"I Am Not A Rapist": A Documentary Everyone Should Watch, And Sit With

I watched I Am Not A Rapist today after it was recommended to me by someone on X. It's a documentary on Netflix UK, directed by Huw Crowley, about 45 minutes long, telling the stories of three young men who were falsely accused of rape.

I am not a Rapist - Netflix UK

Two of them tell their own stories on camera. The third, Jay Cheshire, isn't there to tell his. He was 17 when he was falsely accused, and he took his own life weeks after the allegation against him was withdrawn. His story is told by his sister, who has spoken publicly, with extraordinary courage, about losing her brother, and then, a year later, losing her mother too, who couldn't survive the grief of losing her son.

I went in already knowing this pain. I've lived it myself, the fear, the disbelief, a cell. I've spent years since then talking to other men going through exactly the same thing, building a platform, raising awareness, trying to make sure fewer men go through it as alone as I did.

But knowing something, even living it, isn't the same as watching it laid bare on screen, in someone else's words, someone else's face. Watching Jay's sister talk about her brother, and then her mother, that's not something I could brace for, even with everything I've heard from other men over the years. This documentary captures the brutal, full weight of what this actually costs, not just the men it happens to, but everyone who loves them, in a way that stopped me cold even though I thought I already understood it.

By the end, I wasn't thinking about statistics anymore. I was thinking about three specific young men, two of them sitting in front of a camera finally getting to say what happened to them, and one who never got the chance to.

What struck me most, though, wasn't just the pain in this documentary. It was how the men in it talked about rape itself.

These are men who had rape used as a weapon against them, who lost years of their lives, in Jay's case, everything, to an accusation that was never true. And none of them used that experience to diminish what rape actually is. If anything, the opposite. They talk about it as what it is: one of the most horrific crimes a person can commit against another human being. They don't flinch from that. They don't try to soften it to make their own suffering feel more justified by comparison. They hold both things at once, this happened to me, and it wasn't real, and rape itself is still one of the worst things one person can do to another, and the people who commit it are exactly as contemptible as everyone already knows they are.

That's not a small thing to hold onto while your own life is being taken apart by an accusation you can't disprove fast enough. It would be easy, natural even, for a wrongly accused man to become bitter about the entire framework, to start resenting the idea of taking rape seriously at all, because that same seriousness is what nearly destroyed him. These men don't do that. They come out the other side still saying, unambiguously, rape is real, it's devastating, and it deserves to be treated with total seriousness. What they're asking for isn't less seriousness. It's the same seriousness applied properly, to guilt and innocence both, rather than assumed before the evidence is even looked at.

That's the balance I think this documentary gets right, and it's the balance I want to be just as careful to hold here.

Rape is one of the most serious crimes there is. Full stop, no caveat. It leaves people carrying trauma for the rest of their lives, sometimes decades, sometimes forever. Survivors are too often disbelieved, too often let down by an investigation process that moves too slowly, gathers too little, and treats the burden of proof as something the survivor herself has to overcome, alone, against a system that was supposed to be doing that work for her. That failure is real, it's documented, and it's part of what this documentary shows too, evidence sitting unexamined, victims not properly supported, cases falling apart not because nothing happened, but because nobody did the work properly to prove that it did.

Being falsely accused of rape is its own, distinct kind of trauma, and it deserves to be named as exactly that, not minimised, not treated as a lesser cousin of the real thing. To be accused of the worst thing a person can be accused of, and to know it isn't true, and to watch people you love start to look at you differently anyway, that's not a bruise that fades. It's a wound that can outlast the legal process entirely, long after any charge is dropped or any trial collapses. The men in this documentary make that unmistakably clear. Reputations don't get restored just because a case falls apart. Relationships don't reset back to where they were. The suspicion, once it's out there, doesn't fully leave, even when the truth eventually does come out. And for Jay, there was no "afterward" at all.

And here's the part I think matters most, the part I don't want to lose in trying to say all of this carefully: these two truths were never actually in competition with each other. They only look like they're pulling in opposite directions if you assume the system only has enough attention, enough rigour, enough care to give to one side or the other. It doesn't have to work that way. A system that properly investigates, that gathers evidence thoroughly, that doesn't assume guilt or innocence before the facts are actually established, protects real victims and protects the falsely accused, at exactly the same time, using exactly the same discipline. The failure isn't that we care too much about one group. The failure is a system that isn't rigorous enough to get it right for anyone, and both groups pay for that same shortfall, just in different ways.

This documentary shows a third thing too, one that I think deserves to sit alongside the other two just as seriously: people who made false allegations and were never held accountable for it. No charge. No consequence. Just moved on, while the men they accused were left holding the wreckage of a life the accusation had already taken from them, or in Jay's case, a life that never got the chance to be rebuilt at all. This isn't a rare, freak, one-in-a-million occurrence you'll only ever see in a documentary. This could be your son. Your brother. Your husband. Someone you love, and no one around him quite believing him fully until, if ever, the truth eventually surfaces, sometimes years too late to give him back what he lost.

I don't think this documentary is asking anyone to choose a side. I think it's asking for exactly what the men in it are asking for themselves: take rape as seriously as it deserves, and take false accusation just as seriously too, because a system that only does one properly is failing everyone who ever has to walk through its doors.

Watch it. Let it sit with you the way it sat with me. Then talk to someone about it afterward, because I don't think this is a film you're meant to watch once and simply move on from.