Reneé Rapp has opened up about the “incredibly traumatic experience” of being drugged and assaulted in a hotel two years ago.
The singer-songwriter and Mean Girls actor spoke about the ordeal during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“I still feel like I’m sorting through those feelings,” she told the publication. “I do understand that it was an incredibly traumatic experience that I don’t remember at all. And it feels weird to talk about because I don’t remember it.”
Rapp continued: “I just recently started to be like, ‘Wait, the people that let this happen to me suck’. 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.”
Rapp went on to explain how the incident had inspired her performance on Saturday Night Live last month. She played ‘Snow Angel’ from her 2023 debut album of the same name on the show, with the track itself having been written about the assault.
“I was like, ‘OK, well, when we do SNL, if I’m doing this [song], I am doing this’,” Rapp remembered. “I will be on a red floor and I need to start laying down because that’s how I woke up. And there should be red underneath me and I should be in all white.”
When asked if she’d spoken to her former friends about what happened to her, the singer responded: “I talked to the guy that I was seeing the day after, and I remember 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’.”
Rapp explained that she “always knew” she was spending time with the wrong crowd at the time, but “made a lot of excuses for it”.
“[My friends] were like, ‘What the fuck is going on? You realise you’ve been out every single night and it’s a Tuesday. That’s wild’,” she said. “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 continued: “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’. I think I went to a [recording] session the next day.”
Speaking to NME last year, Rapp said her music – which she described as “stripped-back pop” – contained lyrics about “all the shitty things that have happened to me”.
Last month also saw Rapp and Megan Thee Stallion perform their Mean Girls collaborative single ‘Not My Fault’ on SNL. Rapp reprised her Broadway role as Regina George in the new reboot of the film.
In other news, Reneé Rapp is set to perform at Reading & Leeds 2024 this summer.
For help, support and advice regarding domestic abuse, visit Refuge here or call the freephone, 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.
