Victim of Stuart Hall speaks of ordeal

ONE of the victims of Stuart Hall has said she knows of more young people who were abused by the veteran broadcaster.

The woman, who was 13 when she was sexually assaulted by Hall, spoke of her relief that Hall has been jailed.

“At first I didn’t think he was going to plead guilty but then he did. It was a relief because then I didn’t have to go to court with my family,” she told ITV News.

“I suppose there was overwhelming evidence against him, so he had to plead guilty.”

Asked how she felt when he previously maintained his innocence, she said: “I was just quite sickened really that he was saying that the girls who said this were lying, and I found that awful, as it was something that I’d held as a dark secret for so many years.”

She said she found his apology “hard to accept” after his initial denial.

Describing her ordeal, she said she had been invited to stay at a friend’s house over a Christmas holiday and Hall was with her friend’s father when she was picked up from her house.

She said she was with two friends in her friend’s bedroom “just playing music and chilling”, and drinking a bottle of Martini they brought up from downstairs.

“We had obviously drunk too much and I was sick,” she said. “My friend’s mother came up and took me to the bathroom, undressed me.

“Then Stuart Hall came in. She left me and told him to bath me. I remember all this even though I was drunk.

“I was absolutely shocked into rude awakening, because I’d never been naked even in front of my own parents, never mind a stranger.

“He put me in the bath and he was fondling me and he obviously didn’t have very long, it felt like it was a panicking frenzied fondle, as much as he could do with the time he had me. And he laid me on the floor and was trying to kiss me, and just hands everywhere basically. Then my friend’s mother came back and it was over.”

She said the next day she found out Hall had done the same thing to her friend in the bedroom immediately after, and her friend’s younger sister, aged eight, has also been assaulted.

“Then the eight-year-old daughter said she had a secret with Stuart Hall and she told us that he had gone into her room the night before when she was in bed and he made her put her elastic bracelet on him and he made her lick him because he had put some drink on. And she told us it was a secret,” she said.

Asked if she thought people should be named when they are arrested, she said: “It is very important. I came forward because I was looking on the news, listening out whether his name would come up. If his name hadn’t come up I probably wouldn’t have come forward.”