom you couldn't remember was a societal badge of honour, a totem of how much alcohol you were able to consume and how 'up for it' you were.

Maybe that's all it was, I kept ­telling myself. Just another silly drunken story. After all, virtually all my friends had a tale to tell of a ­sexual assault of some degree after drinking too much: from a grope to full-on sex. There was even a name for those 'hilarious' ones you ­struggled to remember the next day: blackout sex.

It wasn't until a few months later that the laughter stopped.

I was watching TV one evening when my phone rang showing a number I didn't recognise. 'Hey, it's Billy [not his real name],' an ­unfamiliar voice said as I held my breath. 'We hooked up last summer.' I was confused. Not just about why this unknown man was suddenly calling me but what he meant by 'hooked up'.

I knew he wasn't the man from the bar, with whom I'd had sex in the bathroom, so who was he?

As far as I was aware, I'd left that party alone. But Billy told me we slept together at my house that night. I asked for more details. Where did I live? Why wasn't he there when I woke up? Why was he calling me now?

I didn't get any clarity beyond the terrifying fact that he did know where I lived and apparently had left early for work the following day before I woke. I started to cry, and explained I didn't have any ­recollection of this. I had to know more but he got shifty and hung up. I tried to call him back, but it didn't go through — he must have blocked me immediately.

To my horror, I realised not one, but two men had had sex with me that night, while I was in the middle of an alcohol-induced blackout.

Desperate for answers, I quizzed my housemates. One had been asleep and hadn't witnessed anything, and the other had been away that night, so they were no help.

Feeling petrified and vulnerable, I rang the police — not to report a sexual assault but to get guidance on ­harassment or stalking, for that's what I thought was ­happening to me.

Two officers arrived at my flat within the hour. After listening to me explain Billy's claims, alongside what happened with the man from the bar, they calmly told me it sounded like I'd been ­sexually assaulted by both of these men and asked if I wanted to pursue cases against them.

Shocked, I felt an immediate wave of shame and started blaming myself for drinking myself into a stupor.

Knowing how difficult it is to ­pursue any kind of sexual assault case — in the year to September 2021, just 1.3 per cent of rape cases recorded by police resulted in a ­suspect being charged or receiving a summons — I decided not to pursue a case with the man from the bar; I could remember kissing him and suspected this would undermine my claim.

As for Billy, I reported the incident and a case officer was assigned to me. Then I was told that the next step would involve calling Billy in for an interview. My officer warned me that, based on the lack of evidence, I had a low chance of getting any kind of charge brought. What I would be left with, she explained, was a potentially dangerous man on the loose who'd know I'd accused him of rape. So I let it go.

Still, I couldn't let go of the sense of blame and shame, that it was my fault for getting drunk — that nasty, misogynistic belief that still lingers, that a victim carries a certain degree of culpability because of her ­behaviour and life choices. ­Blackouts affect a part of the brain called the hippocampus, the region involved in the formation, storage and retrieval of memory, and there are two types of blackouts, fragmentary and en bloc, both of which are common when drinking owing to alcohol ­disrupting brain activity.

Fragmentary blackouts may refer to fuzzy memories or memories that only return with prompting, or ones that fade in and out. En bloc blackouts refer to gaps in time that, regardless of prompting, do not return. I experienced both of these on that night.

While rape cases are ­complicated at the best of times, they are even more so when there's a blackout involved. Blackout rapes are harder to prove than 'date rape' drugging cases — where ­victims are slipped a powerful sedative, without their ­knowledge, to render them comatose and insensate.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 states that a person can consent only if they have the 'freedom and capacity to make that choice'. That capacity is compromised by alcohol. 'If a person is unable to give consent because they are drunk, drugged or unconscious, it is rape,' states Crown ­Prosecution Service guidance.

But, those accused claim, how can you know for sure if someone is 'blackout' drunk or not? That's why, in the rare event when these cases make it to trial, defence arguments are usually predicated on the basis that the perpetrator 'couldn't tell' the victim was too drunk to consent.

This was one of the key tactics in the high-profile case of Brock Turner, the Stanford University student who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a fraternity party in 2015. 

'People in a ­blackout appear to be behaving normally,' argues Kim Fromme, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who testified for Turner's defence team. 'A peer-reviewed publication that reviewed 26 scientific studies on blackouts concluded there are no objective observable indicators of a blackout, and that no cognitive processes, other than memory, are impaired.'

However, this view has been heavily contested by experts and survivors, most notably Chanel Miller, Turner's victim, who later waived her anonymity.

In her victim statement, she explained that during a phone call and voicemail message to her boyfriend just prior to the attack she was 'incomprehensible' and 'slurring so heavily he was scared for me'. She pointed out that Turner himself had admitted that she 'fell down' and that the two passers-by who caught Turner during the attack had ­immediately seen that she was unresponsive.

'Two guys on bikes noticed I wasn't moving in the dark and had to tackle you. How did you not notice while on top of me?' she said.

Despite this, Chanel said that during the course of the investigation and trial: 'I was not only told that I was assaulted, but I was also told that because I couldn't remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, almost broke me.'

Another problem is that 'blackout sex' is happening in a culture that has perpetually normalised, and even parodied in films and on TV, men taking advantage of drunk women. John Hughes' 1984 romcom Sixteen Candles features a subplot about a girl, Caroline, too drunk to realise that the man she is with is not her boyfriend and, frequently unconscious, is being raped.

In the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, starring Steve Carrell, the sexually inexperienced protagonist is explicitly advised by a friend to 'tackle drunk bitches'.

This has to change, says Amelia Handy, head of policy and public affairs at Rape Crisis England & Wales. 'In law, someone consents to sex or other sexual activity when they agree to it by choice and have both the freedom and capacity to make that choice,' she says. 'If someone is unable to make a choice or is unconscious, it is simply not sex, it is rape.

'So "blackout sex" in law is rape and should be named as such. All forms of rape are deeply serious, and can be highly traumatic for ­victims and survivors. And the way we speak about it should reflect that rather than diminish it.'

'Victim-blaming myths, stereotypes and language abound in contemporary culture and need to be challenged,' adds Ciara Bergman, the charity's CEO. 'Only those who choose to rape and abuse can be held responsible for their behaviour — not victims — and nobody who has ever been through this is ever to blame for what has happened to them, no matter the circumstances.'

It has taken a long time for me to accept that what happened to me wasn't my fault, and to shake off the shame I've felt as a result. Yet, to this day, I still find it incredibly difficult to talk to my friends and family about what happened to me that night.

Once you bypass the cultural barriers that prevent you from accepting what happened to you and taking it seriously, the feelings you face can be almost too hard to bear. Yes, there's the shame, but there's also the violation. The sense that my body is no longer my own.

Four years on, I'm still trying to get that autonomy back, and the loss of it has hindered romantic and sexual relationships I've had since. I'm now 30, but still a long way from committing to anyone.

My relationship with alcohol is tenuous, too. While I still drink, I never get drunk nowadays. It's as if I now have an inbuilt trip switch that tells me to stop for my own safety — putting the onus for rape prevention on me, not my ­potential attackers.

I know I'm far from alone in my experience, which forms the basis of my debut novel, Gold Rush, in which a young girl wakes up in pain after spending the night with a famous musician, trying to piece together what happened.

This is an indictment of our society, one that fails survivors of sexual assault so frequently that it starts to feel like rape — which is exactly what happened to me — isn't even a crime.

I'm not sure there's anything more devastating than that.

Gold Rush, by Olivia Petter, published by Fourth Estate (£16.99), is out now.