“How can somebody be so cruel?”

Lenny lets the words hang in the air. He is talking about a sexual encounter he will never be able to forget. That encounter was with Daryll Rowe who, in April 2018, became the first person to be jailed for deliberately infecting men with HIV in the UK.

It was the winter of 2015 when Lenny first met Daryll, a hairdresser from Edinburgh who was then in his mid-20s, while they were both living in Brighton. They connected on a gay dating app and started swapping flirty messages, before exchanging photos. But when their chat turned to sex, Lenny says the tone of their conversation shifted. Daryll said he didn’t want to use protection and Lenny, who grew up in New York, quickly shut him down.

Lenny, who works as a celebrity make-up artist, had recently come out of a long-term relationship. He says he decided to just ignore the Scotsman after the talk of unprotected sex. That is until he received a message from Daryll saying he’d agree to use a condom. Then, shortly afterwards, Daryll showed up at Lenny’s home unannounced. “That’s a moment I always think about. I should have just not opened that door,” the 38-year-old, who had previously given the hairdresser his address, says. But, despite their agreement, Daryll still tried to force himself on Lenny without a condom.

“I had to push him off me and say, ‘That’s not what we agreed on. If you don’t wear a condom then you’re leaving’.” Eventually, Daryll seemed to acquiesce and Lenny watched until he was satisfied that the condom was safely on.

The next week, when Lenny was at home on his own, he began to receive menacing, xenophobic messages and phone calls from Daryll. “How dare you block me? Stupid American,” Daryll said over the phone. “You can’t get rid of me. You’re gonna burn. I ripped the condom. You’re stupid. I got you.”

“This rush of fear went over me,” says Lenny, his face darkening at the memory.

A few weeks later, Lenny fell ill and – with those disturbing, callous and cruel messages echoing in his mind – decided to go for a sexual health check-up. When he received the life-changing news that his HIV test was positive, there were two dominant thoughts in his mind. The first was a mistaken belief that this meant his life was over. The next, after being told by the clinic his case wasn’t unique, was to report Daryll Rowe to the police.

Now, Lenny and four other men are speaking publicly about their encounters with him, the ways in which their lives have changed as a result, and their search for closure, in a new BBC Three documentary.

This is their story.