I WAS A VICTIM OF STEALTHING

Women are dealing with a dangerous new kind of betrayal

W HEN Cindy, 30, went on a first date with a guy she met on Tinder in June, she was expecting a fun fling.

But instead, when they went back to her place to hook up, she was violated.

“He took off his condom without telling me in the middle of [sex],” says Cindy, an administrative assistant in Bushwick who didn’t want to disclose her last name for privacy reasons. Minutes later, she realized what he’d done but was too intimidated to say something.

“I kind of went along with it because he was older and I didn’t want to ruin the moment,” she says. “I felt terrible afterward.”

Although at the time she didn’t know what to call the disturbing experience, a report recently published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law dubbed it “stealthing” — an act in which a man secretly removes his condom in the middle of consensual sex.

Alexandra Brodsky, the study’s author and a Yale Law School grad, interviewed victims and perpetrators of these encounters, which she calls a form of sexual violence and a rising epidemic in big cities.

“Men try to justify this by saying it’s their right to spread their seed and that it’s a natural impulse for them,” says Brodsky, who’s based in Washington, DC.

When Cindy brought up the incident to her sexual partner later that night, he got offended.

“He said, ‘Why are you so upset by it? I know you’re clean and I’m clean. Who cares?’ ” she says.

Besides being put at risk for unwanted pregnancies and STIs, the latter of which are at an all-time high for millennials in New York, victims also suffer from posttraumatic stress.

“They experience a lot of shame after the fact, ” says Kathryn Smerling, a psychotherapist and clinical instructor at Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side. She says that she’s seen this happen more frequently in the past five years.

Cindy says she’s only told a handful of close friends.

“I don’t want my friends to judge me or think I’m easy,” she says. She never talked to the guy again.

Clarissa Silva, a behavioralscience researcher based in the Financial District, advises women to be wary of meeting men on dating apps for casual hookups.

“The less human face-toface interaction you have with someone, the higher the probability of [things] like this happening,” she says.

Adrianna, 25 and a grad student, says she’s been the victim of “stealthing” four times in the past few years, all with men she met on Tinder and Bumble.

“Guys would be sneaky and pretend they were putting [the condom] on,” says Adrianna, who lives in Midtown and didn’t want to disclose her last name for professional reasons. “I felt violated and disappointed because I invited someone into my bedroom to share this personal moment, and I didn’t consent.”

In each instance, as soon as she found out she was being duped, Adrianna immediately stopped the hookup, got dressed and left. “Nothing kills the mood like being violated,” she says.

Now Adrianna says that she always makes sure she’s the one who puts the condom on her partner before every encounter.

And although Brodsky says that victims of nonconsenual condom removal have the option to take perpetrators to court, Adrianna would rather just move on with her life.

“After the last [stealthing] encounter, I just became emotionally shut off,” she says. “At first I wanted to get pissed and scream at the person, but all that disappointment drains you . . . Now I just try to be way more careful.”