Lucy Spraggan has said that the real reason she left The X Factor was because she was sexually attacked during a night out with the cast and crew.
Lucy tried out for the ninth season of the reality singing show when she was 20 years old. She made it through the tryout, boot camp, and judge’s house stages, but quit the competition four weeks into the live shows.
At the time, she left because she was sick, but now the singer says she had to leave because she was raped.
telling in detail what happened Lucy, who is now 30, says the attack happened after a night out enjoying fellow contestant Rylan Clark’s 25th birthday at the Mayfair bar Mahiki, where some of the show’s crew was also present.
‘It was inappropriate for anybody – including contestants – to be drunk,’ she said.
‘How can you fulfil your duty of care when free alcohol is involved?’
In her new memoir, Process: Finding My Way Through, Lucy explains how she was escorted back to the hotel by a member of the production team when a hotel porter offered to take her to her room.
But as they were leaving, Lucy said that he had flipped the safety latch on her door so it wouldn’t lock.
Rylan came back later to check on Lucy, who was still sleeping, and made sure her door was locked before he went.
When the servant came back to attack her later, he had to use a key card that could be tracked.
‘I woke up the next day with this sense of sheer dread,’ she explained when speaking to The Guardian.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt that level of confusion since.
‘I knew that I’d been raped, but I could not process that. So I put my clothes on and went into autopilot.’
The production team called the police, and an arrest was made quickly. However, Lucy has said that she thinks they were “unprepared” to deal with what had happened.
Even though she got financial and medical help right away, she has said that she doesn’t think she got enough help after the trial.
‘No one ever contacted me to ask if I was OK,’ she wrote in her memoir.
‘No one called or emailed when the trial was over and he was convicted. No one offered me rehabilitation or ongoing mental health treatment.
‘I was on my own.’
Lucy was a working artist before she went on The X Factor. Producers found her, and she was the first contestant on the show to play an instrument and sing her own songs.
Her demo song, “Last Night,” was the fourth most-watched video on YouTube that year, and she became the most-Googled act in the UK.
At first, she said she was leaving the show because she was sick, but now she says it was because she was raped.
She said that the side effects of Pep, a drug that stops HIV, made her too sick in the days after the attack to think about continuing with the competition.
Although she wanted to publicly reveal the real reason for her exit, she has said various people said: ‘You have your whole career ahead of you and you can’t retract this.’
However, she’s now said that ‘in order for me to rebuild myself and move on, I needed to tell the truth’.
In a statement, an ITV spokesperson said it had ‘the deepest compassion for Lucy and everything she has endured as a result of this horrific ordeal’.
‘We commend her resilience and bravery.’
It added that the series was produced by Thames and Syco, who were ‘primarily responsible for duty of care towards all of its programme contributors’.
But ITV also said that as commissioning broadcaster, it was ‘committed to having in place suitable and robust oversight procedures, with a view to ensuring that independent producers employ the correct processes to protect the mental health and welfare of participants’.
‘We have evolved and improved these oversight procedures since the events in question and we are encouraged to hear that Thames recognises the importance of continuous review and improvement of their own processes.
‘We continue to evolve our own duty of care processes on programmes we produce to ensure that there are appropriate measures in place to support contributors before, during and after filming.
‘In an event of such a distressing nature, welfare and support towards the victim would always be of the utmost priority.’
In a statement, a spokesperson for Fremantle, the show’s producers, said: ‘The serious sexual assault suffered by Lucy Spraggan in October 2012 was a truly horrific criminal act for which the perpetrator, who was not connected with the programme, was rightfully prosecuted and imprisoned. Anyone should feel safe when they are sleeping in a hotel room – and it is abhorrent to think that a hotel porter abused that trust in such a vile way.
‘To our knowledge, the assault was an event without precedent in the UK television industry. Whilst we believed throughout that we were doing our best to support Lucy in the aftermath of the ordeal, as Lucy thinks we could have done more, we must therefore recognise this. For everything Lucy has suffered, we are extremely sorry.
‘Since then, we have done our very best to learn lessons from these events and improve our aftercare processes.’
They added: ‘Whilst we have worked hard to try and protect Lucy’s lifetime right to anonymity, we applaud her strength and bravery now that she has chosen to waive that right.’
Simon Cowell, the creator of the series, also told The Guardian that what happened to Lucy was ‘horrific and heart-breaking’.
‘I have always supported her wish to tell her story, as well as her efforts to bring about positive change,’ he said.
The defendant was given a 10-year jail term after he or she admitted guilt.
Lucy said earlier this year that writing her book had been “horrendous,” but that it was “great” to look at herself and think about the past.
