Naked, panicky and disorientated, a 19-year-old waitress wakes up in a budget hotel room in North Wales on a May Bank Holiday morning.

How she came to be here is, at least to her, a mystery. She takes in her surroundings and tries unsuccessfully to piece together what happened, managing to summon only fragmentary memories.

Aware of discomfort and what she will later tell police was a pain in her right arm, she hurriedly dresses, leaves the room and finds she is in a Premier Inn next to a KFC restaurant near Rhyl. She calls her mother who will later accompany her to a police station where she recounts the events, so far as she can recall them, of the night before.

And so begins the rape investigation into then 22-year-old Wales and Sheffield United striker Ched Evans that will cause national soul-searching, ignite debate about consent and victim-blaming, and not so much divide as splinter public opinion.

Almost 15 years have passed since that morning. Today, Evans is a contented family man. Still playing professional football at 37, he is married to Natasha Massey, the woman who, inexplicably to some, has always stood by him – waiting patiently, for instance, as he spent two and half years in jail for raping the waitress.

Doubtless, Ms Massey felt her faith vindicated when, ten years ago, her then-fiance’s conviction was quashed after a retrial. When the matter was put before a court for a second time, a jury decided that the unsavoury threesome in which Evans had taken part with fellow footballer, Clayton McDonald, and the waitress – who told police she blacked out and feared her drink was spiked – was not rape after all but a distasteful sexual encounter.

During its entirety, Evans uttered not one word to the woman and left the hotel via the fire exit. Even if it seemed he had done nothing wrong legally, the consensus was that he was morally deficient. Or as one campaigner judged at the time ‘a slimeball’.

Still, all that’s behind him now. The rape case derailed his career for a while but life is now good for the Welshman, who once told police that ‘women throw themselves at me’.

Today, he is a highly-regarded favourite of Fleetwood Town FC’s supporters and will this afternoon turn out for Lancashire club against League Two rivals Chesterfield.

The footballer is assured a hero’s welcome whenever he returns. During his incarceration, his black Land Rover Defender with personalised number plates remained parked on the drive of his mother’s six-bedroom detached house in the town.

Although he earned £20,000 a week in his early 20s, his career after his release from HMP Wymott in Lancashire never quite hit the heights he must have once envisaged.

Despite the loss of earning potential, he and his wife Natasha, a beauty therapist, have always lived in the ‘golden triangle’ of Cheshire towns – including Alderley Edge, Prestbury and Wilmslow – favoured by top footballers and celebrities around the North West.

The waitress, however, has not found it nearly so easy to move on.

‘She’s quite a strong individual but it’s had a lasting impact on her, all the trauma of it,’ said a close relative. ‘She will never get her old life back. The consequences of that night are still felt to this day.’

Indeed, the Daily Mail has discovered that one of the most painful legacies of this case is that the young woman, now in her 30s, has become estranged from her family.

Her mother died some years ago and then, over time, she appears to have broken off contact with her father and siblings. All had been supportive and never for a moment doubted her story.

‘It’s very sad,’ said one relative. ‘I guess she just needed to get away from everything and everyone. It’s depressing that it should be her life that was turned upside down, and her family ruptured, all because of that one night.’

If, to her frustration, the young woman struggled to remember what happened in Room 14 she must surely wish she could forget what happened later. After the footballer’s original conviction, her lifelong anonymity – protection afforded to anyone subjected to a sexual assault – was breached on the internet.

She was named thousands of times on social media and labelled a ‘slag’, ‘tramp’, ‘bitch’, ‘whore’ and worse. Life was intolerable. She lived in fear. Some of the abuse amounted to ‘psychological GBH’, said one senior detective, and left her ‘traumatised’.

Police gave her a new identity, and a new home in a new town – the first time, it is believed, a rape victim has been given such help in these circumstances.

‘She pretty much vanished,’ said an uncle last week. ‘I was fond of her but I haven’t seen or heard from her since the trial. I lost my niece and I have to say it’s all rather tragic.

‘People were making stuff up, putting things on the internet that were just not true. It all got too much, and she couldn’t stay here, where she could be close to her family. Everyone knew who she was and what had happened, so she had to get away.’

Now, she is said to live a quiet life, though sadly the kind of contentment Evans enjoys has eluded her. On that May Bank Holiday back in 2011, she was, as her uncle pointed out, ‘carefree and normal, with her life ahead of her’. No matter that her horizons didn’t stretch much beyond starting her own family at some point in the future, she was happy and lived for the weekend.

At the time, Evans had been dating Natasha for two years and was enjoying a successful spell with then League One side Sheffield United having come through Manchester City’s youth ranks.

That Sunday he was on a night out in his home town of Rhyl with McDonald, another former City junior, with whom he had participated in a threesome on a previous occasion. Evans had booked a room for McDonald at the Premier Inn.

At the footballers’ subsequent 2012 trial for rape, the prosecution would allege that the hotel was booked for the sole purpose of ‘procuring a girl or girls’ with whom the two men could have sex.

Finishing work late that evening, the waitress had drunk two large glasses of red wine with colleagues before going home. She then showered and went out again at 1.30am to meet friends at the resort’s seafront nightclub, Zu Bar.

Within an hour of arriving at 2am she had drunk a further four double vodkas and a shot of sambuca.

When she left the club and made her way to a nearby fast food shop, arriving ten minutes later, she could hardly stand. In her confusion, she left her handbag in the takeaway and staggered outside with a pizza. It was now around 3.30am. CCTV footage showed the teenager falling into the wall of a building, losing her balance and clumsily attempting to get into the back of a taxi she had flagged down.

By then, her clothing was already ‘disarranged, her bra visible’, the driver recalled. At this point she was approached by the 6ft 6in McDonald who, along with Evans and others, had also been in Zu Bar. They both got into the taxi, and McDonald, then 22, paid the fare to the Premier Inn, three miles away.

During the journey he sent a text to Evans saying he had ‘got a bird’.

At 4.15am, McDonald and the teenager arrived at the hotel.

The hotel’s night receptionist recalled that the girl was ‘extremely drunk’. He told the jury: ‘She wasn’t very steady on her feet and had a blank expression.’

Ten or 15 minutes after the couple’s arrival at the hotel, Evans also turned up. He persuaded the receptionist to give him another key to Room 14. Once he had let himself in, he watched McDonald have intercourse with the girl, then had sex with her as well. In yet another tawdry scene, two of Evans’ pals tried to film the encounter through a window.

Both footballers were arrested the next day and, though the woman never accused them directly, they subsequently stood trial on separate charges of rape.

Theirs were not cases in which the fact that sexual intercourse had taken place was disputed, or that it had taken place under duress. Rather, they hinged on the woman’s ability or otherwise to give consent to sex.

Both men admitted that they had sex with the teenager. Both claimed that it was consensual and that she had encouraged it. They denied they had been predators looking for girls for sex that night. The prosecution case was that the victim did not truly consent to sex, and that ‘neither man reasonably believed she was consenting’. She was so drunk she was in no fit state to say ‘yes’.

After nearly five hours’ deliberation, the jury at Caernarfon Crown Court found McDonald not guilty of rape. They convicted Evans on the same offence and he subsequently became a pariah in the football world. Fierce debate ensued over whether or not, having served half his original five-year sentence, he should ever be allowed to return to the sport.

Plans by his former club Sheffield United to re-sign him after his release in 2014 were torn up after a 150,000-strong petition, not to mention threats by sponsors and a warning from Olympic gold medal winner Jessica Ennis-Hill that she would remove her name from a stand at the club’s ground if Evans was to return.

When ten other clubs announced that they would not consider signing him, it seemed as if he’d never play professionally again.

A high-profile campaign was launched to clear his name.

Evans had powerful allies working in his defence – his girlfriend and her family. Ms Massey, who he married in 2022, offered unswerving support despite his infidelity. So too did her multi-millionaire jeweller father Karl Massey, who funded private detectives, a top legal team and a website offering a £50,000 reward for information that might help overturn the rape conviction.

Evans’ case was referred to the Criminal Cases Review Commission which sent his case to the Court of Appeal, which quashed his conviction and ordered a retrial.

He was cleared after two ex-lovers of the waitress were allowed by Court of Appeal judges to give evidence about her sexual history. The retrial was ordered when they came forward to reveal she had behaved in a similar way as she had during the sex Evans described in the sordid hotel liaison.

Both men denied on oath that they had been motivated by a £50,000 reward offered by Evans’ supporters. It emerged that, after Evans’ original conviction, Ms Massey had sent a message to the head of security at the hotel highlighting the reward on offer. The prosecution said the Facebook messages – signed off with a kiss – had the ‘flavour of a bribe’.

Prosecution lawyers argued that the messages showed the imbalance of power between Evans, backed up by his girlfriend’s wealthy family, and the waitress from Rhyl. But the judge ruled that the jury should not hear about the messages. The jury’s ‘not guilty’ verdict drew a line under Evans’ ordeal.

He married Ms Massey in 2022 and the couple have two children and an enviable lifestyle.

A close relative of the waitress says: ‘She would have liked kids too but it hasn’t happened. She carried on working elsewhere as a waitress for a bit but things didn’t turn out as planned. She’s still wounded by it all.

‘Whatever happened to basic human decency, to chivalry, to stepping in and seeing that a woman gets home safely? Instead, she was used as a piece of meat by that footballer – I can’t bear to say his name – and then she was treated like dirt by those vicious cowards who said such awful things about her on the internet. What a country this has become.’