Crowdfunding… To Take My Rapist To Court

Emily Hunt says she was drugged and raped by a stranger. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to prosecute. Here, she tells her terrifying story

Outside it was dark. Emily Hunt could make out the glint of street lights through the curtains. But whose curtains? where was she? next to her on the bed was a man she didn’t recognise, sitting fully clothed with a TV remote in his hand, casually flipping through the channels. By now she realised she was in a hotel room. She also realised she was naked.

Emily is a 38-year-old divorcee with a seven-year-old daughter. Getting paralytic and picking up strangers for sex is not something she does.

She hadn’t even been out partying. She’d enjoyed a very convivial lunch with her father, who was visiting from Ireland for a few days. Her last conscious memory was finishing her meal at around 5pm. It was now shortly after 10pm.

‘I had never seen him in my life,’ she recalls. ‘I was very cold and felt kind of fuzzy. Then I realised in this light-bulb moment that I must have been drugged.’

This November, Emily launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £100,000 to bring her alleged rapist to justice in a private prosecution after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to take up the case. So what did happen that Sunday in May 2015?

Emily and her father had gone for lunch. They ended the meal with a glass of grappa – an Italian brandy.

‘The grappas sat on the bar for a while before the waiter brought the mover,’ says Emily. ‘I’ve wondered if that’s when the drink was spiked, because my dad doesn’t even remember how he got to the airport or boarding the plane.’

He’d had to drop by Emily’s house to pick up his bags, where her ex-husband was looking after their little girl, and he remarked how uncharacteristically drunk he’d seemed.