On a warm Saturday night in May 2018, Leah McGuirk slipped through the crowd at Rooftop 210 in Charlotte to order her usual, a Patrón with water and lime, at the bar.
McGuirk, then thirty-one, was working full-time as a nanny while attending community college, studying communications. She nursed her drink, the only one of the night, with a group of friends as bar-goers churned around them. About twenty minutes later, she says, she started to feel lightheaded, her vision fading in and out. Suddenly, everything went black.
She hadn’t even finished her drink.
Her friends, unsure of what was happening, braced her against a metal pole. She slid to the ground, dropping her drink and purse, and began convulsing as a friend cradled her to keep her from banging her head on the floor. Her companions dragged McGuirk outside, where she eventually regained consciousness atop a planter. A friend picked her up and brought her home. She didn’t get out of bed the next day; she was sick to her stomach and had a throbbing headache.
“I felt the life force had been sucked out of me,” she recalls.
Only later did she realize that she’d been drugged. She didn’t go to the hospital or get a blood panel to prove it. But it was the only explanation.
McGuirk took to social media to tell her story and warn other Rooftop 210 patrons. Her Facebook post went viral. Messages trickled into her inbox from others who claimed to have been drugged—and some sexually assaulted—at Rooftop 210.
When she attempted to file a police report two weeks later, she learned something equally as disturbing: Because she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, what happened to her wasn’t technically a crime in North Carolina.
State law didn’t address the use of date-rape drugs without sexual assault. The state did prohibit tampering with Halloween candy—banning the placement of controlled substances, poisonous chemicals, or razor blades in “any food or eatable substance”—but that didn’t apply to McGuirk’s situation.
As it turned out, that wasn’t the only archaic loophole that remained open. North Carolina was also the only state in the U.S. that didn’t explicitly allow a person to revoke consent once sex has been initiated, the result of a 1979 North Carolina Supreme Court decision.
By today’s standards, the case reads as cruel and even absurd.
Beverly Hester agreed to go on a date with Donnie Leon Wray, who at some point asked her up to his room, where he demanded that she remove her clothes and threatened to beat her if she didn’t. Terrified, she did what he asked. He then raped her. Wray was found guilty of second-degree rape, but he appealed, and the court ruled that a woman was not protected by the state’s rape laws if at any point she had consented.
That ruling—and the legislature’s failure to remedy it for forty years—has come under scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo movement, with calls to bring the state’s consent laws into the twenty-first century.
Last week, Governor Cooper signed into law Senate Bill 199, which makes it illegal to spike a drink or take sexual advantage of a person who is incapacitated with drugs or alcohol and gives people the right to revoke consent during sex. In addition, the law strengthens protections for children who are abused by their caretakers.
SB 199 passed unanimously in both the House and Senate.
The bill was drafted by state representative Chaz Beasley, a Charlotte Democrat, who learned about the loopholes after being contacted by an investigative reporter writing about McGuirk’s situation.
In a legislature viciously divided by party lines, Beasley says he took care to avoid the bill becoming a “political football.”
Doing that meant finding people brave enough to share their stories, Beasley says.
“It wasn’t about making the bill weaker,” he says. “It was about trying to find people who had similar experiences and stories and personal perspectives that would make the bill stronger.”
Representative Jay Adams, a Catawba Republican who also sponsored the bill, knew someone who’d been drugged against their will. He helped rally Republicans behind it.
“We wanted to get something substantive done and something major done, and that required us making sure we didn’t just want to pat ourselves on the back,” Beasley says.
Trauma, McGuirk says, reverberates through time. It comes in waves. Now studying at UNC-Chapel Hill, she says she’s less carefree than she used to be. She still goes to bars on occasion, but she uses a coaster to cover her drink. To her knowledge, the person who drugged her has never been caught.
“I’m sure that person’s still out there,” McGuirk says.
Contact Raleigh news editor Leigh Tauss at ltauss@indyweek.com.
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