This article is part of Had I Known, Zikoko’s theme for September 2025, where we explore Nigerian stories of regret and the lessons learnt. Read more Had I Known stories here.
Trigger Warning: This article contains sensitive topics, including assault and blackmail, which some readers may find distressing. Reader discretion is advised.
When Mary (26)* moved to Abuja in early 2024, reconnecting with an old classmate felt like a stroke of luck. But what started as a nostalgic reconnection quickly spiralled into a nightmare that left her questioning everything she knew about trust.
This is Mary’s Story As Told To Mofiyinfoluwa
It was the last Friday in June 2024. I had just gotten back from work and went straight to the kitchen to put away what was left of my lunch. My AirPods were still in, music humming faintly, when Siri’s voice cut through: “WhatsApp sent a video from an unknown number.”
My heart lurched. I’d been flinching at every notification for days, half-expecting another text. I rushed to my phone, hands trembling, and opened the message. I was right. It was another view-once video. The caption read: “You think you’re smart? Your money is now ₦500,000.”
What made my knees buckle wasn’t just the threat. It was the footage itself. I was fully naked on the same bed I’d woken up on after the party last week.
I burst into tears. All week, I’d been convincing myself nothing happened. Maybe I’d really just drunk too much. Maybe the soreness in my body was from throwing up and passing out. But here was proof that something had happened to me.
I called Patricia*, my best friend, my voice breaking as I told her about the new message. She didn’t hesitate. “Go to the police,” she said firmly.
As I ended the call, a cruel thought crept in. I brought this on myself.
***
In March 2024, I moved to Abuja for work. It was my first time in the city, my first time living alone. The silence of my flat was deafening. After work, I’d sit on my bed, scrolling social media to fill the emptiness.
One evening, I watched a TikTok of a girl who’d met up with her old classmates, and it hit me how long it had been since I’d seen anyone from my past. On impulse, I dropped a message in my old class group chats, telling people I was in Abuja and open to reconnecting. A few DMs trickled in, but Shola’s* stuck.
At first, I didn’t recognise the name. Then he reminded me, we’d been seatmates in JSS2. He sent a picture, and the memory clicked. The same narrow face, now framed by a beard. His shoulders had filled out. I almost laughed, remembering the skinny boy who used to slip me his egg sauce at Sunday lunch because he hated it. It was like opening a time capsule. I hadn’t thought of him in years, not since 2011, when I changed schools after JSS3.
Shola became my guide to Abuja. He told me where to buy foodstuff, which markets were cheaper, and where to get small household items. He’d lived in the city most of his life and knew all the shortcuts.
We first met in person in May, when I needed to buy furniture. He took me to the market, helped me bargain, and made sure the pieces got to my flat.
Subsequently, he’d often stop by my office, and we’d reminisce about secondary school, laughing at silly memories and trying to recall old classmates. I felt a mix of trust and ease with him. Almost like a brother I could lean on.
He insisted I needed to meet more people. He wasn’t wrong. I needed to build a circle, not just bury myself in work. Three months into our friendship, in June, he told me some of his friends were hosting a house party on a Friday. He wanted me to come along.
I hesitated.
I hadn’t been to one since university, and this felt like unfamiliar territory. But he reassured me.
It wouldn’t be wild.
It was just a small private gathering.
He wanted to introduce me to some of his friends.
He even mentioned there’d be other women, not just guys. It would be a good way to widen my circle.
The more he spoke, the less threatening the party sounded. Eventually, I agreed to be his plus one.
That Friday, while getting dressed, my mum called. She asked if I had any plans for the night. For some reason, I lied. I told her I was about to go to bed, even though my makeup bag was open beside me.
She pressed a little, her voice carrying the edge mothers get when something feels off. Then she sighed, prayed for me, and told me to sleep well. The thought of staying back briefly crossed my mind, but I shrugged it off.
Shola had already sent a ride.
***
I arrived at the serviced apartment around 9 p.m. From the start, Shola acted like my personal guide. He introduced me to his friends and made sure I was comfortable. But I was careful with the drinks that were being passed around. I only accepted the ones he mixed himself. Sometimes, he mixed his alongside mine, handed me a cup, and I drank without thinking too much about it.
After a while, he introduced me to Mike*, a friend he had said thought I was pretty. Mike sat beside us to chat. By then, I felt lightheaded. My body felt heavy and weak at the same time.
The group started a game of truth or dare, but I didn’t feel up to it. I slipped out to the balcony to catch some air.
Mike found me there. He kept talking, his words washing over me, but I wasn’t processing much. My legs felt like jelly, the whole place spinning. The last clear thing I remember is trying to move. Then everything went black.
***
The next morning, I woke up in one of the rooms. For a moment, I couldn’t place where I was. My skull felt like it’d split into two. But what scared me most was the sharp, throbbing pain around my legs.
I looked down. The shirt I wore wasn’t mine. My knickers were intact, but the belt I’d fastened the night before was gone. I wasn’t a lightweight. It didn’t make sense that I had passed out over a couple of drinks.
I stumbled into the corridor and ran into Shola. He asked how I was feeling. I told him I didn’t understand why I was wearing someone else’s shirt. He brushed it off, saying I’d just had too much to drink, telling me how I threw up on my shirt, then he and Mike had carried me into a room to sleep it off. He’d been with me through the night. Part of his story matched my hazy memory of vomiting in the sink, so I let it go.
When I tried to leave, I realised my bag, my phone, ATM cards, and cash were gone. Shola helped me look, but they were nowhere to be found. He kept apologising and promising to keep searching after I left. He booked me a ride, and I went home.
On the ride, I leaned my head against the seat, trying to piece the night together. All I saw was darkness. At one point, I had a flash of Mike’s face above me, like he was on top of me. But I couldn’t be sure if it was real or my imagination.
***
When I got home, I pulled out my old iPhone, slotted in a SIM I had once used for a business line, and set it up. I blocked my stolen cards and bank apps. I retrieved some contacts from Google and messaged some contacts, explaining I would use the line until I retrieved my stolen one.
I also reached out to Shola. I sent him a voice note, thanking him for looking after me that night.
Then the words spilled out before I could stop them: “Are you sure nothing else happened? Are you sure no one came back into the room?”
He dismissed it immediately. He said Mike was a good guy, and his friends were respectable people who were only protecting me. I felt bad for even asking, and didn’t want to sound like I was accusing them.
I got someone to help me track my phone, but there was only a slim chance since my iCloud had already been logged out. The whole weekend, nothing came up. By Monday, I was ready to cut my losses.
I was about to leave for work when I glanced through my messages. A text from an unknown number caught my eye. Two video files attached.
The moment I opened them, my body went cold. They were private videos of me. I knew instantly they were from my stolen phone. I’d never shared them with anyone. My hands shook so badly I had to grip the edge of my bed. I didn’t even know what to do.
I called Patricia*, my best friend, first. I shook as I repeated the four words: “Someone is blackmailing me.” I could barely give her the details. She tried to calm me down, told me to breathe, then advised me to block the number, delete the messages, and not give the blackmailer the satisfaction of a reply.
I did as she said, but I couldn’t concentrate at work. My mind spun in circles: How did this person even get my new number? Shola’s name floated into my thoughts, but I dismissed it. I told myself it might be some hacker, anything other than the possibility clawing at me.
When I told him about the blackmail, he was sympathetic and promised to look into it. He sounded concerned, and I chose to believe him. By midweek, when no new messages came in, I forced myself to let it go.
But on Friday, when the new message arrived, the doubt in my mind hardened into anger. I couldn’t deny the facts. How could this video exist if Shola had been with me all night? He had to be in on it.
***
As I stood in the police station, explaining everything, a part of me wondered if I’d made the right decision. What did I really have? A missing phone, blackmail texts from two unknown numbers, and the gnawing feeling that something had been done to me against my will.
The police asked me to write a statement. I listed the numbers, and they said they would try to track them.
Then came the big question: “Do you have any suspects?”
I told them about Mike and Shola, about the party, and how I woke up in a strange shirt with pain I couldn’t explain. They nodded, listening carefully, before asking for their addresses. That was when it hit me.
I didn’t know.
I had considered Shola my tight friend, but I didn’t know where he lived. I didn’t know who his friends really were. I didn’t even know where he worked beyond a vague “I work remotely at a tech company” he’d once mentioned. For Mike, I had absolutely nothing.
The officers said they could at least work with the party’s location. But I didn’t even have that. Shola had booked my ride both ways. I wasn’t familiar with the area, and all I could tell them was that it happened in an estate in Wuse.
Standing there, I felt exposed and foolish. It was humiliating to realise just how blindly I had trusted him.
In the end, the officers told me my only option was to play along. If I suspect Shola, I should keep chatting with him, act normally, and if possible, arrange a meet-up. They said if I could get him to slip up, they’d step in and question him. It didn’t sound like much of a plan, but it was all I had. I left the station holding on to that hope.
For the next few weeks, I stalled the blackmailer, replying here and there, pretending I was trying to come up with the money. He sent me a crypto wallet to make the transfer, but even that was a dead end. There were no useful clues I could turn in — just more threats.
At the same time, I consistently texted Shola, studying his words closely, but he said nothing meaningful. He claimed he was investigating his friends, but his explanations were always vague, almost rehearsed. And unlike before, he started avoiding me. Whenever I asked to meet up, he had excuses. He was either out of town or too busy.
The more I watched him, the more the picture sharpened in my mind. Everything pointed back to him.
By the third week, I’d had enough. The messages from the blackmailer kept piling up, Shola’s explanations were rubbish, and I realised I was chasing shadows. I was tired of the games. So I confronted him directly.
I called and told him straight: I knew he had a hand in the blackmail, and wanted to know why he was doing this. I told him I’d reported him to the police, and if he came clean, I’d drop the case.
He denied everything. But I pressed harder, laying out the facts one by one. He was the only one from the party with my new number, so how else could the blackmailer have gotten it? He claimed he’d been with me the whole night, so how did someone take naked pictures of me? Was he there, or was he lying to me?
He fumbled, offering excuses that didn’t add up. I could hear the hesitation in his tone. It was all nonsense, and I told him so. I screamed at him that I didn’t even care about the phone anymore, I just needed the blackmail to stop.
But instead of answering my questions, he called me a “crazy bitch.” And then he blocked me.
That was the last time I ever heard from him.
Strangely, the blackmailer messaged me once more after our altercation, then they stopped. To me, that was all the confirmation I needed.
I kept pushing the police to trace the number or at least recover my phone, but weeks turned into months with no progress. Each time I followed up, they showed less interest in my case. At one point, an officer even suggested I “leave it to God” since the blackmailer had gone quiet. I’d paid them money, yet they acted like I was disturbing them.
Eventually, after nearly two months of waiting for answers that never came, I decided to drop the case. Deep down, I already had my answer. Shola had to be the culprit.
The hardest part is that I’ll never fully know the extent of what was done to me that night. The uncertainty eats at me to this day. I don’t know if I’ll ever move past that or forgive the friend who betrayed me in the worst way possible.
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