Taylor

The investigator wanted to take a statement right away, Taylor says, so her mother drove her straight from the hospital to the Chatham-Kent police headquarters. She arrived in an outfit that didn’t quite fit, because the nurses had taken her clothing as evidence.

By the time Taylor sat down in the interview room, the 21-year-old, who had been up for more than 30 hours straight, felt shaky and nauseous from the night before and uncomfortable in the spare clothing.

The constable asked her to recount her version of events as best as she could remember.

Taylor explained that the night before – Sat., June 11, 2016 – she and a friend had split a 26-ounce bottle of tequila before heading out to a sports bar in town. They arrived at 10:30 p.m.

During the course of the night, a stranger introduced himself. He hung out with Taylor and her friend until a little after midnight. At this point, Taylor told the officer, she began to feel dizzy and on the verge of passing out, so she phoned her grandfather for a ride home. Her next clear memory was being in the townhouse of the man from the bar.

Taylor recalls that he gave her a tour and then she had to sit down on the basement couch, because she was going to throw up.

“The next thing I know, when I came to, I was in his bedroom upstairs, on the top floor, with no clothes on. He was on top of me. We were having sex,” she says she told the investigator.

Taylor says she tried to push him off, and wanted to say no, but she wasn’t sure if she was actually able to say the words before passing out. (A person cannot give consent if he or she is unconscious.) The next time Taylor woke up, the man was downstairs on the phone, she says.

“I just grabbed my purse and ran out the door. I left my shoes behind,” she says.

As soon as she was done telling her story to police, Taylor says, the officer made her feel like he thought she was lying.

“Well, we all make mistakes when we’re drunk. Are you sure you want to press charges?” she remembers him saying.

“He said something along the lines of, ‘Well, any normal person, like me, [would think] if someone goes over to someone else’s house late at night that something sexual is going to happen.”

Taylor says the investigator then told her he had phoned the suspect that morning and the suspect said the sex was consensual. (The man hired a lawyer and declined to be interviewed beyond that brief conversation.)

Taylor left the interview furious. Her mother later complained to a supervisor and a female sergeant was reassigned to the case.

In a subsequent interview with that sergeant – a copy of which was obtained by The Globe – Taylor was told that while it was obvious something had happened, because she ran out of the house without any shoes, there were too many issues with the case to lay charges.

First, witnesses at the bar told police she and the man were “all over each other.” Second, there were text messages showing she willingly went to the man’s apartment. And third, perhaps most damaging of all, the sergeant told Taylor that the blood test that was done as part of the sexual assault examination kit showed her blood alcohol level was just 102 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood – which didn’t support her claim that she was drunk enough to pass out.

“One hundred and two, from my 24 years of experience, is not an extremely high rate of alcohol in a person’s system,” the sergeant told her. The officer conceded that there may have been “a couple of hours” between her last drink and the blood test, but that would mean her level at its peak “might have been 110 … which is not an excessive amount of alcohol.”

But two forensic toxicologists interviewed by The Globe said the officer is misunderstanding the science. The body eliminates alcohol at a rate of between 10 to 20 points per hour. Medical records from Taylor’s sexual assault examination kit show that Taylor’s blood was drawn at 7:15 a.m. So if her blood alcohol was 102 at that point in time, seven hours earlier it could have been anywhere between 170 and 240 milligrams at its peak, which is well within the range for a person to be extremely intoxicated.

The Globe interviewed Taylor’s mother, as well as her friend from the bar, who supported her version of events. The Chatham police declined to comment on the specifics of the case.

“As is the case with every sexual assault complaint received, this incident was thoroughly investigated by the Chatham-Kent Police Service. The evidence was then reviewed by the Crown Attorney’s Office and charges were not proceeded with,” Inspector Ed Reed said in an e-mailed statement.

For her part, Taylor says the experience has been a nightmare and the police only made it worse. She can’t understand why anyone would think a woman would make up a sexual assault.

“So what, I wake up one morning and decide I want to falsely accuse someone and put myself through this hell, through the hospital tests and police interviews, for what, the hell of it?”