Police to probe TV Cathy’s claims of abuse at top school
POLICE will be investigating claims that TV news presenter Cathy Newman was sexually assaulted and bullied by teenage boys when she was a pupil at top public school Charterhouse.
Newman, 44, who won a scholarship to the sixth form when she was 16, told of the incidents yesterday.
She said she did not report them at the time and attempted to “laugh it off” in order not to appear “po-faced”.
Ahead of today’s launch of a campaign by anti-bullying charity The Diana Award, she said she wished she had.
The male pupils’ behaviour damaged her confidence and left her feeling she was to blame, she added. In one incident she said she was in the lunch hall when a boy sitting next to her unzipped his flies and grabbed her hand and forced her to touch him intimately. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it,” she said.
The mother of two, whose father taught chemistry at the school in Godalming, Surrey, claimed she was hosed down by boys while wearing a white shirt so they could see her bra.
She said bullies targeted her because she was different: “I was a girly swot – protruding teeth, big, thick horn-rimmed NHS specs, so I was an easy target.”
The Channel 4 presenter was also one of “a tiny minority” of girls at the school at the time. It charges £40,000 a year for boarders.
Charterhouse said police were informed and added: “While the events are said to have happened some time ago, they are deeply shocking. Such behaviour has no place in any school.”
Surrey police said it was aware of the claims, adding: “We take sexual abuse very seriously. Cases are investigated, no matter how long ago they took place.”
The claims came as Department for Education guidance on how schools should handle sexual abuse starts this week.