A woman battling to raise £100,000 to privately prosecute her alleged rapist said police blunders leave her with no choice but to drop the bid.
Emily Hunt, 39 – who was shocked to see police files that reportedly called her ‘obstructive’ and ‘difficult’ – says officers ‘simply did not like me’.
The strategy consultant says they failed to investigate properly whether she was drugged and attacked and wrote her off as an attention seeker. She accuses them of failing to obtain vital evidence.
Her fury over her treatment led her to go public a year ago, waiving her anonymity. She raised £27,000 to pay for what would have been the first crowd-funded British private prosecution for rape. But the Crown Prosecution Service had said there was ‘insufficient evidence’ for a realistic prospect of a guilty verdict, a decision upheld by a further review.
Emily Hunt, age 38, woke up naked and terrified at the Town Hall Hotel in East London
Meanwhile, a QC specialising in sex crimes, who was hired with cash from her fighting fund, examined the police dossier and concluded any further legal fight is doomed.
Instead, she hopes police will launch a new inquiry into voyeurism after the man admitted secretly filming her as she lay naked and unconscious.
Last night Miss Hunt said: ‘The rape case is such a disaster because of poor police work and this would have made it a struggle to bring it to court. They hated me and wrote down horrible things about me in their notebooks.’
She was left suicidal in the wake of events at a trendy £200-a-night hotel in Bethnal Green, east London, in May 2015. After a long lunch with her father she met a man in a bar who took her back to a room for sex.
She believes that at some stage she was drugged and can only remember waking alongside the man.
Miss Hunt, who has an eight-year-old daughter, was ‘flabbergasted’ by the contents of notebooks, statements and toxicology reports when they were eventually provided by police.
Emily Hunt raised £27,000 to pay for what would have been the first crowd-funded private prosecution
They show that officers labelled her ‘obstructive and negative’. They were unhappy when she did not immediately hand over her clothes and declined to undergo initial forensic tests.
‘I have always suspected that the reason the police did not do their job was they simply did not like me,’ she said. ‘The officers wrote in their notebooks that I was the kind of person who was trying to get attention. The police wrote that I was difficult. This was because I was utterly terrified.’
Miss Hunt, who is originally from New York, found police did not test tablets held by the man which he claimed were Viagra and LSD. She believes she was given date rape drug GHB. She said most of the £27,000 she raised has been spent on her legal costs, as well as marketing for her campaigning work.
The Metropolitan Police confirmed officers are examining whether an offence of voyeurism took place. A spokesman said prosecutors had previously found there was not enough evidence to bring a case to court. She said: ‘The complainant made a number of complaints to the Met about its investigation and these were passed to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The complaint was independently reviewed by the IPCC and not upheld.’