Author opens up about how 2018 Tinder date left her feeling ‘worthless’ after she was raped

One author shared how a 2018 Tinder date left her feeling “like a worthless person” after she was injected with her drink and raped.

Zoe Rosi opened up about the turmoil she felt in the immediate aftermath and how blurred memories made it easy to blame herself, but writing her new book helped her explore grief in a “creative outlet.”

The 36-year-old novelist from Greenwich revealed that the perpetrator had also acted as if the couple were merely having a “one-night stand”, even texting her several times afterward.

Coming to terms with the horrifying events, Zoe said it was too late to take legal action because the DNA had been washed.

She added that he seemed “a cut above the average guy” at first when they met on Tinder.

By text, he told her that he had read his books and seemed “humble and normal,” plus some selfies at the gym that made him “look a little vain.”

The couple met in a pub in Woolwich, south-east London. After just one glass of wine, Zoe headed to the bathroom, leaving her drink with him on the table while he bought another round.

During the second drink, she began to feel “very, very drunk and out of it,” which was out of character, since she you can usually drink a few glasses without feeling so drunk.

As things became increasingly blurry for Zoe, the perpetrator asked her if she wanted to get some fresh air.

Her memory went blank: the next thing she knew she was in a taxi and he was offering the driver money.

He fleetingly thought this was odd because people rarely carry cash with them, possibly indicating that the events were premeditated.

Zoe said she was acting like she was taking care of her because she was drunk.

The last thing she remembers is that they were in her bedroom before she woke up the next day to him in her bed, both naked and feeling like they’d just had sex.

“I woke up the next morning and he was kind of lying next to me,” she said. I knew we had sex, we were both naked, and I just remember thinking what the hell happened?

“I felt this horrible dark feeling inside, like something was really wrong.”

The author said that she was quick to blame herself, thinking that “maybe she got too drunk and maybe it was her fault”, despite knowing that she could not have consented in the state she was in.

“And so I felt pretty guilty and bad about it,” Zoe explained. “I knew something was wrong, very wrong, but I didn’t want to admit it.”

The writer said she also didn’t want to think she had been raped, “because that’s really traumatic.”

She continued: “He was acting like we were having a one-night stand, he was a little embarrassed and he just got up and left quickly.”

“I was laying there with this horrible, foreboding feeling that I knew what happened was wrong.”

Zoe reached out to a few friends, but found it easy to normalize her traumatic experience.

“I texted an older friend from work about what happened, who is from a different generation, and he replied saying you haven’t done anything that thousands of other women do on a Saturday night,” she said. “So I thought to myself, ‘maybe it’s normal,’ but looking back, that was a very misogynistic thing to say.”

She tried to put the events behind her, but eventually began to “feel really violated and really down.”

“My self-esteem went down a lot because I thought I’m just a worthless person that no one respects and that men can use,” Zoe admitted. “I thought, to men I’m just a piece of meat.”

She added: “The guy texted me a few times afterwards, not asking to meet up, but acting like everything was normal, so I replied like this.”

“After a few months, I started to realize that I really wasn’t right, but at that point I had no DNA because I had washed it all away, and just some text messages that seemed like a one-night stand.”

While Zoe did eventually speak briefly about the incident with police, who said they could take a witness statement, she claims they told her they couldn’t take things any further “because the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t do anything”.

He tried to use Tinder again several times after the incident, but each time he felt like “lamb to slaughter.”

“It was like self-harm,” he said. “There are a lot of shady guys there, they’ll just act like they’re on Uber Eats and they’re ordering a pizza and they ask you to come over to their house for a hookup, you don’t even know.” Yo, why would I do that?’

Zoe admitted that the experience caused her to “lose faith in men for a long time.”

“I would be very careful,” she warned. “I think people should be friends before they become something else because people can be a personality to get what they want.

Now I think it’s nice to have a date during the day, no alcohol, just a coffee and a walk, and if a guy is decent and really wants to meet you, I’d be totally fine with that.

“If you’re talking to a predator, they probably won’t have the patience for it.”

Zoe found that writing her novel, a book about a Me Too serial killer who hunts down sexual predators, also helped her heal.

In a quagmire of depression and unable to seek legal justice, the writer created an empowered fashion editor who works as a vigilante killing rapists, pedophiles, and abusers.

Writing the novel Pretty Evil, for which television rights are now up for grabs, was a therapeutic outlet for date rape.

About three months after the event that left her feeling violated, depressed, and her self-esteem shattered, Zoe began writing.

In Pretty Evil, which will be released on January 17, its protagonist’s first death is based on her experience.

In the book, Camilla Black sets up a date with Julian Taylor, which is not the real-life alleged rapist’s name, after tracking him down on Tinder when she learned a judge released him for beating up his girlfriend.

During the night, he tries to sweeten his drink, but Camilla notices and retaliates with the same strategy.

The quote closes with Camilla firing a crossbow at Taylor, who is tied to a post on the roof of an abandoned council property “like a San Sebastian type scene”.

As she wrote, Zoe described feeling ‘almost possessed’ because she was so focused.

To keep it from becoming a ‘popcorn thriller’, he sometimes called in former police detective Stuart Gibbon to help verify that Camilla could legitimately get away with the murders.

To add to the investigation, Zoe ordered a large stack of old, out-of-print true crime magazines, detailing how the villains were brought to justice.

Before Pretty Evil, she had written four romance novels, published with HarperCollins, but she said she had never written anything like this book.

“I felt bad about myself, defeated, angry and frustrated because I realized there was nothing I could do to get justice, then strangely this character popped up in my imagination,” she said. “She came in fully formed, and she was this powerful, daring, intelligent, self-assured woman, completely different from how she felt at the time.”

“She kills predatory men who evade justice by not getting caught by the police or sent to jail, or who get out early for good behavior.

“She doesn’t feel like that’s good enough, so she kills these rapists, abusers, pedophiles and creeps, even using Tinder to track some of them.”

Zoe continued: “For some reason I lit candles while I was writing, it sounds so pretentious, and I was just writing, not going back and forth between Word and Twitter like I often do.”

‘I wrote the first 40,000 words in two or three weeks.

“I know writing stuff like that sounds a bit crazy, but writing it really helped.”

Zoe describes her protagonist as “the Dexter of predators”, with “her own moral code and her own standards for who she kills”.

“She wouldn’t kill just anyone,” the author said. She has to be someone who has done something really terrible.

“I wanted it to take itself seriously, and not just be a cheesy book, I wanted it to look realistic, she got away with everything.”

The novelist said she felt lucky to be able to use writing as an outlet to process what had been done to her.

‘I think I’m very lucky because I write and I’m creative, when something difficult happens I use it as material, and I really feel sorry for people who don’t have that outlet.

“It’s very easy to internalize a lot of pain and shame about rape and sexual assault, for a while I didn’t feel like myself at all.”

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