UnTouchableStories
People who are known for something else, saying what happened to them or to someone they love. Every story here was shared publicly by the person themselves, and every one of them lists its sources.
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2 stories about Sexual abuse and sexual assault
Penny Lancaster
Penny Lancaster was believed the first time. The second time she told nobody for years
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Penny Lancaster was twelve, in her school uniform, when a man followed her on the way to school and assaulted her. She ran straight to the headmaster's office and told them what had happened. They believed her. The police were called that day. Weeks later the police came back. From her description they had worked out that the same man was behind a number of attacks on girls, and that she was the oldest of them, and so the best witness they had. She was driven out before dawn on a winter morning and parked in a police car outside a suspect's house, and she watched him scrape the ice off his windscreen while the officers waited. She could not be certain it was him. She says nobody put her under any pressure, but she could tell what they were hoping for, and she would not name a man she was not sure about. He was never caught. She has lived since with not knowing how many others there were. Afterwards, nothing was dealt with. Her parents were protective, her father drove her to school every day, the police and her teachers were kind — and so, she thought, it was fine. Nobody then understood what something like that does to a child, and she says it has stayed with her. Years later, working as a model, it happened again. This time it was a client she had worked for before and had no reason not to trust. She was drugged. She says she was not conscious and not aware of what was happening. She pulled herself together, went on to the event she was booked for, remembers little of it, went home and felt sick to her stomach — and when her parents asked the next day how it had gone, she said nothing. She decided it would be buried and go to her grave. She was not thinking of it as a crime she could report, and she did not want to put her parents through it a second time after what they had been through when she was twelve. It came out decades later, and by accident. Filming a television programme with police officers, working on a case not unlike it, she mentioned it in passing — matter-of-factly, she says. The officer stopped her. He told her she had just reported a crime, that it did not matter how long ago it happened, and that they should take a statement. She said no. Asked why, she says she did want him to pay for what he had done, but that he was an old man by then and she believed no longer a danger to anyone, and the people who would suffer were his wife, his children and his grandchildren. She has had one session of therapy. It lasted three hours, she cried through it, and she has not been back — she says she was looking after too many other people at the time, including a husband who was seriously ill. She says she will get round to it. She is a special constable now. She says that through her modelling years she watched out for the other young women in the room: staying in it, holding the door. Nothing here is medical advice. You do not have to report anything to the police to get help, and it does not matter how long ago it was. The support at the end of this page is free, and some of it is open day and night.
Kimberly Wyatt
Kimberly Wyatt told someone as a child, and was not believed
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Kimberly Wyatt was sexually abused as a young child. She said clearly that she did not want to go into detail, and this story does not. What she did describe is the shape of it. It was not her immediate family but relatives who were close to them, living in the same farmhouse, in a place cut off from everywhere else. She was, in her word, vulnerable — a child in a room down the hallway. It happened more than once, and not only with one person. The part she returned to was not the abuse. It was telling someone. She built up the confidence to speak about it as a child, and she was not believed. She describes that as consistent — that the people who felt safe to trust turned out not to be, and that when she was honest about it nothing changed. Looking back, she is not sure her parents had it in them to deal with it or protect her the way she needed, and she thinks that is because of hurt in their own lives. She says she has found a way to accept that. Where it went instead was dance. On stage, she says, everything she did had something behind it, and nobody watching knew: she was living out something true that she had no other way of saying. She describes it as therapeutic — a place for what she was not being listened to about. She now runs a dance academy and works with children who have been bullied, or are neurodivergent, or simply feel they do not fit. What she tells them is that a wider well of experience is something an artist can draw on, and that finding forgiveness can make it a tool rather than a weight. That is how she holds it. It is not advice, and nobody has to arrive at it. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this happened to you, support is listed at the end of this page — and it does not matter how long ago it was.