By Bente Birkeland | Colorado Sun, CPR and Andrea Kramar
Editor’s note: This story contains details of sexual assault and might be difficult for some readers. Originally published at cpr.org.
It’s a situation Miranda Spencer never thought she’d find herself in. The Denver mom was going through a divorce in November of 2023, when she decided to try a dating app for the first time. She used Bumble.
“That’s one I thought was safe,” she recalled.
After a few uneventful first dates, Spencer agreed to meet a man who had been persistently messaging her.
“So I let a friend know, ‘hey I’m gonna go out,’ and the exact words that I used were, ‘on this pity date. You can come over afterwards and hang out.’”
Those ended up to be fateful words. She said she only remembers the first twenty to thirty minutes of that date.
“I woke up the next morning with my friend just kind of hovering over me, staring at me. He’s asking me, ‘Are you okay? What happened last night?’ And then he went on to tell me what he walked into my home (and) the person that assaulted me was in my bedroom. I was unclothed, I was pretty incapacitated. I had vomit all over me.”
At the time, she blamed herself, thinking she’d made some bad choices.
“I was very embarrassed and ashamed and I couldn’t understand why I would have a stranger in my home or how I got home.”
Spencer went to the hospital and found out she had fentanyl in her system. She also endured the invasive process required to submit evidence of a sexual assault: a nurse conducted a full body medical exam, took photos and collected DNA from her body. Those samples were sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Sixteen months later, Spencer still doesn’t have the results and the man hasn’t been arrested.
“I was drugged, and so there’s a lot of things I don’t remember, and there’s a lot of answers that I don’t have.”
She said one of the hardest things has been waiting almost a year and a half to fully understand the worst thing that’s ever happened to her.
“It is barbaric,” she said. “It’s not fair to put that on somebody.”