He’d stroke and kiss me. It was horrible, I was a child
60 years on, woman abused by Clement Freud relives agony in TV documentary
SYLVIA Woosley met Sir Clement Freud at the age of ten when she moved to the South of France with her mother, stepfather and two sisters.
Sir Clement, then 24 and working at the glamorous Martinez hotel in Cannes, ‘immediately took a liking’ to her.
She told how he rented a house nearby and visited her parents at weekends, bringing her presents.
Sir Clement would often take her to the beach – but she said his attentions took a more sinister turn on a trip into the hills.
Miss Woosley, nicknamed ‘ Pooh’ because of her love of honey, recalled: ‘He’d stroke me, and he’d kiss me at the back of the bus on the mouth. He put his tongue in my mouth and it was wet. It was horrible and I didn’t like it. I was disgusted and helpless.’
Sir Clement’s visits to Miss Woosley’s home continued over the next 12 months until he returned to England in 1949.
In 1952, Miss Woosley’s mother’s marriage fell apart and the girl, now aged 14, was sent to live with Sir Clement and his actress wife June Flewett – known by the stage name Jill Raymond – in London.
Now they were under the same roof, Miss Woosley said Sir Clement’s behaviour escalated and he began sexually touching her. She believes his wife did not know he had abused her while she was below the age of consent, with Mrs Freud assuming she was just an infatuated adolescent.
Miss Woosley, who has waived her right to anonymity, spoke out as part of an ITV Exposure documentary. She said: ‘ My breasts started to grow, and he took a liking to my left breast and was always pinching it and playing.’
She remembered a particularly disturbing incident from when she was 14, when the couple asked her to join them in bed.
Mrs Freud left the room to make breakfast and her husband sexually assaulted her, she said.
‘I knew what was going to happen. I was in my nightdress and he pulls it up and pulls me against him, touching me and kissing me,’ Miss Woosley added.
Sir Clement often came into the teenager’s bedroom after returning home from the nightclub he ran. She said: ‘If he had been violent, I would probably then have been able to react. But because the way he went about it was so, sort of gentle and loving ... I just lay there and he’d put his hand up my nightdress and cuddle me and touch me. And so on.’
A diary entry by Miss Woosley’s friend, Sonia Markham, corroborates her story. Dated November 1956, it reads: ‘Spent the night with Sylvia as she’s scared Clay will try and force himself on her.’
A year later, Miss Woosley told Sir Clement’s nanny about the abuse she was suffering and moved out to live with Miss Markham.
Sir Clement later found out she had confided in the nanny and wrote her an angry letter, saying: ‘If you construe every sign of affection – and there were many – as having an unhealthy sexual motive, then you are both wrong, and in spreading this to other people, so ungrateful and unfair that you have succeeded in turning genuine affection into sour and bitter feelings of contempt and disgust.’
She said her own mother was furious when she heard she had fled the Freud home, urging her to call Sir Clement’s wife and say she had made up her claims. Miss Woosley went on to lead a nomadic, fractured life, plagued by depression, suicide attempts and broken relationships.
It was only when she reached her 40s that she felt able to challenge Sir Clement, then an MP, about the abuse. She explained: ‘I said, “Why, why me?” And he said, “Because I loved you, you were a very sensual little girl.”’
Six months later, he called and
invited her to spend the weekend with him in Cambridge.
He wrote the directions for her on House of Commons paper. She finds it hard to explain why, but she accepted and ended up sleeping with him. Now in her late 70s, Miss Woosley said: ‘I had no respect for my body whatsoever.’
She added: ‘ It destroyed something in me that broke, and I suppose it’s affected my behaviour all my life. I’ve been married twice, my relationships with men. My lack of trust, my lack of self- confidence, my self-destructions.’
Miss Woosley, who has given a full report to police, said she wanted to speak out before she dies. ‘You can’t bury the truth for ever,’ she said. ‘ It needs to be heard.’