My friend secretly filmed me in the bathroom

Tom* set up a camera to spy on his friends in the bathroom of a student house share. A former friend describes what happened next.

The Spy Pen had sat there for at least a month. It was on a cabinet in the cramped avocado bathroom suite, its lens facing the toilet and shower.

There were six students living in the house – three female, three male. The tiny camera had been there long enough for the mundane to jostle with the intimate on its memory stick.

Somebody in their underwear on tiptoe, pushing a contact lens into position. Somebody getting ready for a night out, looking over their shoulder to check out their bum. And a roll call of housemates, friends and lovers, standing naked in the shower.

It was Tom*, one of the housemates, who had secretly put the camera there, recording these and other scenes in the home of my ex-girlfriend and four of my friends. One of the many questions being asked amid all the sexual harassment allegations now circulating is, “how do you reconcile your love for your friend with the knowledge that they’ve behaved badly?, external”

I never did with Tom, and we haven’t spoken since. And out of the 50 Facebook friends we’d once had in common, just four remain today.

But one of them is a former housemate.

National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) is one of the USA's highest grossing films of all time. It’s often credited with inventing the college comedy: a kind of crude, gleefully lowbrow banter-fest with soft porn thrown in.

In a notorious scene, John Belushi’s character Bluto scales a ladder outside a sorority to watch some girls pillow fight in their underwear. As the women pat each other and giggle, Belushi turns to the camera with a sly grin.

From that moment on, a key motif of the college comedy was voyeurism. Porky’s (1983) featured an entire subplot about college boys spying on cheerleaders in the shower. Revenge of the Nerds, released a year later, had a group of guys set up surveillance cameras in a girl’s house. More than a decade later, American Pie (1999) showed boys hiding a webcam in a bedroom so they could watch a female foreign exchange student masturbating.

I’m mentioning these films because I know Tom liked them, and because I need some way of explaining why he did what he did. Perhaps they helped normalise something very strange: researching, buying and concealing a camera, knowing you'll use it to record hours and hours of footage of your friends – day in, day out – during indisputably private moments.

This was the creepiest part of the scenario for me: the premeditation. Rob*, one of Tom’s housemates at the time, saw it differently when I called him to talk about it again. It was the first time we'd talked about it in years.

“My overarching feeling of the whole thing at the time was that it was sad; it was tragic," he said.

"It made me think he'd had some weird trauma, or long-term simmering social problem that built up some pent-up sexual energy that had to be released somewhere like a volcano.’”

I met Tom in our first year at university. He was placed in halls with Jess*, my girlfriend at the time – so I ended up seeing a lot of him. We’d play video games together or go out to bars. Tom was stocky, but he took pride in his appearance and went through phases of vigorous exercise. He wore polo shirts with baggy jeans and skater shoes. He was middle class but made much of his working class roots. Friends from that period often describe him as ‘laddish’.

“There weren't any warning signs,” says Sally*, another housemate. “He just seemed like an average student.”

Tom spent a lot of time talking about and to women, although he never seemed to hook up with anyone.

“He didn’t have the confidence to get what he wanted,” says Rob. “He wouldn’t have been able to walk up to a girl and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go for a drink?’

"I don’t remember him ever having a girlfriend.”

When I found out I was one of an unknown number of people who may have been caught on camera by Tom, I remember feeling a mix of anger, revulsion and pity.

My most overwhelming sensation was a painful flood of feelings for Jess. Had Tom been recording her? I called her and we exchanged a few texts – but she was clearly as confused as I was.

Rob was much more blasé about the situation. He was rational in crises – almost to the point of callousness, sometimes.

“Personally I wasn’t that fussed about it,” he says. ”It’s just a bit sad, that he’s going to be socially stigmatised as a sex pest - and that’s probably right. But it’s still sad, isn’t it?

"He was an alright bloke up until then.”

Maybe pitying Tom helped Rob feel like less of a victim. But he was feeding into an old trope of sympathy for the male perpetrator at the expense of the victims.

It was never quite clear who Tom was spying on. The girls? The boys? Everyone? Everything – including his inclination for casual homophobia – was suddenly seen in a new light.

Craig* was the third male housemate. He was brushing his teeth in the bathroom when he saw the red light winking at him. The BPR 6 HD Spy Pen was a popular entry-level surveillance device back then. It looked like a regular pen, and could be picked up for around £50. It had one pretty major design flaw, though: a red light that flashed when the battery was running low.

Craig unscrewed the lid to reveal a USB port and an SD card. He took it straight to Rob’s room. Tom was home, too, but they didn't tell him – although in retrospect they couldn’t say why.

“We plugged it in and started watching,” says Rob. Grainy video of the empty bathroom began to play on the laptop. Suddenly, Tom’s face loomed into view. He fixed the camera with a blank stare, reached up to the lens to adjust it slightly, then walked out.

They started contacting the other housemates.

“Craig called me at work and just said, ‘you need to come home’,” recalls Sally. She had known Tom for the shortest period – about nine months – and considered him less of a friend than the other housemates. Amber* had known him a little longer. Jess, my ex-girlfriend, had known Tom for more than three years.

Together they watched the videos on the pen. Tom was upstairs in his room, while they huddled downstairs, talking in hushed voices. They were in a strange period of limbo. Everyone knew what Tom had done, but nobody knew what to do next.

“A couple of people wanted to just tell his family, which I didn’t think was appropriate,” says Sally. “There was some discussion about whether we tell the university.”

It was Sally who first mentioned the police. It was an unpopular suggestion.

“I got told [by another housemate] it was going to ruin his life,” she says. “I felt a bit, you know, am I overreacting by saying that there should be consequences to this?”

The housemates ultimately decided that each of them should decide individually how they wanted to proceed. In the meantime, they agreed to confront Tom as a group.

“He denied all knowledge in the first instance,” says Sally.

But when Tom realised they had the videos, he confessed.

“He told us, ‘The footage isn’t going anywhere. I’ve not used it for anything.’ But we said, ‘No. You need to pack a bag and we’re going to decide what we want to do.”

 The next day, Sally went to the police station. A warrant was issued for Tom’s arrest.

“I just thought, ‘What if it happens to someone else?’ she says.

Tom pleaded guilty and received a two year suspended sentence under the Sexual Offences Act. He was ordered to do community service and sign on to the Sex Offenders register for five years.

"There isn't any doubt in my mind that I did the right thing," says Sally. “[The police] said that if he’d got away with it he could then have progressed to more serious crimes.”

According to the latest statistical bulletin, external (2014-15) 14.9% of adult sex offenders in Britain will reoffend. 

None of us ever saw Tom again. Rob was the only housemate who didn’t remove him from Facebook, however.

“I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately un-friended anyone,” he says. “I think if it was just me and him, and he had filmed me naked, and we were the only two people existing on the planet then and before, I’d be like: dude, that’s grim.’” But he probably wouldn’t have gone to the police, he says.

The housemates' friendship was forever affected by the fallout from what Tom did. Sally hasn’t seen any of them since then. “It soured those relationships,” she says.

Years have passed but my friends still don’t talk about Tom. We don’t even joke about him. We don’t know why he did it. We don’t know who he was spying on. We don’t even know what happened to the footage - did any of it end up online? It was nothing like Animal House, or American Pie.

Every now and then, though, thanks to some quirk in Facebook’s algorithm, a picture of him pops up on my news feed. He’s looking directly into the camera, smiling. 

If you have been affected by issues raised in this article, help and support is available.

*All names have been changed.