Ciara Charteris has revealed that she was raped five years ago by a close friend.
The 25-year-old actress, who starred as Emma Tregirls in hit show Poldark, wrote about her experience in an open letter on website ‘I Am Arla’, a support network for survivors of abuse, trauma and discrimination.
Describing him as “a close friend, slightly older than me, but I had known him since I was 16,” Charteris wrote that the rape happened after a night out to celebrate her best friend’s birthday in 2015.
She candidly wrote: “Although I have struggled to say the word rape out loud for a long time, I knew that’s what had happened. Despite saying no numerous times, begging him to get off me, trying to physically pull him off, my flight mode was not attuned to protect me from a rapist that had the face of my best friend. So I just shut my eyes and passed out in terrified defeat. Only waking later to clean myself up and try and find my bottoms.”
Charteris says that “for numerous (and common) reasons at the time” she chose not to report her rapist, but confided in her best friend. “She supported me unwaveringly, and after much deliberation, we decided to deal with it by never seeing or speaking to him again,” she shares.
But the actress was left shocked when she discovered that her best friend had started hanging out with her rapist again in 2018. “Why? When? How? And although I am no perfect friend, what could I have possibly done to deserve this?,” she wrote in the post. “As most survivors of Acquaintance Rape understand; we take the blame and live with the shame, as society tells us to.”
Charteris reveals that she challenged her friend, who blamed her for putting her in a ‘difficult position’ for years, and although they tried to salvage their friendship, Charteris says that her friend completely cut her out of her life and decided to form a friendship with Charteris’s rapist.
She wrote: “It was one thing to deal with the post-traumatic stress of being physically violated by someone I trusted, but quite another when the person who had stood by me through it all, whom I trusted the most, suddenly decided to turn a blind eye to it. This broke me.”
“I started having regular panic and anxiety attacks, thinking I had seen them would make me physically sick, frequently triggering flashbacks to the assault, and resulted in me having to leave my new job.”
Until, in December 2019, Charteris reported the rape, no longer wanting to make sure “that his life was unaffected and protected from the consequences of his actions”. But in March this year, she was informed he would not be charged.
“This was not surprising, and to quote the police: ‘it does not make him innocent’,” she wrote. “I had achieved what I set out to do and his name will forever be listed with the police. Nevertheless, the decision not to charge him still hit hard.”
Charteris said she chose to use her voice to share her story “for the better of my community”.
Tom York, Charteris’s co-star in Poldark, recently took to social media to praise his ‘dear friend’ for sharing her story.
“This has been a huge decision for her, an incredibly brave one, and I deeply admire her for it,” he wrote on Instagram. “I hope to anyone else who has suffered rape, Ciara’s story can help by showing, you are not alone, and that it was not your fault. To everyone else.. it is an eye opening account, not only of violation, but of losing those friends closest to you as a result. Please take time to hear her story.”
If you have been affected by this story and would like advice or information, please visit rapecrisis.org.uk or call 0808 802 9999 (open between 12:00-14:30 and
19:00-21:30 every day of the year).
