Katherine Jenkins says she'll never forget attacker

Jan 14 2008 by Rin Simpson, Western Mail

KATHERINE JENKINS revealed yesterday how she is terrified of walking anywhere on her own at night after she was grabbed in the street by a sex attacker.

The chart-topping mezzo soprano was a 19-year-old student in London when she was almost raped by a stranger whose face she says she’ll never forget.

“I was absolutely terrified,” she says in her new autobiography, Time To Say Hello.

“My first thought, as he grunted and dragged me along, was that he was going to murder me; my second was that he was going to rape me.”

Now 27, she was a year into a scholarship at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music when the attack took place as she walked home from a birthday party to her flat in Paddington.

She was on the phone to her flat mate Lucy – a precaution she decided on because she had to pass through a narrow pedestrian tunnel – when she sensed a man behind her.

Before she could alert anyone he had grabbed her. As he pulled her down an alleyway she tried to bargain with him, offering him her wallet, but he wasn’t interested.

Katherine, fit from regular gym visits, managed to slip out of his grasp and began to run. But she was in five inch heels and he caught up, punching her to the ground.

Her reaction, she says, was instinctive. She writes in her autobiography, which is now being serialised in the Mail on Sunday, “Until this kind of thing happens, you do not know how you will react; you have no idea whether you will freeze or put up a fight.

“What I knew instinctively, though, was that if I could curl up into a small, tight ball, he would not be able to rape me. He could kick me, which he did over and over again, but not rape me.

“So that is what I did.”

If she had failed, the course of her life may have been very different, but her attacker gave up and settled for taking her wallet.

Neither had realised that the entire ordeal had been heard by Lucy, who was still connected on the phone Katherine had clutched in her hand.

Moments after the man disappeared, Lucy appeared with fellow flat mate Edda, both in pyjamas and desperately worried they would find their friend dead.

Shortly after that the police – who had been called – arrived too, but the attacker has never been caught.

Eight years on Katherine is still affected by the experience.

She tries to avoid having to walk anywhere by herself after dark. She is also very protective of her younger sister Laura, and always insists on giving her money to get a taxi home when she visits.

Katherine, originally from Neath, said, “I have never forgotten what happened that night in Paddington when I feared for my life, but I have been determined to minimise its effect on me.”

Time to Say Hello, on sale from January 28, is published by Orion at £18.99