After calling the police, she shared her experience with her producers at Retort, the now-defunct production company behind Chewing Gum, who funded her therapy at a private clinic until shooting on Chewing Gum concluded. In the hours to follow, fragmented memories of the night dribbled back to her, and she grasped that she had been assaulted. Hours later, she came to at the production office where she had been writing in a fugue state, she hammered out the remainder of her draft. While pulling an all-nighter on a morning deadline, Coel ducked out to meet a friend at a bar, where a stranger spiked her drink and sexually assaulted her.
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In 2016, Coel’s own journey to hell and back began during the making of Chewing Gum, her award-winning comedy series about an ultra-religious twenty-something hellbent on losing her virginity. Letting go, for her, is allowing herself to go through all of those emotions and all of those stages of grief, accepting that this happened and that she has survived it.” Ultimately no one scenario is really the answer. I wanted to explore the different ways that a person can engage with a very traumatic situation.
In the very beginning, my therapist said, ‘What we need to do now is bring you closure, irrelevant to what happens with the case, because you carry that thing with you.’ This became my objective with Arabella. “When they closed my case, I learned that I would have to find my own closure,” Coel said. How could she find some measure of closure for Arabella when, so often for survivors of sexual assault, closure is a fiction? Her answer came not from legal justice, nor from revenge against her attacker, but from within. Paapa Essiedu Feels a Sense of ResponsibilityĬoel, who herself was raped after a stranger spiked her drink, had firsthand experience of the daunting narrative task before her, yet even so, it was no less impossible to end the series.Every Man Should Be Watching 'I May Destroy You'.The series finale poses a staggering question: if you crossed paths with the stranger who raped you, what would you do? That’s the jaw-dropping thought experiment explored in just thirty-five astounding minutes, which see Arabella move through a thousand and one shades of anger, understanding, and absolution. In I May Destroy You’s twelve breathtaking episodes, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, Coel fictionalizes the harrowing story of her own sexual assault, laying bare the wrenching journey of Arabella, an East London-based writer who must claw her way back to wholeness after she is drugged and assaulted during a night of drinking. Auteur is a loaded title, one freighted with bad faith and bad behavior, but with Coel, there’s no cult of personality: just pure generosity and pure brilliance. The series finale born of this impossibility is one of the boldest visions in television history: astonishing and gut-wrenching, deft and dazzling, a narrative high-wire act from the miraculous mind of a true auteur. How do you end a sprawling story about a trauma with no cure, a crime with no justice, a tragedy without end?
Michaela Coel wrote almost 200 drafts of what would become I May Destroy You, her landmark HBO series about sexual consent, memory, and trauma, but for many of those drafts, the path to an ending proved elusive. Content warning: This article contains discussion of rape and sexual assault.
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