Actor, comedian, and self proclaimed male feminist Aziz Ansari is the latest actor to face sexual assault allegations by a woman who claims the assault was “by far the worst experience with a man I’ve ever had.”
Women’s lifestyle vertical Babe published an interview on late Saturday with a pseudonymous 23-year-old woman named “Grace,” who alleges that Ansari sexually assaulted her on their first and final date when she was 22.
The publication was able to corroborate her claims by cross-referencing the phone number from which his text messages were sent to a public registry.
Grace told the publication that after dinner the couple went back to his place when he immediately started groping her. The details of the encounter are graphic—escalating from aggressive kissing to oral sex, which she says she felt aggressively pressured into performing. Although she did not say “no,” Grace did not offer enthusiastic consent.
Babe states:
She says Ansari began making a move on her that he repeated during their encounter. “The move he kept doing was taking his two fingers in a V-shape and putting them in my mouth, in my throat to wet his fingers, because the moment he’d stick his fingers in my throat he’d go straight for my vagina and try to finger me.” Grace called the move “the claw.”
Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward. “He probably moved my hand to his dick five to seven times,” she said. “He really kept doing it after I moved it away.”
But the main thing was that he wouldn’t let her move away from him. She compared the path they cut across his apartment to a football play. “It was 30 minutes of me getting up and moving and him following and sticking his fingers down my throat again. It was really repetitive. It felt like a fucking game.”
The alleged victim says she used “verbal and non-verbal cues” to indicate her distress and lack of consent, and that she even turned stiff at one point to indicate her displeasure at his Ansari’s alleged advances.
“I know I was physically giving off cues that I wasn’t interested,” said Grace. “I don’t think that was noticed at all, or if it was, it was ignored.”
Following the uncomfortable foreplay situation, Grace says she went to wash up and collected herself. When she went back, he allegedly asked if she was okay. She told Babe that she was at first happy with his reaction to her call to slow things down, and then he asked her to just chill on the couch with him.
She says the unexpected happened when she went to sit down with him and Ansari allegedly resumed pressuring Grace into having sexual intercourse with him—first making her perform oral sex again, and then bending her over in front of a mirror in a different part of the apartment to initiate coitus.
“I just remember looking in the mirror and seeing him behind me. He was very much caught up in the moment and I obviously very much wasn’t,” Grace said. “After he bent me over is when I stood up and said no, I don’t think I’m ready to do this, I really don’t think I’m going to do this. And he said, ‘How about we just chill, but this time with our clothes on?’”
They got dressed, sat side by side on the couch they’d already “chilled” on, and he turned on an episode of Seinfeld. She’d never seen it before. She said that’s when the reality of what was going on sank in. “It really hit me that I was violated. I felt really emotional all at once when we sat down there. That that whole experience was actually horrible.”
Grace says that while the TV played, Ansari once again made motions to be aggressive toward her, allegedly kissing her and sticking his fingers down her throat and moving to undo her pants. At this point, she says she turned away and being in a “different mindset,” she was able to ward off his aggressive advances.
“I remember saying, ‘You guys are all the same, you guys are all the fucking same.'” Ansari asked her what she meant. When she turned to answer, she says he met her with “gross, forceful kisses.”
At this point, Grace says she stood up and got her things and said she’d call herself an Uber. Ansari gave her a hug and allegedly went in for another aggressive kiss, which she pulled away from.
“I cried the whole ride home. At that point I felt violated. That last hour was so out of my hand,” she said.
A day after the encounter, Ansari texted Grace to tell her it was “fun meeting you last night,” but later apologized, claiming he “misread things in the moment.”
Aziz Ansari is a “certified woke bae,” according to Refinery29, and has done numerous interviews with Cosmopolitan, “The Late Show With David Letterman,” and The Guardian—among others—bragging about his engagement with the feminist movement. In 2015, Ansari spoke at length about his feminism in the Netflix special “Live at Madison Square Garden,” highlighting creepy and sexist attitudes men have toward women.
Ansari has yet to comment on the sexual assault allegations against him.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.