“I had no idea where I was, I was so confused,” Love Island’s Jessie Wynter tells Closer, recalling the moment that she woke up in hospital after having her drink spiked.
Jessie was on holiday in Chicago with her boyfriend Will Young last year when they were targeted by a group of two men and two women who followed them into a bar. They “kept coming over and trying to ask to buy drinks” for Jessie and Will, who refused to accept their offer and instead bought their own drinks.
After playing basketball with Will in the bar, the last thing Jessie remembers is taking a sip from her drink after the women from the group came over to talk to her while he was in the bathroom.
“I really have no recollection of anything else that happened that night, but I'm very thankful that my boyfriend was there to look after me and fill the details in,” she says.
An ambulance rushed Jessie to hospital after she “collapsed” in the bathroom at another venue and was “throwing up everywhere”. She says she became “more and more and more drunk” throughout the night despite not even finishing her drink at the bar.
After spending the night in hospital, Jessie opened up about the incident to her 996,000 Instagram followers and admitted, “I wasn’t sure if I should post this as I felt so embarrassed, but the other night I was unfortunately rushed to hospital after my drink was spiked.”
Sadly, Jessie is only one of a growing number of spiking victims. In a YouGov poll in December 2022, 10 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men said they had been spiked, while police in England and Wales received 6,732 reports of spiking in the year ending April 2023.
According to the Met police, reports of drink spiking increased 13 per cent in July to December 2023 compared with the same period in 2022.
But despite the increasing number of reports made, spiking is still underreported. A national survey carried out by charity Stamp Out Spiking shows that over 97% of victims don’t report getting spiked to the police.
Jessie, who rose to fame on winter Love Island 2023, didn’t report her spiking to the police and admits it’s something she “definitely regrets”.
She says, “I was very uneducated about spiking when it happened to me and I didn't even know how do you report it? Who do you report it to? These are all big questions that I have for myself and that's kind of one thing that really motivated me to become an ambassador for Stamp Out Spiking.
“I think one of the big issues is because people don't know how to report it and, in the past, because spiking wasn't a standalone offence, when you do report it, the file, it doesn't go anywhere. Nothing happens, which is really, really frustrating for the victim.”
Last month, the government introduced a new law making spiking a specific criminal offence among 35 other bills announced in the King’s Speech.
Spiking – the action of putting a drug into someone's drink or into their body through another method, without their consent – was already a crime under other pieces of legislation, including the 1861 Offences against the Person Act, but it is hoped that creating a new, specific offence will increase reporting and help police better respond to these incidents.
Dr Amy Burrell, a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham who specialises in sexual violence and policing, explains, “Having a specific offence means that it will be recorded in a more uniform way that will allow us to better understand prevalence and the characteristics of spiking, which will then help us to develop more targeted interventions and prevention measures.”
She adds, “There's problems with underreporting, so lots of people don't report what's happened to them, or don't realise what's happened to them, or feel frightened or worried about reporting. I'm hoping that by making it very clear that this is an offence and you will be taken seriously that will then give people the confidence to report.”
But, as well as making spiking a specific criminal offence, Dawn Dines, CEO and founder of Stamp Out Spiking, says that a multi-facted approach is needed in order to tackle the issue of spiking completely.
“Societal change is needed, it really is. Education, we feel, is key,” Dawn explains. “Multi-agency working is what we need, because then and only then, we'll start to gain convictions and safeguard.”
As well as testing initiatives in bars and clubs, Dawn has called for funding so that venue staff can be properly trained.
“Everyone needs to have an invested interest in this,” she adds.
Jessie echoes Dawn’s sentiments, revealing that she’s been subjected to trolling after opening up about her ordeal online.
She says, “The negative responses are very disheartening to read. We have a right to go out and enjoy having a drink. Everybody has the right to go out and enjoy a night out. There's never, ever a case where it’s the person's fault.
“When I do see the negative comments, I just personally think that these are the people that need to be educated as well, because nobody ever deserves to be spiked.”
WATCH Dr Amy Burrell discusses the proposed changes to spiking laws
Nathan Katnoria is heat and Closer online’s senior digital writer. He became obsessed with Love Island when Malin Andersson came back to confront Terry Walsh in series two and hasn’t looked back since. When he’s not interviewing former Islanders, Nathan is scrolling through their Instagram feeds for relationship updates and piping hot tea.