I feared I’d be raped in a taxi, says author Dame Jilly
author Dame Jilly Cooper has revealed she once feared a fellow writer was going to rape her in the back of a taxi.
Dame Jilly said she was in her 20s and working in the publicity department of a major London publishing house at the time of the terrifying attack.
She and the man, who Dame Jilly has refused to name, were returning from a lunch in Soho when he pounced and tried to ‘tear her clothes off’ in the back of the cab. The 87-year-old added: ‘He jumped on me and pulled my clothes apart.
‘It was awful. I was terrified. When I got back to the office I was in floods of tears and told my manager that someone had just tried to rape me.’
Dame Jilly, known for her bestselling ‘bonkbusters’ such as Rivals, Riders and The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, claimed her boss was initially very sympathetic – until she named the person who had sexually assaulted her.
‘When he realised it was one of our authors I was ushered out of that office in two seconds,’ she told the Daily Telegraph.
When The Mail on Sunday contacted Dame Jilly last night, she played down the incident and again refused to name her attacker, saying: ‘I mustn’t. I mustn’t. I mustn’t. It’s so long ago. It was an important author. I was very young. They didn’t try to rape me – they made a massive pass after lunch. It was a heavy pounce.’
Dame Jilly, who has two children and five grandchildren, insisted ‘the past is another country’.
However, she admitted to the Telegraph that the incident was one of the reasons why she tended to be broadly supportive of the Me Too movement.
She said: ‘Yes, I think [Me Too] has been good in many respects.’