Penny: My drink was spiked and I woke up to find him attacking me
PENNY Lancaster yesterday spoke out about how she was drugged and sexually assaulted by a fashion designer when she was a teenage model.
Rod Stewart’s wife broke down on TV as she recalled how her drink was spiked by a man she thought she could trust.
Her next memory was finding herself ‘face down on a bed with him on top of me’, she told ITV chat show Loose Women.
Ms Lancaster, 46, said she was a virgin and was terrified by the experience, adding: ‘I was too afraid to tell anybody.’
The model said she chose to speak out after thousands of women shared their experiences of sexual assault and harassment on social media, using the MeToo hashtag, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal. Ms Lancaster likened her ordeal to the TV series Liar, in which a rape victim’s drink is spiked.
She did not name her abuser but said he was a fashion designer she worked with when she was starting her modelling career, in her late teens. The designer offered to take her to an industry event and she agreed, thinking it would be an opportunity to get more modelling work, she said.
But he then took her to his flat as he needed to ‘pick something up’, and poured her a drink.
Ms Lancaster fought back tears as she said: ‘The next thing I knew, I don’t even remember drinking the drink, but I found myself face down on a bed with him on top of me.
‘I couldn’t tell my mum and dad because I thought they would be saying to me, “What on earth were you doing going back to his house?”
‘But he was a client that I’d worked with and he’d promised me to meet other people, so I was just naive and I trusted him. And
‘I was too afraid to tell anybody’
like with the series Liar my drink was drugged and I can’t remember much of what happened. I just know he was on top of me enjoying the experience, but I certainly wasn’t and I don’t really remember much more, and I was too afraid to tell anybody.’
Ms Lancaster urged young victims of sexual assault to tell their parents and the authorities.
She said: ‘I had never had sex at that point, so it was a frightening thing. They [young victims] have to know they won’t be told off, it’s not their fault, they’re not guilty – the other person is – and they need to brave enough to tell the authorities. You end up burying it, you know, and you try to pretend it never happened.’
Viewers of Loose Women praised Ms Lancaster on Twitter for her courage in speaking publicly about her ordeal.
Ms Lancaster has previously revealed she was sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old by a man who grabbed her in an underpass as she walked to school. Speaking in 2015, also on Loose Women, she said: ‘I was attacked under a subway. I managed to fight this man off because I was tall and I was strong, but he had pulled my skirt up and wrestled me.’ Ms Lancaster, who grew up in Essex, said the man fled and was never caught, adding: ‘There are a lot of evil men who prey on people.’
The 6ft 1in star trained as a dancer as a child but when she became too tall to pursue it as a career she became a model. In 2002, when she was dating Stewart, she was signed as the face of lingerie giant Ultimo, but after two years was replaced with the rocker’s ex-wife Rachel Hunter.
Ms Lancaster and Stewart wed in 2007 and have two children together. A spokesman for her said she did not want to give further details about the sexual assault.
Meanwhile the fallout from the Weinstein scandal has continued, with the British Film Institute withdrawing an honour it gave the disgraced producer in 2002.
The institute said it was revoking Weinstein’s BFI Fellowship – due to the many allegations of sexual assault and harassment he is facing. Weinstein, who denies wrongdoing, had been suspended from the film academies behind the Baftas and the Oscars.