Exclusive: The woman, who filed a report with the Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday, told BuzzFeed News Sam Pepper assaulted her last month in Los Angeles.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
An 18-year-old woman filed an incident report with the Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday alleging the YouTube celebrity Sam Pepper raped her last month.
The woman, who asked that her name be withheld, also uploaded a video on Sept. 29 describing the alleged rape, titled "Sam Pepper Doesn't Understand The Word No."
Last week, Pepper, a 25-year-old former U.K. Big Brother contestant, set off an internet firestorm with a prank video that featured him groping and pinching women on the street. Pepper said the video was a "social experiment" to raise awareness of male victims of sexual assault and that the women were in on the stunt.
Since Pepper posted that video, several women have come forward with stories of being inappropriately touched or harassed by Pepper. Last week, Bryony Harris, 19, told BuzzFeed News that Pepper solicited nude photographs of her in 2011 when he was 22 and she was 15. And most recently, a Toronto woman told BuzzFeed News that Pepper raped her in April 2013.
The YouTube video titled “Sam Pepper Doesn’t Understand The Word No,” uploaded Sept. 29.
The woman who filed the report on Thursday told BuzzFeed News that she met Pepper at a party on the night of Sept. 5, 2014. Her friends had known Pepper for some time, she said; he had even shared a hotel room with them at one point. "I thought that he was someone definitely trustworthy," she said.
"I've been friends with people in the YouTube-Viner group for a really long time," the woman told BuzzFeed News. She said that two of her friends involved with YouTube and Vine had worked with Pepper in the past on DigiTour, a large annual social media festival that has featured Pepper as a special guest.
The woman said she left the party at about 1:30 a.m., with Pepper and two of his friends, and they drove to the Aroma Cafe on Sunset Boulevard.
She said that she was comfortable leaving the party with Pepper because it wasn't a one-on-one situation. "He seemed like a charming, friendly guy. I was like, Everything seems fine here," she said.
When the group left the Aroma Cafe around 3:30 a.m., the woman said Pepper told her he needed to drop his friends off at their house before driving the woman home. Once she was alone in the car with Pepper, she said, he began to drive in the wrong direction.
"He said something along the lines of, 'I need to get something from my house first,'" she said. "He still seemed really friendly, he didn't seem weird. It didn't seem like I was going to put myself in danger by going there."
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/1rBOVFs
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