Over the last decade, many people have told me they are aware of what really happened to me while I was competing on the X Factor in 2012 – some very directly. A journalist from Sheffield sat me down in front of a camera in my dressing room before my show for a “relaxed interview” and in the middle of nonchalant questions about what it’s like on the road, and what bands I’m into at the moment, said, “I heard you were raped and that is the reason you left the show.” A man in a London bar once shook my hand and blurted out the exact same sentence, waiting for my response as if he’d just asked me if I was having a good night. In those moments, the story was more important than the fact that I was a human being.
I don’t know how much the story of what had happened to me was worth in financial terms but it was sold, or leaked, to the papers – allegedly by someone within the Metropolitan police – within hours of it happening. Reddit, Digital Spy, Twitter and all of the gossip websites started to flood with rumours of what had taken place, of which hotel it had been in – details that should never have been public. In the UK, victims of sexual offences have a legal right to anonymity, for as long as they choose to do so. By deciding to speak about what happened to me now, I am waiving my right to anonymity, but back in 2012 countless privacy specialists and cyber experts were hired to remove any leaked information about me from the internet. As the speculation on discussion forum webpages went up, they were pulled down. Tweets containing my name and allegations of what happened to me disappeared. It was quite amazing, really; I had no idea that this kind of thing could be done.
Not everything was caught in time, though. In the weeks that followed, my dad, who I hadn’t had much contact with over the years, had been trying to call me. He wanted to know why I had left the show and where I had gone, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to pick up. Searching for answers, he took to the web forums, where painfully descriptive stories of what happened to “X Factor’s Lucy Spraggan” were being posted. One day, I did pick up one of his calls. I had never heard my father cry until then. “I just want you to tell me one thing.” A breath caught in his throat and his pitch went up. “Is it true?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I heard a crash of something being thrown across the room on the other end of the line. Then I heard a noise that sounded like a scene from a wildlife documentary: a primal, guttural cry, the kind that a buffalo makes when it watches helplessly from a distance as a lion kills its young. The line went dead.
The police arrested and charged my rapist almost immediately due to the evidence that was available. Thank God. Privilege sounds like an odd word to use when talking about sexual assault, but an arrest and charge are a privilege that not many victims are afforded. The court case began quickly. In this country’s courts, we have public galleries to ensure a “transparent justice system”. It means that any member of the public can be present for a court case. During the trial of the man who attacked me, the entire gallery was full of press. Straight after the verdict, my closest friends and my family didn’t know what had happened, but if you were reading the right online newspapers, you did.
At least, you knew it happened to someone that sounded very closely, but not explicitly, like it could be me. Lots of newspapers flew close to the sun while reporting on me, without using my name. There were headlines like: “a 21-year-old, female, reality TV contestant, made famous by a song”. In 2013, on the day the judge sentenced her daughter’s rapist to 10 years in prison, a journalist offered my mum £35,000 for an exclusive. She put the phone down on them.
In 2014, I’d been out drinking all day in Brighton and a woman befriended me. She joined on to the group I was out with and appeared to be getting more and more drunk as the day went on. She waited until the group had disbanded and just she and I were left. Both of us were sat slumped against a wall in the smoking area on a roof terrace of a club. She started to divulge her deepest, darkest (almost certainly made up) traumatic secrets to me, and then asked me, “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” The security guard who had been quietly chaperoning me noticed a red light in her breast pocket and approached her. She was using recording equipment. When asked what it was, she got up, clearly not drunk at all, and left very quickly.
And it wasn’t just journalists. A greatly disliked former winner of another reality show sent me a DM on Twitter, out of the blue, saying he had “found out what happened in 2012” and was about to “announce” it. He wanted to know if I would like to “make a statement” before he did. I sent proof of his threats to my lawyer, who responded with our own threat of legal enforcement: contempt of court carries a 10-year sentence.
When I use my name to book a table at a restaurant, or it flashes up on the screen at the doctor’s, lots of people study it, look at me, then back at my name, and then say, “Lucy Spraggan – are you the girl off X Factor?” That has happened ever since 2012. It’s pretty mad to think that something as personal as the name I was given when I was born, the one I had for 21 years before the show, ended up being synonymous with a TV show. And, by default, synonymous with what happened to me. I thought about changing it for a while because every time someone asked if that was me, it triggered that reaction.
I’ve had to lie almost every single day since. When I’m introduced on a podcast or written about in the paper, it’s always, “Lucy Spraggan, who quit TXF due to illness.” People still ask me why I left the show. And with each lie comes a flood of extremely painful memories. It’s not good to lie, to hide, to harbour. But that is why we’re here. I have spent 10 years in my very own prison, a small box, nodding my head in agreement to a narrative that I didn’t even choose.
It happens less now but when members of the public used to ask me, “Why did you leave the show?’, it was usually very genuine. Some people would joke or scold me: “Must have been a pretty fucking bad hangover to miss out on that opportunity. What a waste!” That always stung. But when a journalist asked me that question, I knew they had an ulterior motive. They would quiz me about my “mystery illness” and I would know that they knew just as much as I did about why I left.
Do you know what? My experience was fucking awful. It has been a terrible thing to live with and was a hideous thing to endure. But being in the public eye has meant that every time I spoke to a journalist and they repeatedly asked me vague-but-not-vague questions, which I quickly learned to sidestep, just in time for the next rephrased one, I knew that what they really wanted was for me to relinquish my right to anonymity. Every time they have asked me their version of the same questions, they have inflicted more pain.
If I had initially spoken openly about the reason I “disappeared”, about the events that altered the course of my life so greatly, I don’t think I’d have truly had the space to recover from them. The question I would have been asked at supermarket checkouts would be, “Are you the girl that happened to?” Now, I’m in a strong enough place to talk publicly about what really happened for the first time. I’m ready to talk in order to show people at checkouts that I’m not just that girl. I have a story to share.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
