Woman Pretends To Be Drunk & Alone In A City At Night To Showcase How Dangerous It Is For Other Women
Who knows what could have happened if she were actually drunk?
TikTok Women in today’s society, no matter where they’re from or where they’ve been, are constantly targeted in acts of sexual harassment and assault, making it hard for them to go anywhere in public alone.
In order to showcase just how dangerous it can be, one journalist named Ellie Flynn went undercover and pretended to be in her most vulnerable state just to see how the public would react and what could happen to her.
Channel 4 journalist Ellie Flynn pretended to be drunk and alone in the city to show how dangerous it is.
As part of the Dispatches documentary “Undercover: Sexual Harassment — The Truth” which aired on the UK broadcast Channel 4, Flynn looked to showcase just how common sexual harassment is and how horrifying it can be for a woman, drunk and alone, out in the city.
Despite having a team around her and security ready to jump in at any moment in case things got too dicey, not every woman is as equally prepared, especially in an inebriated state.
In a clip from the documentary, Flynn is recorded by hidden cameras “stumbling” through the streets of Liverpool, England, pretending to be drunk — purposely slurring her words, looking dejected, and stumbling in her step.
A strange man approaches her as she sits atop a concrete barrier and asks her, “How are you? Where are you going?” as he holds on to a can of Red Bull in his left hand.
“Huh?” Flynn asks, maintaining her facade. “I’m looking for my friends,” she adds, trying to further emphasize how she’s currently alone and maybe even lost.
“You go to bar?” the stranger asks, prompting Flynn to deny his advance with an “I’m fine.”
“Come with me. Come together to hotel,” he insists with Flynn once again rejecting his advances, adding “I need to find where I’m going.”
Flynn has given the strange man, whose identity was hidden through post-production blurring, no indication that she held any interest in him — not even on a conversational level.
When she reveals to the stranger that she was on her way home, he follows her the entire way.
“I’m going home,” Flynn says, still maintaining her drunk act when the man responds with “You come home with me? Yeah?”
Once they make it all the way up into Flynn’s hotel room, she drops her act and confronts him.
“Sit down. On there,” she directs him, pointing to a bed on the opposite side of the room from the entrance. “Why have you followed me here?”
“I like you,” the man responds.
“I didn’t give you any indication that I wanted you to follow me here,” she explains. “So why have you followed me here?”
He tries to explain that they came to her room together, despite her many rejections of his advances by saying that she was fine on her own.
He then tries to say that she likes him and repeats that they had come together, but she once again explains to him that those statements are both untrue.
When all else fails, the man reveals his true intentions and why he had followed her to her room, asking her in broken English “you come sex with me?”
Flynn says no, and in her complete shock and nerves asks him why he would even think she would do that, to which he replies “Because I like you.”
The man likely thought, due to her act of being in the vulnerable state of inebriation, that he would be able to either coerce her into performing a sexual act or that she would be too far gone to be able to properly give consent — or force him away if it came to that.
If Flynn had been as drunk as she appeared, she would have been unable to consent to any sexual act.
She told him to get out, and while they stood in the doorway of the hotel room, she denied his request for a kiss.
The moment ended with him leaving, and a sobbing Flynn seeking out the company of the security that waited in the bathroom of the hotel room.
When she wrote about the situation in The Times, she explained how ‘chilling’ it was.
Despite everything surrounding the incident being controlled alongside a security team that was waiting in the bathroom of the hotel room, Flynn expressed her discomfort with what the situation meant to her.
“Seeing your previous, vulnerable, drunk self through sober eyes is a chilling experience — and nothing could truly prepare me for what came next,” she wrote.
Flynn has a breadth of experience in working undercover for documentaries like this.
However, she expresses that this time felt different — that she was “really afraid” this time around.
“I was acutely conscious of being in such an enclosed space with a man I believe could have been a sexual predator,” she admitted.
She believed that his most “appalling” act of harassment was requesting a kiss after everything had been said and done.
In her article, she makes note of a YouGov study that had been carried out for Channel 4 which revealed that 1 in 4 women in the UK have been followed at some point during a night out, while 1 in 4 has been sexually assaulted or raped on a night out.
By the end of the documentary, Flynn expresses that there needs to be a “cultural change” in order to change attitudes surrounding sexual harassment and assault.
“This is so often seen as a women's issue but it's not a women's issue, It's everyone's issue.”
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.