SINGER SOPHIE: I WAS RAPED AT 17
Star reveals sex attack nightmare in book
SINGER Sophie Ellis-Bextor has revealed she was raped by a 29-year-old man when she was 17 and still a virgin.
The rapist, who she has not identified – giving him the pseudonym Jim – was a musician she had met after going to a gig. He invited her to his flat to give her a history book after she had told him she was studying the subject at A-level. Sophie, 42, said: “Before I knew it we were on his bed and he took off my knickers. I heard myself saying ‘No’ and ‘I don’t want to’, but it didn’t make any difference. “He didn’t listen to me and he had sex with me and I felt so ashamed. It was how I lost my virginity and I felt stupid.” In her autobiography Spinning Plates: Music, Men, Motherhood and Me, she wrote: “After it was over, I lay on the bed feeling odd, trying to process what had happened. “He fell asleep and I slept, too, not really knowing how to get myself home in the middle of the night. “I woke up after a short while and I can remember angrily picking up my clothes from the floor while saying to myself, ‘I said no’. I went and sat in his kitchen, watching TV, feeling dazed.” In the book, serialised in the Mail on Sunday, Sophie said: “After a while, Jim came into the room. ‘Oh, I didn’t think you’d still be here,’ he said.
“Again, I felt stupid. I didn’t know I was supposed to have left.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to just go afterwards.
“On the way home I wondered if everyone else on the Tube could tell what had happened to me. I felt grubby, but also unsure about my own feelings as I had no other experience to compare it with.”
She said she was not interested in “naming and shaming” her attacker. But she added: “By going back to that room and to that time when I felt I didn’t have a voice, I can now give myself that voice.”
Sophie and husband Richard Jones, of The Feeling, married in 2005 and have five sons, Sonny, 17, Kit, 12, Ray, nine, Jesse, five, and Mickey, two.
Sophie, who went to No2 in the charts with 2001 single Murder on the Dancefloor, said: “I’m a mother of five young men now, and I introduce the concept of consent pretty early.
“I want to raise considerate, kind people who can take other people’s feelings into account.”
She explained further to the Mail on Sunday: “When they play we use the words, ‘Stop’ and ‘No’, and they are powerful. No matter how much fun they’ve been having, if one of them – even laughing – says ‘No’ or ‘Stop’, then they must.”