honestly don’t even know how to process what happened tonight, and I think I just need to talk about it somewhere.
I went on a second date tonight with a guy I met on a dating app. He seemed really great, we were having a good time, and we ended up back at my place having consensual sex.
Then, in the middle of having sex, while he was behind me, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. This man was holding his phone sideways and recording himself having sex with me. I had absolutely no idea he was doing it. I had not consented to being recorded. I was consenting to sex, not to being filmed.
I immediately confronted him and screamed at him to get out. I made him show me that he had deleted the video, but obviously I have no way of knowing what happened to it or whether there are other copies. I called the police, and they came to my apartment and took a report. They have since left, and I’m sitting here trying to comprehend what the fuck just happened to me.
I’m genuinely traumatized by this. I keep thinking about how normal the evening felt before that moment and how quickly everything changed. I trusted this person enough to invite him into my home and be intimate with him, and I never imagined I would have to worry about something like this happening.
I don’t even know what to call what happened. Sexual violation? Nonconsensual recording? I know I didn’t consent to being filmed, but I’m struggling to wrap my head around the fact that someone I was willingly having sex with would do this without my knowledge.
The timing of this is also awful because I’ve already been struggling so much with work and burnout. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my life to a more sustainable place, and now this has happened on top of everything else. I can’t even think straight right now.
I don’t know how to tell people about this. It’s such an uncomfortable, intimate thing to have to explain, and I don’t want to have to manage everyone else’s reactions while I’m trying to process my own. I know I need support, and I’m reaching out to my therapist, but I feel so overwhelmed.
Has anyone experienced something similar? How did you process it? How did you talk about it with friends or family without feeling like you had to explain every detail? And how did you deal with the uncertainty about whether the recording was actually deleted?
I don’t need anyone to tell me what I should have done differently. I did nothing wrong by trusting someone I was dating. I just genuinely don’t know what to do with all of this right now.
What the actual fuck.