The bizarre story behind the ‘Salford University rape cover up’ posters

With additional reporting from Ethan Penny

A student walks into Salford University’s support office and douses themselves in petrol. “Not as theatre,” they would later write, “but as a last available language”.

Now they recount the story over the phone. As they explain it, they’d entered the room “presenting female” and carrying a large green Jerry can, sat down in a chair before a member of staff and said: “Do you think I look gay? Do you think I look gay now?”

When security tried to restrain them, the student poured the contents of the Jerry can over themselves and took out a lighter. They can’t recall now if they threatened to set themselves on fire, but they do remember flicking the small round striker with their thumb.

This is the story behind the posters that have been plastered remarkably far and wide across Greater Manchester: in Salford, Bolton, Wigan, Stockport, as far as Oldham, as close as Deansgate. The text in them varies, but they all make the same accusation: that Salford University is involved in a “rape cover up”.

A journalist posing with one of the posters on Mosley Street reached 50,000 viewers on Instagram, asking them if they’d send their children to a university “if you knew that they’d covered up rape”. One member of a student chat room wrote that the posters had generated “a lot of worried discussion” in student halls and group chats. “People are asking if it’s safe here,” goes the post. “Is anyone else concerned, or has the [student union] said anything? Feels like the silence is making it worse.”

But the truth of the story involves no evidence of a cover up whatsoever. Instead it’s about one student who discovered that an allegation had been made against them by someone at the university; and the extreme measures they went to to find out what that allegation is.

The strange case of ‘Alistair Finch’

What you’re reading here isn't the first article about the posters. A piece of writing on the subject, written by one Alistair Finch, can be found in the Dorset Eye; a second penned anonymously is in the Prole Star, and another written under the pseudonym ‘Philippa Fisher’ was published in the London-based Prisma. All of them interrogate Salford University’s supposed lack of response to the allegations, and crucially, one of them – the Finch-penned piece in the Dorset Eye – features a direct quote from the figure behind the posters: “Until the university ceases its long-held pattern of deflection, there are reasonable grounds to suspect something is being concealed.”

So we reached out to the Dorset Eye, to put us in touch with Finch, who in turn could hopefully connect us with the mysterious character behind the allegations, who Finch refers to only as “the claimant”.