A customer at Good Times at Davey Wayne’s in Los Angeles shared his story about getting roofied after drinking an espresso martini. His video went viral as he hopes to spread the word about drinking safety.
Ujjwal (@its.ujj) on TikTok has reached over 508,000 views and 64,000 likes on his video by Tuesday morning.
Ujjwal starts his video saying that he was roofied while at a work event in L.A.
He says he is hesitant to tell his story because it was a somewhat-traumatic experience for him, but he figured it was the most responsible thing to do.
“If it can prevent it from happening to even one other person then fine, the embarrassment is worth it,” he says.
Giving context, Ujjwal says he had worked on an album that was having a release party at the popular Hollywood bar, Good Times at Davey Wayne’s.
Next he explains that since he worked on the project, himself and the rest of the crew received wristbands that gave them free drinks for the entire night.
Ujjwall says that as people started to rush into the party, he and another friend realized they were starting to feel tired. He calls his friend Stella in the video for anonymity reasons.
“Instead of leaving and being lame, we decided to go to the bar and get espresso martinis to wake up,” he adds. After getting their drinks, he says they returned back to a section of the bar with the rest of their friends.
He says Stella went off with a couple of her friends, and this is when the whole group started to fragment. “Stella’s been gone for like 30 minutes, I’ve been at the section the whole time,” he explains, “our drinks are like thoroughly mixed up at this point.”
Ujjwall says he didn’t know whose drink it was, but he had been standing by them the entire time. He realizes that neither he nor Stella paid for the drinks, so decided to just finish both of them.
At this point, Ujjwal says Stella had been taken home by some friends because she was found “foaming at the mouth,” and was unconscious. “Her friends took her home, watched her all night, and made sure she was OK,” he adds. He says Stella ended up being alright, but it was a very scary situation.
@its.ujj suffice to say my worldview was altered significantly that night. #storytime #goodtimesatdaveywaynes ♬ original sound – Ujjwal
Ujjwal didn’t know at the time that Stella had left early, he only found out the next morning.
So, after downing the two espresso martinis, Ujjwal says he makes it through four songs once the album was released at the party, but can’t remember anything after that.
The next thing he remembers is waking up in his bed the next day around 1:00pm. “I have absolutely no recollection of how I got there, when I left, what has transpired in between,” he says. “I’m very, very anxious suddenly.”
He says he shoots up in his bed, and realizes that he doesn’t feel hungover. “I blacked out, but I feel completely fine,” he adds. Then he looks around his room, and sees that he had thrown up over his mirror, shelves, and carpet. “It’s a mess in there,” he adds.
Ujjwal says he began to freak out at this point, and starts to call all of his friends. This is when he found out about what happened to Stella as well.
According to Ujjwal, his friends said, “We think that somebody put something in her drink, why else would she have responded this way?”
To which he responds saying it must have been the espresso martinis because he had some of the same drink, and blacked out around 30 minutes to an hour later.
“So now, what do I do with this information?” Ujjwal says in the video. “First of all, I’m never going to Good Times and Davey Wayne’s again, I mean why would I?” he says.
Ujjwal adds that he isn’t sure if it was the bartenders or the bar themselves, or just another patron at the bar, but he still won’t be going back.
“I don’t know who could’ve done it cause I was around that drink the whole time that it existed, and I never noticed anything,” he says.
After this, Ujjwal explains that “every single woman listening to this right now already knows this, but this is for men.”
“Do not drink a drink if you haven’t seen it poured, if it hasn’t been in your hand, if you don’t know every single thing that’s in it, don’t drink it.” he adds.
He says what could’ve happened to him and Stella in that situation could’ve been much worse, had he not been there with friends who made sure he got home safely.
“None of my friends even knew that I was inebriated like that by that way,” he adds. His friends told him he kept repeating “I’m so drunk,” the whole night, and they had been annoyed by it because they thought he was “just being drunk,” Ujjwal says he thinks he was trying to figure out what was going on, and it was “a cry for help most likely.”
Ujjwal captioned his video, “suffice to say my worldview was altered significantly that night.”
After posting his original video, Ujjwal posted a second video addressing some of the comments viewers left.
@its.ujj (part 2) in response to many of the comments ive gotten since I posted my story about me and my friend getting roofed while at #goodtimesatdaveywaynes #storytime ♬ original sound – Ujjwal
First he says, “I’m really sad reading all the comments because there’s well over 1,000 of them at this point, and almost half of them are stories about other women having the same experience.”
“I knew this was a thing,” he adds, “and I am acutely aware of it after having it happen to me, but I did not think that it would be so widespread.”
He says he got a lot of comments saying his friends shouldn’t have been annoyed with the way he was acting that night. “I want to defend them real quick,” Ujjwal says. He says these are his closest friends in the world and they have seen him drunk various amounts of times. “If they could not tell that something was off, it obviously was not readily apparent to them, and having not known what was going on they did the right thing,” he adds.
Next, he says he got a lot of comments telling him to check the cameras at the bar as well as reporting the bar. “We did that the next day,” he says, “We asked them to look into the cameras and I never heard back from the bar.” Ujjwal was speaking to the bar through the event organizer, not the bar directly.
“They never got back to me,” he adds, “and I can’t assume anything because to be honest it was very very dark in there, and there were a ton of people in there.” He says it would be a miracle if something was found on the cameras.
The Daily Dot reached out to Ujjwal via TikTok direct message. Ujjwal says, “This sort of subject matter isn’t very TikTok friendly/algorithm friendly and I was pretty surprised to see that this got a lot of views.”
He also adds that he’s “not saying this is the only reason, but I do think people tend to listen more when this sort of thing happens to a guy as opposed to a woman.” He says it “really shocked me to see how many of the 1000+ comments on my video are from women recounting their own experience being roofied.”
Ujjwal says that he got a private message from one person in particular who mentioned getting roofied at the same bar. “She was found unconscious on the bathroom floor and woke up in the hospital the next day covered in bruises,” he says.
The Daily Dot reached out to Good Times and Davey Wayne’s via email.
