Model Penny Lancaster has said she still has “triggers” after surviving multiple sexual assaults.
The Loose Woman panellist, 54, who is married to Sir Rod Stewart, has written a memoir titled Someone Like Me which documents some of the attacks she endured when she was younger.
Ahead of its release, Lancaster spoke about the impact the assaults have had on her life which included an attempted abduction when she was five and an attack in an underpass when she was 12.
Lancaster told Saga Magazine: “To this day I have triggers, when I hear footsteps behind me. I flinch and that makes me quite angry and frustrated.
“Although it was hard to write about, I can now talk about it as if it was someone else’s experience, when before I couldn’t without crying and becoming a bit of a mess.”
The model was also sexually assaulted by a fashion designer when she was 17, however, never reported it despite being urged by police.
She said: “To this day I don’t know if I was raped.
“He (the officer) said reporting it could still help someone. But I said, ‘I can’t’.
“I realised how old the guy must be now. Even if he’s still alive, he wouldn’t be a risk. The only people who’d suffer would be his family and I’d feel that was cruel.”
Lancaster has since joined the Special Constabulary where she talked down a suicidal man and helped guard the Queen’s coffin.
She said: “It’s lovely to be known as part of a team, rather than just Rod’s wife. I had to put the work in for them to realise I was taking this seriously but it’s my true calling.
“The more you do it the more you understand the importance of caring for your community.”
Lancaster met Sir Rod Stewart in 1999 and married him in 2007 despite not originally being a “fan” of the Maggie May singer.
She said: “I wasn’t a fan. And I definitely wasn’t thinking of a relationship because I was coming out of a long-term one, which wasn’t easy.
“Rod was such an unknown entity.”
Speaking about the night they met, where she went up to the singer to ask for an autograph, she said: “There were a lot of times after that night when I thought, ‘What the hell am I getting myself into?’. But Rod’s world was a vortex and I was sucked in.”
Prior to their relationship, Sir Rod was married to his first wife, actress Alana Stewart and later to New Zealand model Rachel Hunter and has eight children, two of which, Alastair and Aiden, he shares with Lancaster.
She also revealed that Sir Rod originally did not want to have more children, however, eventually changed his mind.
She said: “Now Rod always says, ‘I wish I’d said yes (to babies) earlier, because then we could have had more children’. Even five years ago we were talking about adopting, but it ended up not happening. We thought there might be too much of an age gap.”
Lancaster’s memoir, Someone Like Me, goes on sale on September 25.
