Reneé Rapp Just Opened Up About The Confusion And Trauma Of Not Remembering Being Sexually Assaulted After Her Former Friends Abandoned Her In A Hotel Bar

Speaking out during an appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, the 24-year-old star explained that she had started “hanging out in a new group of people” who were “partiers” after going through a “really tough” breakup. 

Although her family and friends warned her about the wild group, Reneé said that she was having too much fun with her newfound “freedom,” until her friends abandoned her in a hotel bar.

Recalling the night of her assault, Reneé shared, “We were all out, and it was just situation after situation where they were just not trustworthy, and then the next thing you knew, I was face up, laying down in a bathroom stall in a hotel bar, just waking up [at] 5 in the morning, completely alone."

She then realized that she had missed two text messages that were sent in a group chat by her friends around 10:30 p.m., which prompted everybody — including Reneé’s romantic interest at the time — to leave the bar.

Not only did they not track Reneé down so she could leave with them, but they also didn’t raise an alarm about her whereabouts despite her being missing for seven hours. 

"I stopped being friends with those people and stopped doing as much partying as I was doing,” Reneé said. “I told my parents, told some of my friends. I explained it in a very matter-of-fact way, and they were all very concerned, and I didn't even understand what was happening."

She went on to acknowledge that she didn’t really process what happened that night for a few months, and at that point she was “crying, so upset, very confused, and then resentful of those friends that I was with.”

Reneé has now said that she is still “sorting through” her feelings about that night as she opened up some more about the confusion she feels regarding the attack in a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter. 

“I just recently started to be like, ‘Wait, the people that let this happen to me suck,’” Reneé continued. “I recently was like, ‘I actually don’t want to follow this person on Instagram anymore because they left me at a club to get drugged.’ God knows what happened to me. And it happened two years ago.

“I woke up on a bathroom stall, face up in the Beverly Hilton, with blood on my pants. And had been left alone at that point for like seven hours,” she added. 

When asked if she’d spoken to any of her former friends about what had happened, Reneé said that the guy she had been seeing messaged her the day after. She recalled, “He was like, ‘Are you OK? What happened? I guess you went home. Hope you’re OK.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t go home. Don’t be dumb.’”

“Ultimately, I’m not making music to just make music. I’m making music to start conversations,” she said. “I still see so many funny takes now that are like, ‘Well, this song is clearly about when she was doing heroin.’ And I’m like, ‘You’re amazing, and I love your creativity.’ But I like that people think that, weirdly enough.

“I think that now that I’ve talked about it and now that it’s been a public thing, I hear more people being like, ‘This has happened to me,’” Reneé went on before sharing the importance of breaking down stigma around assault. 

“I think that if I was taught and spoken to about what assault is — obviously, it’s really difficult to prevent that or prevent being abandoned by a group of friends at a hotel bar, [but] I would love to have had more emphasis on what assault was and how to handle it,” she explained. “Because in hindsight, I think the next day, going to the hospital would’ve probably been [smart]. But I was just like, ‘Nope, I’m going to block it out.’”