Sitting in the House of Commons, waiting for the speaker to call her name last week, the MP Charlotte Nichols was doing breathing exercises to try to keep calm. “I was just trying to get myself into the headspace where I could say what I wanted to say without either completely garbling it or just crying or bottling it at the last minute.”

She didn’t bottle it. She stood up, asked MPs to be gentle with her, and then went public with her biggest secret.

“I care profoundly about rape victims facing intolerable delays for their day in court,” she said in a debate about scrapping jury trials. “I know only too well what that feels like because, after being raped at an event that I attended in my capacity as a member of parliament, I waited 1,088 days to go to court.”

For almost five years, Nichols, 34, the Labour MP for Warrington North, had kept her silence in public about what she says happened to her in a hotel room in 2021 – and the trial three years later – that ultimately ended with a jury unanimously acquitting the man she accused of raping her.

But no longer. After her speech last week, she spoke to the Guardian about an extraordinarily painful episode in her life, and how it shed light on the reality of making a claim of rape and taking it through the courts.

Her story started at an away game for one of Warrington’s football teams. Nichols was there as the local MP and went along to the team hotel afterwards to celebrate.

She ended up going back to the room of one of the players. One thing led to another and they had, they both agree, consensual sex. “Vanilla sex,” Nichols later told police.

That is where their stories diverge. Nichols told police she woke up to find him having sex with her again, biting her back, breasts and thighs. He raped her twice, she said, giving detectives photographs she and her GP had taken in the following days showing an array of bites and bruises. He denied raping her, saying they had consensual sex three times and they bit each other during intercourse.

The court heard that at some point in the early hours, he took naked photos of Nichols while she was asleep and then sent them to a WhatsApp group of his teammates.

He declined to comment when approached for this piece. Giving evidence, he said he regretted sending a picture of Nichols’ naked breasts to the other players and asking “Anyone want a go?” along with a crying with laughter emoji. And he was also sorry that when one of the other players replied “show us her gash”, he obliged with a photograph of Nichols’ genitals.

“What were you doing taking an intimate photo of a sleeping woman who had not given you permission?” his barrister asked. He replied: “I don’t know. I was bragging. I deeply regret taking it. It was stupid. If I could take it back I would. I can’t justify why I did it. It is horrible.” He added: “I was just showing off and being a lad. I don’t know why I did it.”

But in court he maintained that all of the sexual activity that night was consensual. She bit him too, he told the jury, saying that he was left with bite marks on his groin and chest. “She showed no signs of being unhappy,” he said, telling the court they had parted on good terms the following morning – albeit with her put out to discover that he had a girlfriend.

The jury returned unanimous verdicts acquitting him, after deliberating for three hours and 16 minutes. He was cleared of raping Nichols and of disclosing sexual photographs of her with intent to cause distress. The “being a lad” defence worked when it came to the photos. The law has since changed and the prosecution does not now have to prove that perpetrators intended to cause distress when sharing intimate images without consent.

Nichols found out about the pictures three months after the away match, when she told the manager about her experience with his player. “And he was horrified. But then he basically said: ‘Ah, this makes sense now.’ Because he’d seen the photos.” He had learned on the bus back to Warrington that they were being passed around, he told Nichols, assuring her that he had made all of the players delete the photos, one by one. But for Nichols, the damage was done.

“After that conversation, I went home and I contemplated killing myself,” she said. “I was on the phone to Samaritans for hours. I felt like my life was completely over. There’s been times in the intervening years where every time I open my phone and I’ve suddenly got loads of notifications, I have a panic attack thinking: ‘Oh, is this the day that someone’s put them on Twitter.’”

She would walk past men in Warrington and wonder if they had seen the photos: “It was a humiliation on top of a humiliation.”

In September 2021 she reported the alleged rapes and the photos to police. Two months later she was sectioned, and she spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital for treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

It wasn’t until May 2024 that the case reached trial, at St Albans crown court. Nichols gave evidence from behind a screen not just about the night itself but what she did afterwards – most notably giving a Zoom interview to BBC Politics North West while still in the player’s hotel room.

She told the jury she was “on autopilot”. Looking back at it now, Nichols recalls feeling “completely outside my own body”. She said: “I had known the previous evening that I was going to have to do this interview and I couldn’t really see any way of getting out of it without having to articulate what had happened.”

Under cross-examination she was repeatedly asked why she didn’t try to escape. It was a painful question. “There was a lot of work that I’d done in therapy. Because I blamed myself a lot for what had happened, and I’d spent a lot of time unpacking that, only to kind of have that all undone. It’s like having a bruise punched and all the worst things that you think about yourself, they’re going for.”

Everything from her past was dredged up, including one tweet she had posted about the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, directed at the Home Office, which ended: “Fuck you and fuck her.” The player’s barrister used this as an example of Nichols’ “combative” and “resilient” nature. Looking back now, she finds the cross-examination to have been “quite surreal, being a bit like: ‘Oh, well you once told Suella Braverman to fuck off on Twitter, so why couldn’t you fight your rapist off?’”

In court, much was made of a text she sent her best friend the morning after, saying: “I’m a bag of shite, got extremely pissed last night, had to do an interview from the hotel room of [one of the players] lol”.

She said it took her 48 hours to “process what had happened”. She said the text was her “dark sense of humour”. “You know, my mum always gets annoyed with me because whenever I’ve spoken about my time in psychiatric hospital, I’m often like: ‘Oh, when I was in the funny farm, lol,’ and she’s like: ‘One, it’s not the funny farm, and two, there’s nothing “lol” about that.’” Now she sees the text as her trying to “rationalise it in my own mind and move on. To be like, oh well, maybe I can file this as, you know, as a funny thing. But it doesn’t work that way.”

The court heard a voice note Nichols sent to the same friend two days after the incident, which began: “You know when I made the joke about the [player] the other morning, like don’t get me wrong, we did have a really fun night actually where I was fully up for it, I wasn’t like super pissed or anything like that, it was good.”

Nichols told the court this was her referring to the first time the pair had sex, which she consented to.

The message went on to talk about how she was beginning to notice injuries. “I’m not into being bitten and stuff, like, I wouldn’t have gone along with that,” she said in the message, before telling her friend it would “never, ever, ever in a million years be something that the police would take you seriously about”.

Nichols was back at work, attending the infected blood inquiry with some constituents, when she got a call saying the verdicts were in. “I completely fell apart,” she said. “I was signed off work for two months to give me a bit of space to come to terms with it … And then the next day Rishi Sunak stood outside No 10 in the rain and said that we were going to have the general election in six weeks’ time.”

She contemplated not standing but decided to push on through, ultimately being re-elected with a 9,190 majority. Photos taken during the campaign show her looking very thin. “There’s a photo of me having my nomination paperwork in, standing outside Warrington town hall, and you can see my hip bones through my dress.”

On 4 November 2024, Nichols received £11,000 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA). The CICA pays compensation to people physically or mentally injured because of a violent crime, when a claims officer is satisfied that a violent crime has been committed. It is not a court but an authority that works in parallel with the courts, and can award compensation even after an acquittal or if no one has been charged with the alleged crime.

To Nichols, the award is proof she was a victim. “It’s vindication for me,” she said. She sees the CICA compensation as a recognition from the state that “we believe you. And despite everything, it’s the first thing I’d save from my house burning down.”

Nichols waived her right to anonymity as a complainant of sexual offences to speak up in parliament, to oppose plans to cut jury trials in England and Wales for offences carrying likely sentences of less than three years. The UK government says the plans would clear the colossal backlog in the crown court.

But Nichols disagrees. “I don’t buy it at all and actually there’s modelling both from the Institute for Government and the Criminal Bar Association who both say that at best you would be looking at perhaps a 1-2% reduction in wait times.”

She would like to see the introduction of the specialist rape courts promised in the Labour manifesto, and a “trauma-informed” criminal justice system “where juries would be educated on … rape myths and stereotypes to help guide them in their decision making”.

Nichols says she feels that “a weight has been lifted” since giving her speech. “I worried that waiving my anonymity would just be giving free rein to every stranger on the internet to call me a lying slag or what have you … But I feel better for having done it. And actually I’ve been really bowled over. I can’t keep on top of my WhatsApp with how many supportive messages are coming in, emails and things. I feel I’ve done the right thing.”