The troubling report about why Jordyn Woods hooked up with Tristan Thompson.

Reports have emerged that Jordyn Woods was “blackout drunk” when she kissed Khloe Kardashian’s partner, Tristan Thompson, at a nightclub earlier this month.

“Jordyn Woods can’t handle her booze,” TMZ published.

“That’s why she was down to make out with Tristan Thompson and blow up her relationship with the Kardashians… She’s saying she was actually blackout drunk. As in, she doesn’t even remember how she got to the party or anything that happened there,” they added.

According to ‘insiders’ Woods had to be told what happened the next day and was horrified. The 21-year-old is said to rarely drink, but, to quote TMZ, “it ends badly when she does.”

The reports themselves likely have little if any relationship with the truth.

But it’s the implicit tone that lurks beneath the surface of these reports that we ought to take a closer look at.

If, for a moment, we accept that Woods was ‘blackout drunk’ and learned the next day she had been intimate with Thompson, then surely our response shouldn’t be an eye-roll, but rather a serious discussion about consent.

Perez Hilton has stated his position quite clearly. “Is alcohol any excuse?” he asked his readers.

But if Woods was “blackout drunk” then this has nothing to do with ‘excuses’.

No man or woman should wake up the next morning and learn they had a sexual experience with someone – with no memory of the encounter.

Of course, behaviour is complicated, and if Thompson was equally, or potentially even more intoxicated than Woods, then the lines of consent become even more blurred.

With all the reports that have emerged in the last 24 hours, no one has asked: If Woods was ‘blackout drunk’, then how do we know that hooking up with Thompson was something she necessarily wanted? And if she didn’t want it, and she didn’t consent, then are we all telling the wrong story?

To put it into perspective, the most hated person in the world right now is a 21-year-old woman who (reportedly) kissed someone she shouldn’t have.

And now, there’s a possibility she was not in any sort of state to make a decision in the first place.

The question isn’t if ‘being drunk is an excuse’.

It’s if this woman is really such a ‘villain’ after all.