On a summer evening in 2007, 19-year-old student Carrie Symonds was waiting for a night bus after going out with friends on the King’s Road in Chelsea. A black cab pulled up, and its driver offered to take her home to East Sheen; he lived round there too, he claimed, and would accept just £5 for the fare.

Once she was in the car, the driver told her that he’d just won big at the casino and invited her to raise a glass of champagne to celebrate. When he wasn’t looking, she poured it onto the floor, fearing it might be spiked. Later, he persuaded her to drink a shot of vodka; feeling indebted for the cheap cab ride, she agreed.

From that point on, she couldn’t remember much, but according to her mum, she could barely walk when she arrived home. Months later, she would read about the case of John Worboys, the “black cab rapist” accused of drugging female passengers with spiked champagne then attacking them.

“I will never truly know for sure what happened after he drugged me,” Symonds, who is now known as Carrie Johnson, the wife of former prime minister Boris, wrote of her ordeal in 2018, having waived her anonymity as a victim. It’s a sentence that will send a chill down any woman’s spine.

Carrie’s story – and the eerily similar experiences of more than 100 women who Worboys is believed to have targeted – is yet another horrifying reminder that for women, the simple act of trying to get home at night remains fraught with danger. “I had always been told that minicabs were dangerous but black cabs were safe,” Johnson later recalled. “I’m sure that’s the only reason Worboys ever became a cabbie.”

About 10 years after the incident, with Johnson now a high-flier in the Conservative Party’s press team, she would go on to play a crucial role in the successful campaign to overturn the Parole Board’s decision to release Worboys from jail, as the initial verdict sparked major outcry from the public.

“I think her story is: watch out what you do to the girl, because the woman will come back and haunt you,” says Jeff Pope, the Bafta-winning screenwriter whose new ITV show Believe Me tells the story of how Worboys’s victims struggled to be taken seriously by the police. “A number of years later, she’s a powerful woman who knows exactly how to marshal the forces needed to keep him in prison.”

Pope’s drama is deeply frustrating but necessary viewing. He did not want to turn this story into “some kind of dark thriller about whether the police will catch [Worboys]”, who is played on screen by Daniel Mays. Instead, he focused on how the victims were failed at almost every turn by the systems that were supposed to protect them.

As well as telling Carrie’s story, with Industry’s Miriam Petche playing her, it also focuses on two victims, Sarah (played by Slow Horses star Aimée-Ffion Edwards) and Laila (Aasiya Shah). The victims’ names – and elements of their stories – have been changed to protect their identities, but the judgement and dismissal that these characters receive from the police are based on real testimonies and Pope’s extensive discussions with the women themselves. “I spent many months writing it in a state of almost perpetual anger,” he says.

It was when the campaign to prevent Worboys’s early release kicked off in 2018 that Pope first began to believe that the story could work as a drama. He spoke to Symonds back then – “this was pre-Boris, that’s how long ago it was”. And when he picked up the project years later, he visited her at the Johnsons’ home in Oxfordshire. “She gave me as much time as she could, and we’ve had lots of sessions thereafter,” Pope says. “She’s been incredibly supportive.”

When the first look at the series was released earlier this year, Johnson said that she hopes it will serve as “a wake-up call to the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the parole board”, noting that “far too often, women and girls are failed by the very institutions meant to protect them”. The way Worboys’s victims were treated, she added, “was truly shameful”.The Independent has contacted Johnson for further comment.

The first reports of attacks and odd behaviour later linked to Worboys were made as early as 2002. As time went on, the stories piled up, each following a similar pattern. A woman would be picked up by Worboys in his taxi; he would claim to have just won some money at the casino or on the lottery, and invite his passenger to have a drink to celebrate. The drink, though, would be laced with the insomnia medication temazepam,to try to incapacitate the victim.

It took years for the police to notice a pattern. Worboys was initially arrested in 2007, but was released without being charged; the victim later told The Guardian that she was “not believed” and had been “talked down to” by police officers, “as if it was my fault, as if I was the criminal, and I just felt they didn’t take me seriously”.

Far too often, women and girls are failed by the very institutions meant to protect them

Carrie Johnson

The following year, he was charged, and 85 women came forward to share their experiences with the police. Johnson was among them, and she later became one of 14 victims selected to give evidence at the trial. “I was representing a lot of girls who were not going to stand in court,” she later told the BBC. “I felt happy with how it went in court. I broke down afterwards.”

At the age of just 20, Johnson was also asked to become one of a handful of women impacted who would speak to the press about the case. “I think she had quite a moral imperative,” Pope suggests. “She’s a very moral person. And so when she was asked, ‘would you stand up, put yourself out there and be a face to encourage and inspire more women to come forward?’ she said yes.”

She made it “very clear”, Pope says, that “she thought, ‘well, if I don’t do it, who will do it?’” But, he adds, “there’s no question” that doing so “did put her out there as ‘that’ girl’, connected with that story”. She was inexperienced as to how the media works, and that the quotes she gave to one paper might then be picked up in another magazine. “She didn’t realise that could happen, that’s how naive she was – then she became head of communications for the Conservative Party”.

Worboys pleaded not guilty to all 23 charges brought against him, and his defence argued that he was simply an “oddball” and a “socially inadequate individual”; his interaction with his passengers was played down as “banter”. It was an argument that Johnson vehemently disagreed with. “I hate that it’s been played down… that he is just a weirdo,” she told the BBC. “He is more than a weirdo; he is very, very dangerous.”

On 13 March 2009, he was eventually convicted of one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 charges of drugging, receiving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection with the minimum term set at eight years. The following year, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said that lives had been ruined because the police had not taken the case seriously, and the Met admitted that its officers had let victims down.

After the trial, Worboys’s victims received written assurances that his indeterminate sentence would “to all intents and purposes” amount to “a sentence of life imprisonment”. But in January 2018, it was revealed that the Parole Board had decided to release him from jail subject to “stringent” licence conditions, following a hearing. Some of his victims learnt of this update from reports in the news, a truly shocking oversight that Pope dramatises in Believe Me.

Two victims challenged the decision, and the High Court eventually overturned the board’s ruling. In September of that year, Johnson allowed The Sunday Times to reprint an anonymous account of her experience with Worboys that had previously been published in January, this time using her name. In it, she spoke of her fear at the prospect of the attacker being freed. “I am genuinely terrified that he is going to come after me,” she wrote. “He knows where so many of his victims live. Why should we think he won’t?”

Reports suggested that Johnson, by this point the youngest ever director of communications for the Conservative Party, had used her influence with ministers to lobby for a U-turn on the decision. Michael Gove, then the environment secretary as well as a friend and ally of hers, was among those to urge the then justice secretary David Gauke to “do the right thing” regarding the Worboys case.

Her actions provoked criticism within the party, which seemingly contributed to her decision to step down from her position later that year. “The way she was treated by Tory party bosses over her role in keeping Britain’s most prolific sex attacker behind bars was one reason she was keen to leave her job,” The Times alleged.

The media furore around Worboys’s proposed release also prompted four more women to come forward to the police with more allegations. In December 2019, he admitted two charges of administering a drug with the intent to commit rape or indecent assault, and two further charges of administering a substance with the intent to commit a sexual offence. He was then handed two additional life sentences; the court heard that he was “just as dangerous” as he had been when he was first sentenced.

Since then, Johnson has lent her support and profile to the campaign to keep Robert Brown, who killed his wife Joanna Simpson, behind bars, after he was due for automatic early release having served half his jail sentence for manslaughter. Simpson’s family and friends, she said, had described themselves as “feeling like sitting ducks, powerless to do anything”, something which she recognised “from [her] own experience”.

Campaigning against Worboys’s release, she added, had reminded her “that sometimes against all the odds, you can change things. Your voice doesn’t have to go unheard.”

‘Believe Me’ will begin on Sunday 10 May at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX