Zoe Caldwell reveals how her experience of being raped led to her new novel

In the opening chapter of Zoe Caldwell’s novel Predator, protagonist Camilla is on a date with a smartly dressed, good-looking man she met on a dating app. While she is in the bathroom he slips a pill into her unguarded glass of wine. It does not go according to his plan, though. Camilla is secretly watching him drug her drink… in fact, she’s been fully expecting it. Her date was not a random hook-up, but a carefully orchestrated and meticulously researched meeting.

The date, Julian, has been specially selected because of his history with women. He is a predator. Unfortunately for Julian, so is Camilla. Two hours later – Camilla having avoided her drugged drink and given him, quite literally, a taste of his own medicine – Julian is crucified on a London rooftop, his body riddled with crossbow bolts. And Camilla is already on the hunt for her next victim.

Predator is the ultimate revenge story, described by its author as a thriller for the #MeToo generation. And while Camilla’s uncompromisingly brutal and gory revenge is indeed the stuff of fiction, the root of it is all too real for Zoe Caldwell.

Caldwell, 34, currently living with family in Oxford due to lockdown, has been in exactly the same position as predatory Julian hoped to have her anti-hero Camilla in at the start of her novel.

Back in February 2018, Caldwell matched with a man on the dating app Tinder. He seemed very charming and good-looking. Caldwell had just had her first novel published, a rom-com called Perfect Match. Indeed, her Tinder match might well have appeared her perfect match; he had read her book, and after two weeks of chatting online they decided to meet up in a pub not far from where she was living at the time in London.

“We were getting along well, he seemed sweet,” says Caldwell. “But after two glasses of wine I felt really drunk, sort of out of it. And I can usually handle my drink a lot better than that. Two glasses of wine would ordinarily make me feel a bit tipsy, but this was more like being legless.”

Her date suggested she should go home, and helped her into a taxi. But there his apparent chivalry started to take a darker turn. “I felt grateful to him,” she recalls. “He got in the taxi with me, saying he wanted to help me get home safe. I was pretty out of it at this point.”

The taxi pulled up at her flat, not too far away, and her date took out a crisp £20 note, which he thrust at the driver. It occurred to Caldwell, even in her haze, that “he seemed just a little too prepared for this”.

She says: “He walked me to my front door and came in with me. I should have turned him away but, given my state, I was feeling woozy and out of it and didn’t really have the resolve.”

And after that, things get even more blurry. In fact, she doesn’t properly recall anything until she woke up the next morning, in her bed, naked. With her date sleeping beside her.

“I couldn’t remember what had happened between us,” she says. “I had this horrible feeling as I searched my brain for memories and barely any came, apart from one of him pulling my top off and another fleeting one of him on top of me. I realised I had been used and that I hadn’t consented. I realised that I’d been raped.”

An investigation in 2019 by the Daily Mirror revealed that there had been 724 investigations into rape resulting from spiked drinks – and that was from only half of the police forces in the UK which had responded to the Mirror’s request for information. It was a huge 150 per cent rise on the 285 cases reported in 2015.

Caldwell is in no doubt that she was spiked. She says: “I felt increasingly troubled by the experience and over the next few months I stumbled on a YouTube video of a woman talking about her experience of having been ‘roofied’.”

Roofies is the street name for Rohypnol, one of the most common so-called “date rape” drugs, along with ketamine, GHB and Valium. Caldwell says: “It sounded eerily similar to what had happened to me, the sudden feeling of extreme drunkenness, not being able to remember anything.”

By the time her date woke up, Caldwell was feeling “shocked and full of self-blame”. He left quickly and she messaged a male friend to tell him what happened. The sense that she was somehow at fault herself was compounded when her friend texted back that she “hadn’t done anything thousands of other women had done on a Saturday night” — ie, got drunk and fallen into bed with a stranger.

“I now see this as a really mysoginistic response, but at the time it just made me deny my gut feeling that something really bad had happened, and instead I blamed myself,” she says. “I felt there was no point going to the police since I didn’t think there was any viable evidence proving it hadn’t been consensual sex.”

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The way police deal with rape – even if that’s down to people’s conception of how they might be treated – has improved dramatically over the years. The Metropolitan Police has a large section on their website headlined: “You are not to blame”.

It says: “Sometimes people are afraid to speak to the police because they were voluntarily taking drugs or drinking alcohol before the offence happened. Sometimes they have little or no recollection of what has happened. They may have a criminal record, and worry that the authorities won’t treat them fairly. They might be worried no one will believe them.

“Remember, no matter who you are, how long ago the assault happened or what took place, our prime concern is to give you the support you need. We’ll listen, understand and guide you through the investigation process at a pace you’re comfortable with, while respecting your wishes.”

While Caldwell was sitting in her flat trying to piece together the events of the night before, and coming to the sickening conclusion that she had been raped, her attacker sent her a text message. “Hope you had a good night last night.” Accompanied by the “grimacing face” emoji, which is usually taken to mean nervousness, or awkwardness, or a fear of what the answer might be to the question.

Somewhat flustered, she replied with a casual “Yeah, it was fine”, which she later regretted. She says: “The emoji said to me that he knew something dodgy had happened. I belatedly realised that I shouldn’t have replied like that. If you continue to have a normal conversation and don’t call it out… like, if I had said to him actually, no, I’m not comfortable with what happened last night, something like that, then that would perhaps have been evidence that the police could potentially use. But if there are phone records where you’re acting normal afterwards… I was worried that might not support any kind of case.”

So she tried her best to put it behind her, and concentrated on her writing. Or at least, tried to. Caldwell (who writes her commercial fiction under the name Zoe May) found that the stories she were penning were at odds with her experience.

“I was writing rom-coms, which felt a bit ironic because I was not feeling remotely romantic.” she says. “I was actually feeling quite traumatised.”

So having decided — rightly or wrongly — not to go to the police, Caldwell tried to channel her anger at what had happened to her the only way she knew how. She would write her own revenge.

“The idea for my serial killer character Camilla Black, who goes out and murders predatory men, began forming in my mind,” she says. “Once I got my rom-com deadlines out of the way I started writing Predator. It just poured out of me. I channelled a lot of my own anger into Camilla. I started to think of Camilla as a ‘Me Too’ serial killer, and I consider the novel to be feminist, albeit in a twisted and dramatic way.”  

Camilla Black is a successful magazine editor, but with a history of abuse, harassment and mysoginistic behaviour against her all her life. She tracks down offenders and abusers online and donning a variety of disguises and alter-egos she coaxes them into meetings and makes them pay for their crimes in the most grisly fashion.

Obviously, given Camilla’s almost artistic slaying of Julian, she comes to the attention of the police, and tries to stay one step ahead of them while being unable to stop herself continuing her brutal mission to clear the streets of predatory men.  “I found the writing process very cathartic,” says Cadwell. “I didn't have counselling and writing tends to be how I process things. I put a lot of my anger into Camilla and enjoyed making some feminist points in the book.

“There was a lot of tension in me because I was writing these romantic novels and it just seemed so… fake, given how I was feeling. So Predator became darker and darker, it was almost like I felt like I was lying with the rom-coms a bit, because there was just so much tension inside me, and this was a complete contrast.

“I think the Me Too movement is so important but I think there is still so much work to be done. Rape is rampant and roofying is also so common. Rohypnol is illegal in the UK but there are lots of easy ways to get hold of it that I discovered when writing Predator.”

So is Caldwell done with her Zoe May rom-coms now she has dipped into the dark world of Camilla Black? Not necessarily, but she’s certainly looking at more thrillers in the vein of Predator (it would be giving too much away to say whether a direct sequel to that book is on the cards). She’s also looking at writing a more literary novel, which would probably involve a third pen-name.

But she’s certainly got a thirst for revenge thanks to Camilla, who has helped her to come to terms to some extent with the events of three years ago. Not that the path to publication was easy. “Some publishers thought Predator was too graphic and violent, others worried Camilla was too unlikeable. But I wasn’t going to tone it down. That would lose the point of exactly what it was supposed to be about. It is what it is.”

As well as drawing on her own awful experience, Caldwell heavily researched not only sexual abuse crimes but also the methods that Camilla employed to exact her revenge on the predatory men.

“I bought a stack of old true-crime magazines that went into the forensics of crimes real deeply, and by the end of it I was thinking like a serial killer,” she says. “I had to get into Camilla’s head to write her with honesty and it took me into some pretty dark places, both mentally and with the research.

“I was Googling stuff and some of it was so crazy and intense that I’d keep getting ads popping up from charity helplines asking me, ‘do you need help?’.”

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‘Predator’ is out now from Bloodhound Books. For information on dealing with rape and sexual abuse, go to rapecrisis.org.uk or safeline.org.uk or contact your local police force