Sonia Ulrich, Monica Kenyon, and Marla Saltzer are a group of friends who recently decided to meet up at a restaurant in Santa Monica, California for happy hour. Sadly, their evening out ended up taking a disturbing turn that none of them could have expected.

As the women sat at the bar at Fig at 5, Monica saw a man slip something into a woman’s drink.

“Now, Fig is a nice restaurant,” Sonia explained. “We were enjoying our charcuterie platter and some fancy cheeses. That type of place. They had a bottle of wine they were splitting. It seemed like a first or second or third date. After a few ‘Oh god. What do we do’s,’ I got up to find her in the bathroom to tell her. Warn her. Tell her to get up and leave this creep. Make him drink it. Something.”

The woman was stunned when Sonia told her what had happened, telling her that the man was “one of her best friends.” They had known each other for over a year and even worked together.

“He pulled her glass toward him, kind of awkwardly, then he took out a little black vial,” Sonia said of what Monica saw him do. “He opened it up and dropped something in. Then he tried to play it cool, like checking his phone and hiding the vial in his hand and then trying to bring it back down slyly.”

The three friends told staffers at the restaurant as well, and the manager approached the table and had the woman order a sparkling water. Security was alerted, but there was not much else that could be done since they did not see the incident.

“The poor woman had to sit through 40 more minutes, sitting across from “one of her best friends” knowing that he was trying to drug her. Marla noticed him several times chinking his glass to hers to get her to drink,” Sonia said. “She played it cool. Mostly, I believed, just stunned. The staff wanted to jump in and dump the glass, dump him, do something! I was going through fantasies of walking up and demanding he drink the tainted glass of wine.”

When it came time for the two to get their bill, the waiters kept them there by saying there was an issue with their computer. Finally, the police came in and told the man to come with them.

It turns out that the security footage corroborated what Monica saw, and the man had been caught on camera spiking the woman’s drink.

Afterwards, tons of women in the restaurant came up to the three friends and thanked them profusely, saying that similar things had happened to them.

“At least 10 stories of being personally affected by someone like this. Something like this,” Sonia said. “Those were only the ones who knew what went down. I am sure there were tons more stories throughout the restaurant and the hotel.”

We applaud these three friends for courageously stepping in to stop this rape before it happened!