On the afternoon of Sunday, June 27, I looked at my phone and burst into tears. There were ten Instagram DMs on my home-screen, all of them from women telling me they’d been raped. Some of the messages were short, while others were full-blown essays, detailing the impacts of the trauma they’d experienced. The stories were varied but they had one thing in common: the women sharing them had only recently discovered that what happened to them was rape. Let me explain.
My piece for The Sunday Times Style magazine had just been published, describing how I’d been sexually assaulted four years ago but had also only recently registered it as rape. The man, who I called Sam*, was someone I’d met through a mutual
