Reneé Rapp revealed she went “missing for seven hours” after being “drugged” at a party in Los Angeles at the beginning of 2022.
The 23-year-old singer opened up about the traumatic experience — which inspired her new single, “Snow Angel” — during an appearance on Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast Monday.
Rapp, who had “just gone through a breakup” at the time, explained that she fell in with the wrong crowd of people and wound up alone at 5 a.m. “in a bathroom stall” of a hotel bar with no recollection of what had happened the night before.
“I was living here in L.A., and I was hanging out in a new group of people, and they were partiers,” she explained.
While her close friends and family didn’t think it was a “good group” for Rapp to hangout with, the actress explained that she felt a sense of “freedom” for the first time in a while.
“I really let my judgment go when it came to the people that were around me,” she said. “We were all out, and it was just situation after situation where they were just not trustworthy, and then the next thing you knew, I was face up, laying down in a bathroom stall in a hotel bar, just waking up at 5 in the morning, completely alone.”
“I woke up, and I was just so confused, and I had blood on my pants, and I was really just, like, so caught off guard,” she added.
Although she, thankfully, still had her phone and purse, the “Sex Lives of College Girls” alum says she only had two texts asking if she was OK.
“I had missed two texts from two people that I was with at like 10:30 the night before. Which was like seven hours had gone by. That were like, ‘Hey I guess you left, we’ll see you when we see you.'”
“I still have no idea what happened, no clue what happened,” she explained. “But I was drugged, and I had just been missing for seven hours.”
The former Broadway star says she “stopped being friends with those people” and also cut back on her partying — but it took her months to grapple with the scary situation.
“I didn’t really even understand what was happening because again, I didn’t really recall anything that had happened,” she told Shetty. “A couple months later we really delved into it. I kind of started to have to deal with everything that happened, and I was just crying, so upset, and very confused and then resentful of those friends that I was with.”
When it came time to start writing her album the following year, Rapp reluctantly agreed to tell her story despite being “afraid” that people would “judge” her.
“I felt nothing at all until we had recorded the song, the whole thing was done, and I played it for a bunch of my friends and my manager, and everybody was like, ‘This is insane,'” she recalled.
“But for me, that whole year of my life was inherent resilience … I was fighting through an experience where I [had] no idea what happened to me, lost friends, felt like I couldn’t go out with anybody and trust anybody and then was like trying to explain the situation in a way that I could understand it but I didn’t really understand it and then wanting to write a song about it and wanting to write an album about it.”
