Date Rape

Come on, Babe, it's your lucky day
Shut your mouth, we're gonna do it my way
C'mon, Baby, don't you be afraid
If it wasn't for Date Rape, I'd never get laid!

—Sublime, of course.

This trope is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A character (most often female) is out on a date with someone (most often male) who seems nice and normal … until they force themself on the victim, by drugs (whether the substance is offered openly with an ulterior motive or administered surreptitiously) and/or by violence. Though this is a dated definition: the proper term now is acquaintance rape, owing to the fact that there doesn't even have to be a date (or even a dating relationship) for it to happen - acquaintance rapes have happened as Brother–Sister Incest, between co-workers and roommates and similar, by delivery people or hired employees, by medical professionals while the victim was under anesthesia and in nontraditional relationship settings (e.g. a member of the Groupie Brigade of a band's singer is at a party and gets roofied and raped by the bassist; or a woman is meeting with a male prostitute and instead of having consensual sex with her, he rapes her) among others.

All that is required is that the victim knows the rapist in some way, and that trust (and possibly the setting and any alcohol or drugs given, not all cases even involve alcohol or drugs) enabled the rapist(s) to gain access to and control over the victim. While date rape is often cited as "gray rape" or "accidental rape," and some rare cases undoubtedly are, the great majority of acquaintance rapes are not those rare cases - they are planned events by Serial Rapists, who have simply learned how to use social engineering, alcohol, drugs, and threats as weapons instead of guns, knives, and fists.

In Real Life, a perpetrator of date rape is less likely to be arrested, and even less likely than that to be convicted, for numerous reasons. (The victim may not want the attacker arrested, the attacker may be apologetic, and most of all, proving lack of consent can be very hard.) Sadly, this type of rape can often be harder for a victim to recover from than it is when inflicted by a stranger, given the broken trust.

The term "roofied" is occasionally applied to the actual drugging of someone, and in fiction is often used to describe someone who is drugged and made to do something against their will — but not always in the context of rape.

Contrary to perceptions and common media portrayals, this is far more common than stranger rape, in some places accounting for at least two-thirds of all reported rapes. Sadly, as said above, it's also far less likely to be reported or successfully prosecuted if the victim does report.

No Real Life Examples, Please!

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

A 29 year-old Bachelor Lives Freely In Another World: After their first quest together, the protagonist's cute adventuring partner slips an aphrodisiac in his drink and has her way with him. He comes to his senses the next morning and after the initial shock, decides he's fine with it, promising to take responsibility for what he did.
An episode of Hell Girl dealt with a boy who learned that the girl he had a crush on was about to be roofied and raped by her boyfriend and another guy. The boy goes to Hell Girl to send the rapists to hell but is ultimately rejected and the girl is raped. It turns out the next day that the girl sent her boyfriend to hell afterwards, and the boy takes it upon himself to kill the other one.
Happened to Chizuru "Chizu" Honda in the Bokurano manga, when her boyfriend and teacher Hatagai led her to a love hotel room and had her gang-raped by his friends. Even worse, she was impregnated and he didn't care. No wonder Chizu SNAPPED afterwards.
Metamorphosis: Saki Yoshida's first date post-makeover is with a guy named Hayato, who quickly picks up on her naivety. He gets her drunk, gives her a dose of some form of drug, has sex with her while she's high, then puts his number in her phone and leaves after she's passed out. She enjoys the experience and comes back to him repeatedly for the same, but it's clear that she doesn't understand how she's been taken advantage of.

Fan Works

In Advanced Theory, Sora makes a fake confession to Riku to get back at him for being a jerk to Sora's friends. Which backfires because Riku accepts the confession and admits to having feelings for Sora. In Riku's excitement, he unintentionally forces Sora to have sex with him because Sora felt too guilty to refuse him. While Sora never calls it rape, he admits to feeling tainted by the experience. To Riku's credit, he picks up on this and makes sure to check for Sora's consent.
I Spoke as a Child is a short Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends Dark Fic themed around this. After Frankie is assaulted by her date, the rest of the fic deals with the next few days. In her stressed state, Frankie has an outburst at Mac and curses him out. The next day she apologizes to him and has to explain the situation in a way a nine-year-old would understand.
In this crossover fanvid between Cinderella and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Marina uses magic to change every thing so that Charming is in love with her, not Cinderella. Marina has sex with Charming but the potion wears off in the morning. It's treated as a rape and Marina is thrown in jail to rot.
In Nobody Dies, Asuka's nameless date attempts this. He doesn't get far since NERV set up a sting operation, and the would-be rapist gets knocked out and handed over to Rei.

Films — Live-Action

Happened to the protagonist of the first Trilogy of Terror segment.
This fuels the plot of the Left In Darkness movie, where the young girl Cecilia is given a cup with drugged beer and raped; however, she dies shortly after her dose and wakes up in limbo. At one point in the movie, she does manage to knock a cup of drugged beer away from her friend despite being in limbo.
Basic Instinct: The first scene of Nick and Beth in her apartment. Feeling sexually frustrated from dealing with Catherine's interrogation, Nick acts it out on Beth by aggressively coming on to her. She seems to enjoy it at first, but by the end he forces himself onto her and she's clearly struggling against him, and at one point flat-out tells him "no". After they're done, she calls him out on the fact that he wasn't making love to her, and angrily tells him to leave.
Referenced by JD in Heathers: "Football season is over, Veronica. Kurt and Ram have nothing to offer the school but date rapes and AIDS jokes."
The song "Summer Nights" in Grease has a touch of it. "Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?" Well, it is The '50s...
In Summer Camp Nightmare, during the teenagers' takeover of Camp North Pines, John Mason takes his girlfriend Debbie Stewart out for a date walk in the woods to make out with each other when Debbie tries to stop him from going too far. Annoyed at the rebuff, John gets aggressive with Debbie and ends up raping her, which attracts the attention of Donald Poultry and the girl he was walking in the woods with, who end up reporting the situation to Franklin Reilly, the acting camp director during the takeover. Franklin punishes John by having him go across the broken rope bridge to see if he survives or falls, but when that punishment isn't suitable enough for Debbie when he successfully makes it across and back, the girls take John and hang his body on a tree.
M.F.A.: This happens to Noelle when she goes on a date with her classmate, then into his dorm room where he forces himself on her. Her attempts to find some kind of justice set in motion the events that will turn her into a vigilante, hunting and killing those who have got away with rape or sexual assault.
Tamara: Shawn and Patrick turn out to have drugged many girls' drinks before raping them in a motel room.
For Colored Girls: Yasmine is raped by Bill on their second date, with no warning.

Literature

ALiCE (2014): Shortly after saving Christopher from being raped by Morgan, Michael takes Christopher to a bar, abuses his trust and gratitude to get him drunk, and rapes him.
A key plot point in Going Too Far by Catherine Alliott is that protagonist Polly got drunk on a night out and cheated on her husband with film director Sam. She has no memory of this happening, and just assumes that if everyone thinks she willingly slept with Sam it must be true; even though it's clear to the reader that she was much too drunk to consent and this would be rape. Subverted with the revelation that he actually drugged her and checked them into a hotel together, using her to create a false alibi whilst he burgled her house.
In the Mercy Thompson book Iron Kissed, Tim has Mercy drink from a magic goblet when she comes for dinner to make her fall in love with him, and takes advantage of her when they're alone.
The second book of the Nightrunner series has an unfortunately ambiguous example. The protagonist Alec, 16 years old and very virginal^note, gets very drunk at a party. A seductive woman of his acquaintance (she's the kindly old mentor character's mistress as well as having regular sex with another male friend), who has a reputation of being a "virgin chaser" / "man-eater" and who also wants to perform some villainous, plot-relevant magic on Alec once she gets him alone and asleep, flirts with him while also putting a seduction spell on him, which could be interpreted as the magical equivalent of roofies. She asks if he wants to be let go, but she doesn't lift the spell for this and he's still drunk. He says no, and she teleports him away for a night of off-screen marathon sex. The next morning, Alec initially claims it was great when his best friend asks ^note, but his internal narration afterwards is more ambivalent, stating that he feels used and in need of a bath, and later the friend briefly notices that Alec seems to avoid standing close to the woman at social gatherings. While Alec was in the woman's bed, several characters worried about what kind of magic the woman was using on him, but the only one seriously worried about the sexual consent issue was basically an old lady who'd been celibate all her life and who is described as "prim" in this scene. There's never really any in-depth discussion about what happened and the main characters kind of joke about the woman using magic to get formerly celibate men into bed later on. Not even the kindly authority figure whose mistress she is ^note actually seems to investigate what magic she was using on the boy, while he was sleeping or earlier. Which is why the woman's villain status is a surprise for the good guys later on in the plot. It's hard to say if this was meant to reflect the male characters' double standards and that it comes back to bite them in the ass, or if the author genuinely thought this wasn't a big deal that needed to be clarified with regards to Alec's ability to give free consent. Especially since this was written in the early 1990s.
In Phenomena is this a part of Sha-ra's backstory. He was raised to be the next bearer of the titular prophecy book, but as his teacher and brother died in a fire. He was taken in by the Winter Bears and tried to live his own life. He became one of the first to become a Dragon Rider but his destiny caught up with him, it was up to him to find the chosen children whom hadn't appeared in 100s of years which was what made his teacher mad and burn his castle down. Sha-ra then became an Alcoholic. One day he saw a beautiful woman who invited him to a drink. He doesn't remember much but followed her into an inn, and later woke up, felt dirty and disgusting and wanted to do anything to forget it. 9 months later the woman appeared before him again with a baby, he said some things he shouldn't have and the woman offered to kill the child. He begged her to not kill the child and she scarred the child and placed a curse on him that the next time he met the child he would die.
There's a clearly meant-to-be-educational example in the novel Rule 34 by Charles Stross. Unusually, the moral is not a victim-blaming "Girls, beware of guys you don't know and don't drink", but rather "Only yes means yes." and "Rapists are violent psychopaths, not people who just made a mistake, or just 'boys being boys'.", and it seems specifically aimed at a young male readership, the ones who commonly make jokes about "surprise buttsex". What happens in the book is that one polyamorous female character, who likes to have one-night-stands when in a strange city, unknowingly gets into bed with the book's villain. She consented to rough sex, but not to anal. In the middle of the sex scene, he just turns her around and penetrates her anally, hurting her but finishing so fast that she doesn't even have time to really struggle. Then he tells her to leave, her purpose for him having been fulfilled. Later in the shower, she's very upset but unsure herself whether that qualified as rape. But when she tells the main character (a policewoman) what happened, she confirms that yes, of course it was rape. Later on in the book, the rapist is described as certifiably psychopathic several times and the reader gets to witness firsthand what exactly that means through his POV.
Swordspoint: In The Privilege of the Sword, Artemisia Fitz Levi goes to a somewhat disreputable ball with her fiance, they end up in a secluded corner, and before she knows what's happening enough to protest, he's taking her virginity. He doesn't seem to consider this rape at all and blames her for the fact that it even happened.
Not a "date" in the usual sense, but this happens to Jensen in Pillars of Creation, the seventh book in the Sword of Truth series. Her inner monologue makes it clear she isn't at all comfortable with what her suitor is doing, but she's unable to bring herself to stop him. Not that she likely could have, as he's far stronger than her.
The plot of Asking For It by Louise O'Neill, focusing on what happens after a girl is raped at a party by a group of guys she knows.
In the Teenage Worrier series, Letty attends a Wild Teen Party where she gets drunk, passes out, and comes around to find a guy she's just met next to her. She initially doesn't think anything of this (since he said he'd come to try and wake her up), but when she later misses her period, she believes he may have spiked her drink and raped her. Averted when it turns out he didn't.
The plot of Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle focuses on a fourteen-year-old girl who accuses her ex-boyfriend, a popular hockey player, of date-raping her at a party.

Live-Action TV

The entire plot of Sweet/Vicious is about the college girl protagonist getting date-raped and becoming a vigilante fighter to get some sort of justice on the rapist (her best friend's boyfriend) and other guys like him when police and the college bureaucrats won't do anything. It's shown to be a widespread problem, with other women leaving warnings against dozens of specific guys on a toilet wall.
Quantum Leap: The plot of "Raped" features a young couple going out on a dinner date, which ends with the young man—the "golden boy" of a small town who is about to cash in on a lucrative college football scholarship—raping his date in the back seat of a car. Sam leaps into the body of the rape victim and has to testify (eventually he is — with Al's help in finding the rape victim — able to recount the events exactly as they happened). The boy is acquitted, but in the end, he doesn't get away with his actions at all, thanks to Sam. The epilogue notes that the prosecutor was a victim of this herself, and thus motivated to take up her career, having far more success in future cases.
Degrassi: The Next Generation:
- A story arc about Paige revolved around this trope. She goes to a party, flirts with a boy, gets raped, and has to testify.
- In season 13, Zoe goes through the same ordeal, only hers was videotaped.
An episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 revolved around the girls attending a seminar on the subject. Kelly matter-of-factly states it was a weekly occurrence in high school. The episode was important at the time because the term "date rape" had only recently been coined and attitudes toward sexual assault were changing.
Veronica Mars: Part of the backstory told in flashbacks. Veronica is roofied during a high school party at end of her sophomore year and wakes up partially unclothed the next morning. She tries to report what happens and Sheriff Lamb calls her a slut and kicks her out of the station. Which explains why she hates him so much. At the end of season 1, she finds out she was drugged when Madison (who had just been drugged herself) spit in her drink. Duncan rescued her at first, getting her to a safe room. Then he was drugged and put in the same room. Duncan, in his state, thought she had consented. Logan was the one that brought the drugs to the party. Then, at the end of the 2nd season, she finds out that mass murderer Beaver had raped her that night. In season 3, she can't understand why Logan goes as far as he does to protect her as she investigates a serial rapist, who targets her but is scared off by Logan.
A violent, rather than drugged, example would have happened in Heroes if Brody had succeeded in raping Claire before accidentally killing her. It is also very heavily implied that he is a serial date rapist, who covers himself by spreading rumors about how his victims are sluts.
In the Enemy at the Door episode "After the Ball", Marie Weston is being walked home from the ball by her date when he initiates a makeout session and then takes it too far. He claims afterward that she consented to everything while it was happening, but considering that she'd put away an uncharacteristic amount of hard liquor (at his encouragement) and that the power dynamics were all slanted in his favour, there's no way the situation isn't at least very dubious.
Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has "an extensive history of felonious behavior" and multiple bench warrants for "sexual misconduct". Even his friends refer to his actions as rape on multiple occasions.
Subverted on Sisters, when Cat (daughter of second-oldest sister Teddy) meets a classmate in his dormitory for a study date rather than the typical romantic scenario. They start making out, but she nixes it because she doesn't feel ready to sleep with him yet. He's not pleased, but she doesn't realize just how angry he is until she goes for her run that evening... and he shows up at the track and assaults her. During her attacker's trial, her aunt Georgie (the middle sister) admits to having been date-raped herself while in high school, and another young woman lurking around turns out to have been a previous victim.
Of the "acquaintance" variety on Strong Medicine. A party is held to celebrate the promotion of one of the hospital's surgeons. Afterwards, he encounters one of his colleagues, Dr. Lu Delgado, in the parking lot and offers her a ride. She accepts...and the next scene is of her wandering into the ER, declaring that she's been raped. We never see what happened but her story is that after driving her home, he walked her to her apartment, made advances to her, and didn't listen when she told him "No".
The Outer Limits (1995): In "Family Values", Candace Miller warms to the household robot Gideon after he saves her from being raped by her boyfriend Clay.
Guiding Light. Brent Lawrence does this to Lucy Cooper.
Harrow: In "Malum In Se" ("Evil in Itself"), Harrow and Grace uncover a case of date rape at Wild Teen Party while investigating a decades-old death. Although not directly connected to the death, it does result in the capture of a sexual predator.
Liar (2017): Laura accuses Andrew of this (after drugging her drink), and looks into his past, finding incidents making her think he did it to other women as well. He's guilty of not only her rape but many more.
Law & Order: SVU: In "Design", April went out with several men and drugged them using Rohypnol. While they were unconscious, she used a device to rape them and get their sperm.
Trinkets: Tabitha tries to stop things while having sex with Brady, but he won't listen. She breaks up with him but doesn't want to press charges. In Season 2 she's still dealing with it, and she gets worried that he may have also raped Kayla, his current girlfriend.
The Murders: In "Toxic", a young woman involved with the case tells Kate and Nolan that she'd been raped by a friend at her workplace. Even worse, it turns out this was filmed for others to watch.
Impulse: Henry consensually makes out with Clay, but then he starts going farther than she wants to and won't stop, sticking his hand down her pants and digitally raping her. It sparks her Traumatic Superpower Awakening when she teleports via a subconscious desire to flee, and it partly crushes Clay's truck, leaving him paralyzed.
A Different World: Dwayne becomes worried that his friend Freddie will be a victim of this when her date, a fellow basketball player, matter-of-factly describes having done this to another girl, thanks to his firm belief that "No" Means "Yes". Luckily, he's there to stop it.
Of the "acquaintance" type in the Made-for-TV Movie Without Her Consent, when a young woman goes to her new friend/neighbor's house to look at some old furniture he has to sell. Much like in the page description, she soon discovers that she isn't his first victim and soon after that, a third young woman comes forward, who he assaulted even while being under investigation for the other rapes.

Music

The Special A.K.A.'s (the second incarnation of The Specials) song "The Boiler", featuring vocals by Rhoda Dakar. It's quite disturbing.
Sublime's "Date Rape", a fast-paced and cheery song about a guy who practices date rape, gets arrested, and then suffers Prison Rape.
The PV for "Genkai Haretsu" by hide implies both this and that the victim is, afterward, kept in an induced coma by her rapist, who is the Villain Protagonist of the song. The "seems nice and normal" is played for great effect — the rapist character appears as a wealthy, respectable businessman.
Warren Zevon's "Excitable Boy" includes the verse "He took little Suzie to the junior prom/Then he raped her and killed her/Then he took her home".
Brian McFadden's So Bad, It's Good song, "Just the Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar)", is pretty explicit about this. He sings about wanting to take a wasted girl home to "do some damage" and uses the phrase "take advantage". Moral Guardians (and everyone else for that matter) were pretty upset. Delta Goodrem dumped him soon after.
"Hearts and Crosses" by the janglepop band Heavenly. The song was distinctly Darker and Edgier than their previous material and was something of a Growing the Beard moment for them.
The Music Video for "E-Talking" by Soulwax is about a club with each of partygoers under the effect of a drug for each letter of the alphabet. R and S correspond to groggy-looking girl under the effects of Rohypnol and a shifty-looking guy on Steroids that is claiming he is going to take her home.
Local H does a variation on this trope in "Keep Your Girlfriend," which includes lyrics like "want to know how it feels when she gives in." (One assumes Scott Lucas is playing a character in this song.)
Earl Sweatshirt of OFWGKTA describes performing Date Rape (among many other atrocities) in his song "Earl".
Earl: How the fuck I fit an ax in a satchel?/Slip capsules in her glass./She dizzy rascal./Party staff baffled./Asking: "Where'd her ass go?"/In my room, redefining the meaning of "black holes".
"No Means No" by Firefall.
"The Infamous Date Rape" by A Tribe Called Quest from The Low End Theory criticizes this practice.
Subversion: while the song is merely a flirtatious woman teasing a potential lover by playing the By "No", I Mean "Yes" card, Holly Dunn's 1991 single "Maybe I Mean Yes" was perceived by many listeners as a condonement of date rape (particularly the lyric "When I say 'no', I mean 'maybe', or maybe I mean 'yes'."). Although Dunn stood by the song's more innocent meaning, she still withdrew it as a single anyway, and the ensuing controversy proved to be a Creator Killer.
Similarly, Rocko's song "U.O.E.N.O.", featuring Future and Rick Ross, became Overshadowed by Controversy due to a line from Ross's verse that was believed to condone this trope (particularly "Put molly all in her champagne, she ain't even know it/I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain't even know it"), which caused Ross to lose his Reebok sponsorship deals, cancellations of concerts, and the line to be censored on most formats.

Web Original

The Nostalgia Critic got roofied and raped on his prom night. Played for Laughs, obviously, but has he ever given us a happy backstory?
On her in-character facebook, The Nostalgia Chick finally got a date with Todd in the Shadows. Most people would feel bad if their crush drank the night away and ignored them (which he did), but she was just excited about his judgment being blurred.

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