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The RuPaul’s Drag Race star shared about the incident involving a man who groped and assaulted her at a club.
A version of this article first appeared on Out.
Kandy Muse, best known for being a finalist on RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 and All Stars 8, shared disturbing X posts about an incident that happened overnight between Friday, Feb. 9 and Saturday, Feb. 10 at a gay club.
“Wasn’t going to post about this but might as well tell you babies to stay safe out there,” Muse wrote in an X post that included video footage of her scratched-up, bloody arm. “Last night, at the club, I was assaulted by a man that was groping me and clinging onto the back of my pants and wouldn’t let go of me even [though] I told him to let go of me and NO multiple times. He then [got] upset I wanted nothing to do with him and proceeded to attack me. I’m okay, was a bit shaken up last night, but people need to understand NO IS NO!”
Muse wrote in a subsequent X post: “Thank you all for your kind words. I’m okay [though], about to board the Queens Gone Wild cruise to the Caribbean with Jimbo, Heidi [N Closet], and Jessica [Wild] for the next week and spend time with the fans! I love you all, take care of each other!”
Out reached out to Muse asking for further details about the incident, and the Drag Race star responded while boarding the ship.
“Full transparency, I would like not to get the name of the bar,” she told Out. “It’s a club that I work at a lot, and security handled the situation very, very well. But I’m definitely open to saying what happened.”
Upon agreeing not to divulge information about the venue, Muse shared what happened:
“It was very late in the night. I wanna say it was anywhere near, like, 3 in the morning. I was just dancing with this guy that I had met. He was much bigger than me. I had no idea who he was; I had never seen this guy [before]. He was very clearly intoxicated, either on drugs or on alcohol. I don’t know what it was, but he came up from behind me and was groping me.”
“Then he was holding on to the back of my pants,” she continued. “And what I mean by holding on to the back of my pants, I mean like: b*tch, gripping for dear life. I was like, ‘Alright, sir.’ I was trying to be nice, like, ‘Okay, sir, get off of me.’ [But] he would just not get off of me. After a while, he started getting really aggressive and I was like, ‘Alright, please get off of me.’”
As Muse repeatedly asked the man to go away, it appears that he started getting angry at the situation. The Drag Race star said:
“I finally shoved his hand off of my pants, and I guess he got like upset that I was denying him, and that I had shoved his hand. So he physically grabbed both of my arms and squeezed his f*cking nails into my arms. So, like, scratched me. He was [also] trying to hit me. Luckily, by that point, someone had already called security because they thought that things were getting escalated.”
She added, “And then people came up to me at the club [afterwards] and were like, ‘Oh my god, that guy was on my friend earlier, he wouldn’t leave us alone.’ He was just like a f*cking mess, honestly. I was a little shaken up because, obviously, you never expect something like that to happen. I’m fine now besides the battle scars cards that I got, that he left on my arm. But it’s just so crazy to me that you can be out having a good time at the club and then all of a sudden someone just finds the liberty to try to touch you because they want to. And it’s like… ‘No!’ I believe in consent, b*tch.
“I’m a five foot eleven, 250-pound man. I’m not a small child, you know? So if it can happen to me, it could literally happen to anyone. And it’s so crazy because I was literally minding my own business. And for a second, I was like, ‘Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m being delusional. Maybe I’m being dramatic.’ But no. This is why people sometimes are afraid to speak up when things happen to them. You just never think something like that [could] happen to you.”
Muse continued: “It doesn’t matter how flirtatious and friendly I am. It doesn’t matter how sl*tty I’m dressed at the club. It doesn’t give anyone the green light to touch me. My advice to people is to always stick with your friends at the club and never be afraid to call security on someone. It still [feels] so crazy to me that something like that could happen. It’s wild to even think about it.”
When asked if Muse had met this man before, and whether anyone at the club was hanging out with him as a friend or was able to identify him, she responded: “Honestly, no. He was just like some random guy at the bar. And once they kicked him out, he just disappeared. I hope this doesn’t happen again. And I hope that one of these days, you know, he gets the police called to him. I was just so shaken up yesterday that I wasn’t even thinking about what I should do to him. Like, ‘Should I call the police or anything?’ I was just focused on [trying to stay] centered with myself.”
The Drag Race star then shared what she learned as a result of this incident.
“I think the moral of the story is just to always be careful. You can never be too safe. Cover your drinks at the club. Even in our safe spaces, sometimes they aren’t the safest, you know? And if it can literally happen to someone like me… I mean, everyone knows who Kandy is. I know that sounds so crazy to say, but like, people don't care who you are. If it can literally happen to me, it can happen to anyone. And the f*cked-up part about it is that there are people [who] think they can get away with doing sh*t like that.”
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