The Metropolitan police is examining a statement from one of the women who has alleged that Sir Clement Freud, the late broadcaster, writer and Liberal party MP, was a paedophile who preyed on her for 10 years.
Sylvia Woosley says in the ITV documentary Exposure, to be broadcast on Wednesday night, that Freud groomed and abused her from the age of 10 until she was 19. Woosley, now in her 70s, appears in the documentary in obvious distress to allege that Freud took away her childhood.
“The child that was denied in me has been with me all my life and has orientated my life. So, it’s the child in me that is speaking, actually, and that would like to be freed,” she said.
Woosley has never before spoken publicly about her experiences, and her allegations will be examined by detectives from the Met’s child abuse command.
She has made a statement to the police, and her allegations against Freud will be passed to Operation Hydrant, the overarching national investigation into “non-recent” child abuse. Hydrant said in February that it had a database of 2,328 suspects, 298 of whom were dead and 91 of whom were politicians.
The head of the operation, chief constable Simon Bailey, is clear that victims who allege abuse by someone who is now dead have the same expectation that their allegations will be taken seriously and that they will have recourse to justice.
Freud, who shared an office with the disgraced Liberal Democrat MP Cyril Smith, is beyond justice, but police are likely to examine whether there are any living individuals connected with the abuse.
The ITV documentary also interviewed another woman, who remained anonymous. She said Freud made advances towards her from 1971, when she was 11, and raped her when she was 18.
The family of Freud, who was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, were shown the documentary in the last week. After viewing it, they issued a statement to the programme makers in which his widow, Jill Freud, 89, said she was “deeply saddened and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women”.
Freud, a panellist on BBC’s Just a Minute who became a household name, died in 2009 at the age of 84. Woosley came forward to the Exposure team with a written account of her alleged abuse in 2014, following the programme’s revelations about Jimmy Savile.
Woosley described how Freud molested her for several years after they met in the late 1940s when her parents moved to Cannes, in the south of France. She was 10 and Freud was working in the city at the time.
The second woman, who has no connection to Woosley, alleged that, as well as raping her when she was 18, Freud also abused her as a child.
Woosley said that when she met Freud as a 10-year-old, he immediately took a liking to her.
“Just to me. My mother was thrilled. Clay Freud is paying attention to her daughter, you know,” she said in the documentary, Abused and Betrayed – A Life Sentence.
Alleging that he kissed her on the mouth during a bus trip, she said: “I was disgusted and helpless. I just didn’t react in any way, because I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”
Her mother later turned to Freud for help after her marriage broke down, and Woosley went to live with him and his wife in London for five years at the age of 14. She claims that he assaulted her frequently, and believed his wife did not realise what was going on.
She decide to challenge him in her early 40s, and after contacting him at the House of Commons he saw her again. “I said: ‘Why me?’ And he said: ‘Because I loved you, you were a very sensual little girl’,” she said.
Woosley told the documentary: “I just want to clear things up before I die ... I want to die clean. Having been so hard on myself, trying to destroy myself so many times, you can’t bury the truth forever, it needs to be heard.
“I don’t want to take this to my tomb,” she said. “I would like to just return to the child I was before I was molested physically, before I was introduced to that side of life too early.”
The other woman said she met Freud when she was “a lonely, neglected and socially isolated young girl” and that he had telephoned her from the age of 11 in 1971. He was treated like a “surrogate father figure” by both of her parents, she said.
Years of contact followed, she claimed, including occasions when he brought her to the houses of parliament and to his home.
“I can remember his kissing me on the mouth and soft hugging me,” she said. “I felt sick, but grateful at the same time, frightened and unable to move or react in any way.”
In June 1978, when she was 18 and Freud was 54, she said he raped her after coming to her home. “I kept saying I did not want him to continue forcing me, but was terrified that he would become violent,” she said.
“I live in constant terror that I’ll be found out, exposed. I’ve already suffered across nearly 40 years. It’s not simply to be labelled as depression or mental illness, this is disempowerment, self-destructiveness and grief. This is what real suffering looks like.”
Freud’s widow said in her statement that viewing the documentary was “a very sad day for me”.
“I was married to Clement for 58 years and loved him dearly. I am shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women. I sincerely hope they will now have some peace,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats said: “These allegations are horrific. We are desperately sorry to learn that lives have been ruined by a man whose public face was so greatly at odds to his true character. It has clearly taken a lot of courage for these women to speak out after a lifetime of having to hide it.
“This is the latest in a terrifying line of cases where high-profile figures have systematically used their status, celebrity and power to abuse and to rape.
“Clement Freud was a senior figure in the Liberals, our party’s predecessor, and we are deeply shocked and horrified by this news. Our party was never aware of what happened, and our hearts go out to the women who were affected.”
The Met did not comment.
- Exposure: Abused and Betrayed – A Life Sentence will be broadcast on ITV at 11.05pm on Wednesday.
