Hypnotist Makes Two Female College Students Believe They’ve Been Groped, Hilarity Most Definitely Does Not Ensue

On-campus entertainment can be really hit or miss unless your college a) has a competitive sports team and you can muster the cognitive dissonance required to enjoy a sport that’s exploiting its student athletes for the enrichment of a nefarious athletic director, or b) sells booze at the campus gift shop. Case in point: not only were freshman at the University of Kent at Medway (in UK) subjected to a hypnotist, but two female audience participants were hypnotized into believing that they were lapdancers who had been groped by someone in the audience.

The hypnotist, Colin Adamson, has employed the “it was a joke, jeez!” defense to minimal success — most students readily admitted that the act had gone too far when it became alarmingly clear that the young women on stage were sharing a moment of full-blown panic. During the act, billed, according to the Telegraph, as a “chance to watch your friends turned into aliens and superheroes,” Adamson told the women that they were both “lapdancers” and, what’s more, that a particular audience member had “touched them up.” When the two women woke up, one was reportedly “so horrified she couldn’t speak,” and the other so pissed that she threatened the audience member who’d been singled out as the groper, saying she’d “castrate him with a spoon.”

One of the participants spoke up about the act, describing herself as “disgusted” with Adamson, a man who “shows a lack of empathy towards all women, and a lack of basic human decency – he has no place at a student union.” A non-participating audience member went so far as to admit that some students were initially laughing, but that, once it became clear that the women onstage were truly upset, Adamson’s act lost some of its magic: “Some people still thought it was a laugh, but to be honest the girls were both in shock – they thought they had been sexually assaulted.”

Adamson has said, in so many words, haters gonna hate, and that, obviously, his act was supposed to be funny, because isn’t just so funny to believe that one of your peers sexually assaulted you? Boy, what a gas! It’s all very Curse of the Jade Scorpion meets The Entity. As a result of this disastrous performance, the university will be looking to ensure that its on-campus entertainment remains sexual-assault free.