On Sunday morning, I woke up to a WhatsApp message from a friend. It contained two words and an emoji: “Aziz Ansari :(”. My heart sank. In 2018, being presented with the name of a famous man without context can only mean one thing.

Ansari is an award-winning comedian, actor and screenwriter, the author of Modern Love, a nonfiction book about the nuances of dating in the 21st century, and the creator of the brilliant, tender and switched-on Netflix romantic sitcom Master of None. He is also the subject of an article published this weekend by babe, titled “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned out to be the worst night of my life”. In the piece, a 23-year-old photographer going by the pseudonym of Grace recounts an evening she spent with Ansari in September 2017, shortly after meeting him at an Emmys party.

Her tale is an unhappy and unsettling one, told from the perspective of a young woman who felt rushed into sexual contact and ignored when she tried to resist. Ansari removed her clothes and went to get a condom within minutes of their first kiss in his apartment, Grace says, and brushed off her requests to slow things down. She says that he repeatedly forced his fingers into her mouth, asked her to give him oral sex, and pulled her hands towards his penis, apparently not noticing – or not caring – when she moved away.

Grace complied with some of Ansari’s requests, she says, and refused others. She says she “felt really pressured”. She says that the comedian didn’t seem to pick up on her “clear non-verbal cues” that she was feeling uncomfortable, and tried to barter his way past her explicit verbal assertions that things were moving too fast. At one point in her interview with babe, she says: “He was very much caught up in the moment and I obviously very much wasn’t.”

Ansari has since issued an official response to Grace’s story. In it, he does not make any denials or apologies, but says that he was surprised to hear that she had not enjoyed her evening with him. He also expresses support for the #MeToo movement.

“What the Aziz Ansari story tells us about our attitudes to sex and trauma”