Ulrika: I blamed myself for date rape
TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson has said that she believed for years that her date-rape ordeal when she was 19 was her fault. Ulrika - who was crowned winner of Celebrity Big Brother in January - discussed the incident in a TV interview with Piers Morgan to be screened later this month. "I felt I'd allowed myself into a situation which I shouldn't have," she told Morgan in the interview, part of his ITV1 series Life Stories. "I blamed myself." The 41-year-old said that she was so paralysed with panic she could not scream for help - and that afterwards her attacker suggested they should go to the cinema. "I felt pain, physical pain," she said. "I said 'I can't go'. I don’t remember what I said but I stayed and he left. I actually don’t think he realised what he’d done." Ulrika first spoke of her ordeal, which happened when she was 19 and working as a secretary at TV-am, in her 2002 autobiography Honest. She has admitted she knew her attacker and that he had come to her hotel room because they were going on a date. He was charming and very nice and then things started to happen very quickly," she said. He got very amorous and I panicked because to me that was not what I was expecting."
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Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix.
An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.