AT last September’s Primetime Emmy awards in LA, actor and comedian Aziz Ansari was delighted to be declared the co-winner of a comedy writing gong for his Netflix series Master of None. At the after-party the 34-year-old met, and fell into conversation with, ‘Grace’ (not her real name), a Brooklyn-based photographer then aged 22. As she was leaving, she put her phone number, at his suggestion, into his phone.

They soon arranged a dinner date in Manhattan. Back at his TriBeCa apartment, the encounter took a physical turn. According to an interview with Grace by Katie Way on the feminist website 'Babe', Ansari undressed her then undressed himself. They performed sexual acts on each other.

In painstaking detail Grace revealed the sexual moves Ansari made on her – several times pulling her hand towards his penis, repeatedly asking her, ‘Where do you want me to f*** you?’

We wre told that they “chilled” a couple of times but, she says, he continued to express an eagerness for sex. She told him at one point: “You guys are all the f*****g same’.”

The evening ended with Grace going home by Uber taxi, which Ansari had called for her. “I cried the whole ride home," the writer Way reported her saying. "At that point I felt violated.” She said she had used “verbal and non-verbal cues” to indicate her distress to Ansari. “It took a really long time for me to validate this as sexual assault. I was debating if this was an awkward sexual experience or sexual assault. And that’s why I confronted so many of my friends and listened to what they had to say, because I wanted validation that it was actually bad.”

In a statement Ansari said: “We ended up engaging in sexual activity, which by all indications was completely consensual.”

The #MeToo movement has exposed many sexual predators, but there has been a backlash against Grace from a number of high-profile women. Whoopi Goldberg, speaking on American TV, said: “So, if you’re on a date and he’s not as a good as you thought, and you’re uncomfortable and [giving non-verbal cues], does that mean stop, go away? Whatever happened to ‘Stop or I’m going to knock you in your nuts?’”

Those words were applauded by the mostly female audience. The show’s co-host Sunny Hostin, a former prosecutor, doubted whether Grace’s experience amounted to sexual assault: “She voluntarily went with him back to his apartment, they did engage in sexual activity consensually, and then somewhere along the line she decided that she had had enough and she wanted to go home.” Ansari had not tried to stop her, she added, and had phoned Uber.

One female Twitter user said Grace’s account “tells you she was not assaulted … These girls make it hard for real victims.” One man posted: “With this allegation, we're about to criminalize bad dates. IF he's guilty of assault, he SHOULD be punished. However, crucifying every man who isn't a gentleman is unreal.”

“Sorry,” tweeted another woman, “but bad foreplay does not constitute sexual harassment and #MeToo is not a bandwagon that every woman has to jump on.” Other users strongly defended Grace, however, saying it was assault if a man did not respect a woman’s decision that she did not want to continue with the situation.

US TV anchor Ashleigh Banfield publicly challenged Grace. “What exactly was your beef?" she said. "That you had a bad date with Aziz Ansari? Is that what victimized you to the point of seeking a public conviction and a career-ending sentence against him? Is that what you truly think he deserved for your night out? What you have done, in my opinion, is appalling.”

In the LA Times, Robin Abcarian said she would advise her daughter that “we need to be clear about the difference between sexual assault and horny dudes who move too fast on dates. Both may exist on a continuum of disrespect for women, but one is not the same as the other.”

Bari Weiss, in the New York Times, said Ansari “sounds as if he were aggressive and selfish and obnoxious that night” but pointed out that Grace had several chances to leave. The Babe 'exposé' was “arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement since it began in October. It transforms what ought to be a movement for women’s empowerment into an emblem for female helplessness”.

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan said Grace wanted “affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. He wasn’t interested. What she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn.” Grace and the interviewer, Katie Way, “may have destroyed Ansari’s career, which is now the punishment for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque to the disappointing.”

To many people, Ansari was guilty of nothing more than bad sex, but even that argument has prompted anger. In an article headed Why Aziz Ansari’s behaviour matters, Emily Reynolds argued forcefully: "If we truly want to force a cultural change in how we navigate sex and relationships, as I believe that most of the men in my life sincerely do, then we need to understand how abuses of power can manifest in small ways as well as large ones.”

Ansari's reputation is now in tatters but there has been an interesting footnote concerning Ashleigh Banfield, who read out, on air, comments made about her by Katie Way- "Ashleigh, I hope the 500 [re-tweets] on the single news write-up [on Banfield's original comments on Grace] made that burgundy lipstick, bad highlights, second-wave feminist has-been really relevant for a little while."

Banfield retorted: "If you truly believe in the #MeToo movement ... in women's rights ... in feminism, the last thing you should do is attack someone in an ad hominem way for her age (I'm 50) and for my highlights."