Below Deck’s Adrienne Gang reveals horrifying date rape drug story and arrest

Bravo’s new hit series Below Deck documents the lives of crew members working and living aboard the luxurious mega-yacht “Honor.” Chief steward Adrienne Gang has earned a bit of a reputation as a hard ass (she would prefer to be considered a perfectionist), but the 30-year-old relaxed her stern persona and opened up about an extremely personal “shocking secret” in a radio interview with WFLA published earlier today. In the interview Adrienne recounts being the victim of a near overdose of date rape drugs that caused a blackout and resulted in her arrest for battery! (You can see Adrienne Gang’s mug shot from her December, 2012 arrest above.)

Here is the interview followed by excerpts from the conversation:

Host Corey Dylan: One of the other reasons we wanted to have you in here today is because something pretty serious happened to you not that long ago. Can you tell us about that? And where you’ve taken that?

Adrienne Gang: It’s not easy to talk about. In December I was here in Tampa at a local upscale South Tampa eatery with a bunch of girls. It was a Tuesday night, you know, nothing crazy — two miles away from my house. And I ended up — the last thing I remember was saying, “Good night” to my girlfriends and everybody was supposed to get in cabs and go home. The next thing I know I’m getting my fingerprints done in central booking at [inaudible] jail. And I had no idea how I got there, or what happened. And my body felt really strange and I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and I ended up — as soon as I left there — I went straight and got a drug test and the guy — I had to wait ten days for the results, which was nerve-wracking — and the guy who called me said, “You know, before I give you these results I just want to tell you you’re lucky to be alive. There’s no way that you should be. You took this test twelve hours after you were dosed and the elevated levels that I see mean that you should be dead right now. Even twelve hours later.”

Corey Dylan: You got a DUI leaving South Tampa?
 
Adrienne Gang: No, I got drugged. I was arrested for battery of a cab driver, but I don’t remember any of it. What I came to find out is that I was drugged, a heavy dose of GHB, and then thrown in —
 
Co-host: That’s the date rape drug?
 
Adrienne Gang: Correct. Exactly! Roofies. I was drugged and then thrown into a cab because I wasn’t able to hold myself up any more, and then somehow I flipped out on the cab driver. We did find out who did it, because he had prepaid with a credit card.
 
Corey Dylan: So somebody bought you a drink and slipped a drug — I never understand why anyone would ever do this to anybody, but —
 
Adrienne Gang: Yeah, it was ten o’clock on a Tuesday.
 
Co-host: Did they bust him?
 
Adrienne Gang: Uh, well, that’s a whole other issue. I mean, that’s a whole lot of legal proceedings and everything else. But, I feel confident in the fact that law enforcement is on top of it.
 

Corey Dylan: When I first moved here I think that something like that happened to me at a certain eatery at the mall, which we can’t name names exactly, but where have you taken this whole incident? What can you do about it?

Adrienne Gang: So, as awful and as tragic as this whole thing was, I’ve been trying to find a cathartic outlet to be able to handle this, and I actually — through a friend of a friend — ended up at the Crisis Center. The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay is an amazing place. They are basically full service for traumas like this, and had I known at the time that this happened to me that this place existed, that is the first place that I would have gone. They do an amazing job. They do the drug testing there, rape analysis, if that’s what happened, and they have a full-scale counseling center there too to be able to handle the tragedy and kind of help you work through it. It’s immediate care, and then after, and I wish I would have known. So now I’m working hand-in-hand with the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay to come up with something called “DrinkSafe.” They already exist, and I wish I would have known about this — I’m surprised that parents of college students going in as they’re freshmen don’t know about this. There’s a business card that you can get that you can test your drinks, and you can just keep it in your wallet. And there are coasters that you can do the same thing.

Corey Dylan: Wow, that’s cool!
 
Adrienne Gang: So I’m in the process of trying to figure out a way that we can get these into the hands of people all over the place, especially college students. I’m not a college student any more. I’m 30 years old and this happened to me, so I’m thinking that whatever I can do to help prevent this from happening to somebody else — and that’s kind of my way of getting my way through this.
 
Be sure to listen to the full interview, it begins with Adrienne’s explanation of how Below Deck came to be, which was a three-year process that she was involved with from the very beginning.

Below Deck is tearing it up in the ratings, by the way! The last episode was watched by more than 1.4 million folks, which is extremely high for a debut cable series! Congratulations to Adrienne and the rest of the “Honor” crew of their huge success. Below Deck airs on Monday nights at 10/9c on Bravo.

Adrienne Gang links:

Adrienne Gang on Twitter: @AdrienneGang
Adrienne Gang on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChefAdrienneGang
Adrienne Gang on instagram: @AdrienneGang
Adrienne Gang on Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/adriennegang
Adrienne Gang’s website: www.adriennegang.com
Below Deck Bravo page

Asa Hawks is a writer and editor for Starcasm. You can contact Asa via Twitter, Facebook, or email at starcasmtips(at)yahoo.com