I May Destroy You, and the Ending That Needs Nothing From Him

It is morning, and a writer who owes her publishers a draft has woken with a smashed phone and a night she cannot find. She had gone out for a drink with friends, to a bar called Ego Death, as a break from pages she was meant to hand in by now. Of the rest she has one thing: the flash of a man standing over her in a toilet cubicle. That is the morning at the centre of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, and what matters most is what the series does next, which is almost nothing a thriller would do. It does not show us the night. It gives us exactly as much of it as she has, and then spends twelve episodes on the work of living without the rest.

Her drink was spiked, and she was raped. The series says so plainly. Before saying anything else, this essay will add one thing, just as plainly. Nothing about the drink, the deadline, the bar or the hour has any bearing on what was done to her. A person drugged out of her own night could not have agreed to anything in it.

I May Destroy You is usually called a series about consent, and it is one. It follows the word into every place where it becomes difficult, and there are more of those places than most people have names for. But what it understands best is what the word is for. Consent is a person’s standing to decide what happens to her. It is, in the plainest sense, authorship. Each violation in the series takes that standing away by a different route, and each aftermath becomes a second contest over the same thing, fought this time over a story: who gets to say what happened, and whose agreement is needed before it counts.

This essay follows both contests. Its claim is that the ending, which gives its audience neither revenge nor forgiveness, is the most exact thing in the series. The last episode imagines three ways for her to face the man who raped her, and each of them needs something from him. The series keeps none of them. What it keeps is the one ending that needs nothing from him at all.

The record first. I May Destroy You is a series of twelve episodes, created and written by Michaela Coel, who also co-directed it and plays its central character, Arabella Essiedu. It was made for the BBC with HBO, and it premiered on HBO on 7 June 2020 and on BBC One the following day. Weruche Opia plays Terry, Arabella’s best friend since school, and Paapa Essiedu plays Kwame, the third of the three friends. In 2021 Coel won the Emmy for writing a limited series, and the series won the BAFTA for best mini-series. It reached Japan in May 2023, on U-NEXT.

Two things Coel has said in public belong here, because many readers will already know them. In 2018, giving the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, she said that she had been sexually assaulted while she was writing her earlier series, Chewing Gum. And in an interview around the time the series aired, she described turning down a larger offer for it because the deal would not let her keep even a small share of the rights, and making it with the BBC, which let her keep them. Those are her statements. This essay reports them as hers and goes no further. It does not read the series as a record of her life, or her life into the series.

Arabella is a Londoner in her late twenties who found fame on Twitter and then with a first book, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial. After the night at Ego Death she pieces events together with her friends, from one friend’s evasions and his taxi receipts, and reports the rape. The police investigate, find no one and close the case. Around her, the series finds other violations that are harder to name. A fellow writer, Zain, removes a condom during sex without telling her, and she exposes him from the stage of a literary festival. Kwame is sexually assaulted by a man he met on a hook-up app, and the officer he reports it to does not take him seriously. Terry discovers that a threesome on holiday in Italy was set up by two men who had pretended to be strangers. And Theodora, a schoolfriend whose accusation of rape Arabella and Terry once helped to undermine, now runs the survivors’ group that Arabella joins.

Arabella turns her story into an online following, strains her friendships and is dropped by her publisher. Kwame, after a night with a woman goes badly, finds something tender with a man called Tyrone. Terry lands a part and falls for Kai, a trans man. Then, back at Ego Death, Arabella sees the man who raped her. His name is David. The last episode imagines their confrontation three times, and then does something else.

This essay discusses that ending in full, and everything before it. It names each act the series depicts, plainly, and describes none of them. What it says about the series comes from the series’ published record and from criticism and interviews of record, and it describes scenes rather than quoting them.

The series is built around a case that looks, at first, like the simplest one there is. A stranger. A spiked drink. A toilet cubicle. Nobody in the series argues about whether this was rape, and nobody watching needs to. It is the case the word was made for.

Now look at how little it leaves her. No memory, and so no account she can give in the first person. No suspect, and so no one to accuse. A closed file, and so no process that ends in anything. The plainest case turns out to be the one the system can do least with, and the reason is not hard to find: the evidence a system needs is the kind a drugged person cannot gather. What she has instead is fragments, the loyalty of her friends, and the taxi receipts of a friend who is not telling her everything.

Piecing the night together is the first writing she does in the series, and it is not the book. It is a writer doing the only thing left to someone whose memory has been taken: assembling an account out of other people’s records, and out of what they will and will not say. It plays like an investigation, but its logic is closer to authorship. She is trying to become the person who can say what happened to her, which is exactly the standing the night removed.

Here the series makes its first claim about consent, and it is a practical claim, not a moral one. Consent is not a mood a person has or lacks. It is a capacity she exercises, and it can be taken away before anything else happens, without a struggle, by a drink. A drugged person does not give a weaker kind of yes. She gives none at all, because the person who would have answered is not there to answer. And intoxication, of any degree, is never itself a yes.

Two refusals run through the whole series, and both concern how a woman is put on screen.

The first is a refusal to know more than she does. The series gives us the night only in fragments, as she recovers them, a flash and then another, arriving when she has not asked for them. It would have been easy, and it is common, to show the audience what the woman cannot remember, and so to let the viewer hold more of her night than she does. Coel will not. The viewer is kept inside the same ignorance as the woman it happened to. That is a form of respect, and a form of argument. Nobody, the audience included, gets to become the author of her night before she does.

The second is a refusal to make her easy to defend. Arabella was supposed to be writing, and went out instead. She is ambitious, funny, always online, sometimes careless with the people who love her, and later she will push them away. The series gives her all of this, and it matters that it does. The old argument, still made in many places, is that a woman’s conduct before an assault belongs somewhere in the explanation of it. The series answers that argument by never once making it. Her deadline, her drink, her following and her faults are never allowed anywhere near the question of why it happened. The explanation is David.

Screen drama has often asked women who were harmed to be spotless before they could be believed: sober, modest, careful, sympathetic in every frame. I May Destroy You puts a whole, difficult, contradictory woman on screen and asks for nothing in exchange for believing her. That, as much as its subject, is why it matters to anyone who thinks about women on screen.

Around the plain case the series sets the harder ones, and they are harder for one precise reason. In each of them, somebody said yes.

Arabella goes to bed with Zain, a fellow writer she likes. She agrees to sex, and during it he removes the condom without telling her. Afterwards she learns that what he did has a name, and that the law where she lives can treat it as rape. Her yes was real. It was also specific: a yes to one act, and he performed a different one. Whatever he believed she knew, he did not ask, and a yes does not stretch to cover whatever the other person would have liked it to cover. Removing a condom without agreement is not a detail inside a consensual act. It changes the act, and the consent does not come with it.

Terry’s case is quieter, and in some ways stranger. On holiday in Italy she sleeps with two men who seem to be strangers to each other, and at the time it is a good night. Much later she realises they planned it together, and that the chance meeting she said yes to was staged. The series does not tell her how to feel about that, and neither will this essay. What it establishes is narrower and sharper. Her yes was given to a situation that did not exist. She agreed to a night, and the night she agreed to was a fiction someone else had written.

Kwame’s case ought to end every argument about whether a yes, once given, stays given. He meets a man through a hook-up app, and they have sex that both of them want. Afterwards Kwame wants to leave, and the man will not let him, and sexually assaults him. The yes Kwame gave minutes earlier was real. It covered what it covered, and then it was over. The man treated it as something still owed.

Two essays already in this Library help here. “Consent Is a Conversation That Keeps Going” described a yes at the door as a report on how a woman felt at the door, and nothing more. “A Yes Already Given Is Not a Debt” argued that an earlier yes creates no obligation to continue, however much a room is arranged to make it feel like one. The series supplies three ways in which a true yes can be made to cover something it was never given for. The act is changed without the person knowing. The situation is invented before she arrives. The ending is refused to him. In none of them did the person who said yes fail to say what they meant. In each, the other person alone decided what that yes would be taken to cover.

Set the three side by side and the pattern is not that people are careless with words. In each case one person took a decision that belonged to both of them, and took it alone. That is what makes these violations hard to name. Often there is no struggle to point to. There is only the moment at which one person became the author of what was happening to another.

Kwame’s thread deserves a room of its own, because the series gives it one.

He is the friend who went with Arabella to the police station when she reported her rape. When he reports his own assault, the officer does not take him seriously. The series does not stage this as a scandal. It lets it pass as an ordinary failure, which may be worse. What the scene suggests, on this essay’s reading, is how easily each fact of his account can be heard as a reason not to listen: a man, an app, sex he had wanted minutes before. Every clause of the sentence he has to say is made to count against him.

What follows is not the recovery that stories usually offer. He goes back to hook-ups. He sleeps with a woman without telling her he is gay; when he tells her, she throws him out, and Arabella and Terry call what he did a deception. He takes her to lunch to apologise, and she does not forgive him. The series puts the man who has just been assaulted, and just disbelieved, in the position of having withheld something from a woman who said yes to him. It does not settle whether what he did was a violation. It will not let his injury excuse it, and it will not use it to cancel his injury.

Then Tyrone. He cooks for Kwame, takes him on dates, and is in no hurry to go to bed. And Kwame, with the swagger gone, asks for a hug. It is one of the tenderest moments in the series, and it is a lesson about consent that has nothing to do with law: a pace set by the slower person, a closeness that asks before it arrives. A man who was not allowed to leave is held, this time because he asked to be.

By the end he is with Tyrone, in what looks like his first real relationship. The series does not present this as a cure, and it should not be read as one. It presents something he was allowed to reach at his own speed, which is all that consent was ever meant to protect.

The most uncomfortable choice Coel makes is to give each of her three friends a moment on the other side of a line.

When they were at school, Theodora accused a classmate of rape, and Arabella and Terry helped to undermine her. The series shows it in flashback and does not soften it: two teenage girls, sure of themselves, helping a school decide not to believe a third. Years later it is Theo who runs the group where Arabella brings what happened to her.

Terry keeps something from Arabella for most of the series. On the night of the rape, she told Simon, the friend with the taxi receipts, to leave Arabella. When Arabella learns this, she does not blame her. She thanks Terry for her friendship. And Kwame, as the last section described, keeps from a woman something she would have wanted to know before she said yes.

None of this makes the harms equivalent. What David did is of a different order from anything the three friends do, and the series never pretends otherwise. What it refuses is the comfort of a world sorted into people who are harmed and people who harm, with the viewer safely in the first group. Very few people who watch it will recognise themselves in David. Many more will recognise themselves in the girl who was sure the other girl was lying, or in the friend whose small decision on an ordinary night turned out to matter, or in the person who did not say the one thing that would have changed someone else’s yes.

This is where consent turns into a question of what people owe each other, and not only of what two people agree in a room. Belief is owed before a verdict: not certainty that an account is true, but enough attention to hear it whole before deciding what it is. Staying is sometimes owed, when leaving would be easier. And the truth is owed to anyone whose yes depends on it. Arabella’s thanks to Terry is the series’ answer to what a friendship can do with a failure. It does not forget it, and it does not prosecute it. It decides that the rest of the friendship is also true.

Months later, Terry is in love with Kai, her nerves turned into a performance in a television advertisement, and her friendship with Arabella has never been stronger. The series closes its hardest material inside a friendship, and that is not sentiment. It is where the series thinks repair actually happens, when it happens at all.

After the police close her case, Arabella does what a writer with a following can do. She tells it. The series is clear about what this gives her: an audience that believes her and keeps listening, which a closed file never could. And it sets beside it what she loses over the same months, the friends she pushes away and, in the end, her publisher.

The series is not against telling, and neither is this essay. What it seems wary of, on this reading, is a particular dependence: an account that feels real only while an audience keeps confirming it. That is another ending that needs something from other people. Not from him, this time, but from strangers, every day, in numbers.

When Coel accepted her Emmy in September 2021, she read a short speech addressed to writers. She told them to write the tale that scares them, and not to be afraid to disappear for a while and see what comes to them in the silence. She dedicated the story to every survivor of sexual assault. Those are her words, about writing, spoken more than a year after the series was broadcast, and this essay does not use them as a key to her life or to Arabella’s. It notes only that the series ends in the place the speech describes: with a woman who has gone quiet for long enough to write.

Back at Ego Death, Arabella sees David, and the last episode imagines their confrontation three times.

In the first, she and Theo, with Terry beside them, drug him and beat him. It is revenge in its oldest shape, the harm sent back where it came from. In the second, she lets him try again so that the police can catch him, and she listens to him talk about his own fear before they take him away. It is justice in the form the system could not give her the first time, and it arrives with something she never asked for: his inner life, handed to her to carry. In the third, she takes him home, has sex with him on her own terms, and tells him to go. It is the scene rewritten with her in command of it.

Each is a draft, and each fails the same test. Every one of them needs something from him. The first needs his suffering. The second needs his arrest, and leaves her holding his fear. The third needs his obedience: even an ending in which she gives the orders still has him in it, obeying them. In all three, the man who took her authorship remains a co-author of her ending.

The third deserves a plain sentence of its own. The series does not offer it as a remedy, and it is not read as one here. It is a fantasy, and in a fantasy the author writes every part, his included, which is why it is the last draft she puts down rather than the answer. Sex does not repair what was done to her, on her terms or on anyone’s, and the series moves past this night exactly as it moved past the other two.

Then the series does what it has been building towards. She stays in. She stops going back to the bar. Months later her book is out, and she stands before a crowded room at a reading, about to begin. In this ending there is no scene in which David is punished, forgiven, confronted or explained. He is simply no longer in it.

This is the ending that needs nothing from him. It does not wait for a verdict, because a verdict may never come. It does not wait for an apology, because an apology would be one more thing he gives. It does not need him to suffer, or to understand, or even to be there. It needs only that she decide what the story is, and write it. Of the four endings in that last episode, it is the only one of which this is true.

A film released the same year makes the contrast clear. Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman gives its heroine a revenge plot and follows it all the way to its end, and its ending divided audiences. I May Destroy You gives revenge one imagined scene and lets it go. Neither choice is right in general. But the series’ choice has a precise meaning. Revenge, like every other ending built around the man, keeps him at the centre of her life.

An earlier essay here, “Secret Sunshine, and the Forgiveness That Was Already Given”, described a kind of consolation that settles a person’s account by routing it through a third party, and hands it back to her closed. Arabella’s case is handed back to her closed by the police. Her story is held open by an audience that could close it at any time. Each imagined confrontation routes her ending through the man. The last episode refuses every route. The account is written by the only person entitled to write it.

It would be easy to turn this ending into an instruction: tell your story, write the book, make something of it. That is not what the series says, and it would be a cruel thing to say. Arabella is a writer, and writing is how she takes her authorship back. For most people who have been harmed, the equivalent is smaller and more private. Deciding who knows, and when, and in what words. Deciding to tell no one. Deciding that a night has a name, even if the name is said only once, and only to oneself.

Authorship, in the sense the series means it, is not publication. It is the standing to decide what the story is, and silence can be an exercise of it, when the silence is chosen. What the series sets itself against is not silence but waiting: a life arranged around someone else’s next move, a recovery put on hold until a man is caught, or sorry, or gone.

Nor is this an argument against reporting, or against wanting him punished. Arabella reported. The series takes her report seriously and shows its failure as a failure, not as a lesson. What it declines is the idea that her life must stay suspended until somebody else acts. Justice may come, or it may not. She does not have to wait for it to begin.

That is where this Library stands, and it is a position, not a finding. Consent is a person’s authorship of what happens to her. It can be taken without force, by a drink, a lie, a removed condom, a door that will not open. When it has been taken, the first thing owed to her is not a verdict but a hearing. And the ending that belongs to her most completely is the one that does not depend on the person who took the rest.

The series reached Japanese viewers in May 2023. Two months later, on 13 July 2023, Japan’s reformed sexual offences came into force, rebuilt around the absence of consent. The new offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse turns on a state in which it is difficult to form, express or carry through the will not to consent, and it lists eight kinds of act or circumstance that can produce that state. Among them are alcohol or drugs, and sleep or other states in which a person is not fully conscious. The ground on which the series sets its plain case is ground the law now names in so many words. This essay applies no law to fictional people. It notes only that the words have arrived.

Kwame’s thread lands here too. Until 2017, the Japanese offence of rape could be committed only against a female victim; that year it was redefined so that the victim’s sex no longer mattered. The Cabinet Office’s own page on sexual crime and sexual violence now says plainly that such harm can happen to anyone, whatever their gender.

Some words have arrived only halfway. Japanese reporting has borrowed the English word for what Zain does. But in July 2024 a lawyer, Shinichi Sakano, set out on a Japanese legal news site why, in his reading, it cannot at present be punished as the new offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse: the person consented to the intercourse itself, and the law’s list of deceptions that count, about whether an act is sexual and about who is doing it, does not include a condom. He offered this as his own view, not as official guidance, and it may not be the last word. But a viewer in Japan who watches Arabella name what was done to her from a festival stage may be watching a name that has not yet reached the law here.

Then the survey figures, which are worth reading slowly. In the Cabinet Office’s 2023 survey on violence between men and women, 8.1 percent of the women who responded said they had experienced non-consensual intercourse. More than half of those women, 55.4 percent, had told no one at all. And only one in ten named a complete stranger. The great majority named someone they knew: a partner or former partner, someone from work, a spouse.

The stranger in the bar is the case everyone pictures, and in this survey it is the exception. The rule looks much more like the world the series builds around its plain case: a fellow writer, a man met on an app, two men on holiday, a classmate. The series’ proportions are closer to the survey’s than to the story most people carry in their heads. And that silence should not be read as a failure of courage. Some of it is chosen, and some of it is forced by what telling costs. The series would ask only whether it is chosen.

For a woman living in Japan in a language that is not her first, there is a further distance. The series is full of friends who are simply there: Kwame beside Arabella at the police station, Terry at her side in every imagined ending. Someone who has moved countries may have none of those people within reach at two in the morning, and the words for what happened may exist only in a language the people around her do not share.

In Japan, #8891 connects free of charge to the nearest one-stop support centre for victims of sexual crime and sexual violence, where anyone, of any gender, can talk without having decided whether to go to the police, and the Cabinet Office’s Cure Time service offers anonymous chat every evening, in Japanese and in English and several other languages.

Four objections, and the first two land.

The first is that this is a writer’s ending, and a fortunate one. Arabella has a publisher to go back to, a platform, a following, friends with time to give her. Most people who are harmed have none of these, and an ending in which the survivor becomes an author can harden into one more demand: recover productively, recover publicly, turn it into something. This is conceded in full. The only reply available is the one already made, that authorship includes silence and needs no audience. But the series’ own picture of it is a crowded reading, and that picture is out of reach for most people and unwanted by many.

The second is that authorship is never solitary. Every account of what happened has other people in it, and telling it takes something from them too. The series knows this: Arabella names Zain from a stage, turns her story into a following, and pushes her friends away. That is the hardest edge of the ending this essay admires. A survivor’s story is hers to write, and it almost always has other people in it.

The third is that the ending is stranger than this essay allows. Three fantasies and a leap of months are not a tidy argument about authorship. They may be a portrait of a mind circling something it cannot resolve, and stopping rather than finishing. A reader who takes the finale as deliberately unresolved, rather than resolved in her favour, is reading something that is there. This essay’s reading is one way through it, not the only one.

The last objection is aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship. A business whose evenings run on stated agreements has an obvious interest in essays that make consent sound like something careful people can get right, and a reader should weigh this one accordingly, because the series is partly a record of how often careful-seeming people get it wrong. And it should be said without qualification: nothing this house sells is a response to what was done to Arabella, or to Kwame, or to anyone, and nothing in this Library should be read as suggesting otherwise.

This essay is cultural analysis. It is not clinical, legal or therapeutic advice, it describes no treatment, and it diagnoses no one. It uses no clinical label for any character. The flashes that return to Arabella are described as the series shows them, not as symptoms of anything, and nothing here is a statement about any reader.

Coel’s words are reported as hers: her 2018 lecture, her account in an interview of how the series came to be made, and her Emmy speech. Nothing is inferred from them about her life, and no scene is read as a record of anything that happened to her.

The Japanese law is described, not applied. The lawyer’s reading of the law on removing a condom without agreement is reported as his own interpretation, which is how he offered it. The survey figures are the government’s, drawn from a sample rather than the whole country, and they are read only for what they show about silence and about whom the women named. The survey’s figures for men are left out, because only ten men in it reported this, which is too few to say anything reliable.

The ending is described from the series’ published record and from criticism of it. The three imagined confrontations are summarised without detail, the assaults the series depicts are named and not described, and no dialogue is quoted. Nothing here implies that anyone who made or appears in the series, or anyone else named in this essay, knows of this house or endorses it.

A few questions, for anyone who wants to keep this series a little longer.

Is there a night, or a moment inside one, that you have never had a word for? Finding the word is not the same as deciding what to do with it, and it is possible to have the first without the second. Is there someone whose account you once decided not to believe, and how much of it did you actually hear? When did you last ask a second question, in a room where assuming the first answer would have been easier? Which of the endings you are waiting for depend on somebody else?

The series does not leave her with a verdict, an apology or a confrontation. It leaves her in front of a room, about to read something she wrote.

If any of this is yours, this essay has no instructions for you, and the series gives none either. It shows one thing, and it is true: the story of what happened to you is yours, including the right to tell it to no one, and it does not have to wait for anybody else before it can begin.