Women tell how they were lured by predator
I was 17 and paralysed with fear as he took my virginity
VICKY Hayes told last night how Freud plied her with champagne, violently took her virginity, then told her: ‘If you are pregnant, ring me.’
He had groomed her from the age of 1 and raped her when she was 17. Years later, when she was married and pregnant with her first child, he tried to molest her again.
He first ‘took a shine’ to her when she was a waitress in her parents’ seafood restaurant in Lincoln in the mid1960s. She was pretty and Freud – Clay to friends – was a regular customer, who wrote about the restaurant in his food column. He used her love of horses to befriend her, and in 1966 he took her to the races, with her parents’ blessing. Then in 1969, he offered to take her to the races at Newmarket, which meant staying away for a night.
‘As far as I was concerned he was a friend of the family,’ she told ITV News yesterday. ‘My father asked if there would be anyone else at the house. He assured my parents there would be a housekeeper.
‘When we set off in his Bentley he told me not to smoke. On the way he stopped at a restaurant. He plied me with champagne. He didn’t drink. I had never had it, I was 17 and was very inebriated. He drove to the house. There was no housekeeper just us.
‘He showed me to a room, I got out my nightie, assuming naively I was going to sleep alone. Clay said “No need for a nightie, get in”. He told me I couldn’t put it on. I lay there naked, he got in and I just lay there afraid, scared, and he forced himself on me and took my virginity. I did what he said – I was terrified. I was paralysed by fear.
‘The next day morning, I went for a walk, to think it all over. I came back and he called me upstairs, he pushed me on the bed and tried to rape me again. This time I was sober and told him no.’
Freud, then 5 and a father of four, dropped her at a train station. ‘His parting words to me were, “If you are pregnant, ring me”,’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell my parents because I know my father would have killed him.’ She told her husband, whom she married in 1972, about the abuse when they got engaged.
Freud remained a family friend for years and incredibly even tried to attack her again after she was married – and pregnant with her first child. She managed to fight him off. After Freud’s death in 2009, Mrs Hayes told Suffolk Police about the abuse, giving a statement in 201 .
Suffolk Police said last night that a historic allegation of rape had been recorded but ‘as the suspect was no longer alive, there were no further lines of enquiry’.
A woman claimed yesterday that she was saved from being molested by Freud only because the MP was called back to Commons for a vote.
Giving her name as Nicky, from Cambridge, she told Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show she was 18 and a trainee secretary when introduced to Freud. He was asked to show her the Commons but whisked her to his club and to the theatre, where the 55-year-old MP began making advances.
Nicky said: ‘Being naive and not wanting to cause a fuss I didn’t do anything. And then I was saved, because he suddenly got a phone call saying he had to go to the Commons for a vote.’