May 21, 2021
After Madison Campbell was sexually assaulted, she had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to be touched by anyone, she remembers.
She didn’t want to tell her friends what happened, she didn’t want to talk to the police, she didn’t want to leave her dorm room ever again. In the hours that followed the crime, which occurred while she attended a study abroad program at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, she walked to a nearby pharmacy to buy black dye for her blond hair, and spend the following days and weeks rewatching Westworld.
Years later, it wasn’t just the assault that haunted her—it was the fact that she had no evidence it ever happened. “I had no text messages, no photos saved. I didn’t save my clothes. I didn’t save anything. And so it would have been my word against his,” she told Quartz. “It’s really disgusting to me that I didn’t feel like I can get any sort of justice because I had I had nothing to prove that it happened.”