Black cab victim quizzed about wearing red lipstick

ONE of black cab rapist John Worboys’s victims was questioned by police about wearing red lipstick and nail varnish, according to revelations in a television documentary.

The woman, known only as NBV, was a 19-year-old student when she was attacked.

Speaking about her ordeal publicly for the first time, NBV also reveals that Metropolitan Police officers asked her how much she had drunk and made her feel like she ‘deserved’ to be preyed on.

Worboys, who targeted scores of women between 2000 and 2008 while driving his taxi, had picked her up from a London nightclub.

NBV tells Channel 5’s Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist: ‘They started off by asking a lot of questions about myself.

‘They had observed that I had nail polish on, which was red. They asked me whether I would describe myself as a young lady who wears red nail polish and red lipstick.

‘They asked me how often I would go out drinking and they continued to ask me how much I had drunk that night.

‘The way they behaved made me feel like anything that had happened to me was because I deserved it.’

Worboys was convicted in 2009 of drugging and sexually assaulting 12 women and sentenced indefinitely for public protection, with a minimum term of eight years. The documentary, which airs on Wednesday night, also features never-before-heard audio clips from his first police interview.

In the recording, a female officer can be heard asking Worboys if NBV ‘engaged in sexual activity with you to pay for her fare?’, to which he responded ‘not at all’.

Commenting on the clip, NBV’S lawyer Phillippa Kaufmann QC says: ‘[The officer] is feeding him a defence – if sexual activity took place this was on the basis that NBV was prostituting herself having not paid the fare.

‘If they had actually done some work they would have realised she did pay the fare. It makes plain that they just didn’t believe a word of it on her part.’

Miss Kaufmann adds: ‘It’s not his account, he is not even saying this is what happened.’

NBV, who is entitled to anonymity as the victim of a sex attack, says listening to Worboys’s interview was ‘traumatic’ and ‘difficult’.

The documentary also reveals that Worboys kept a diary detailing the excuses for his sex attacks and describes it as a ‘Machiavellian script’, ‘laid out in question and answer form as if it were a rehearsal for a police interrogation’. In 2018

‘They made me feel I deserved it’

the Parole Board said Worboys could be freed – but the decision was reversed following a landmark legal challenge, supported by Carrie Symonds, the Prime Minister’s fiancee, who waived her right to anonymity to reveal she had been preyed on by the cabbie.

In 2019 he was ordered to serve two additional life sentences, for a minimum of six years, after more victims came forward.

Last month, Worboys, who now goes by the name John Radford, lost a Court of Appeal challenge against the new life sentences for attacks on four more women.

Police believe that in total the former male stripper assaulted more than 100 women before he was caught. In a statement to Channel 5, the Met said: ‘The Metropolitan Police Service has previously apologised for mistakes made in the investigation of rapes committed by Worboys.’

Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist is on Wednesday, March 24, at 9pm on Channel 5.