LUCY Spraggan has revealed she was raped by a hotel porter during production of the X Factor.
The former contestant, who was just 20 at the time, says that she felt let down by ITV after the harrowing ordeal in 2012.
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In her new memoir, Process: Finding My Way Through, Lucy said the rape took place after a night celebrating Rylan Clark’s 25th birthday at the swanky Mayfair nightclub Mahiki.
Lucy said that it was “inappropriate” for anyone, including contestants, to be drunk.
She told the Guardian: “How can you fulfil your duty of care when free alcohol is involved?”
The young star passed out and was escorted back to the hotel by a member of the production team, before the hotel porter offered to escort her to her room.
Some time later, Rylan checked in on an unconscious Lucy and made sure her door was locked when he left.
This meant when the porter later returned to Lucy’s room in order to attack her, he had to use a traceable keycard.
She told the Guardian: “I woke up the next day with this sense of sheer dread.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt that level of confusion since. I knew that I’d been raped, but I could not process that. So I put my clothes on and went into autopilot.”
“No one ever contacted me to ask if I was OK,” she writes in her book.
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Lucy added: “No one called or emailed when the trial was over and he was convicted.
“No one offered me rehabilitation or ongoing mental health treatment. I was on my own.”
Lucy was a popular contestant during her time on the ITV talent show and impressed the judges with a song she had written.
She didn’t win the competition as she had to pull out – due to illness – but the Sheffield singer went on to sign a record deal with Columbia and later went independent.
Although she wanted to make public the reason for her exit from The X Factor, Lucy claimed various people told her: “You have your whole career ahead of you and you can’t retract this.”
But the singer-songwriter said she had since decided that “in order for me to rebuild myself and move on, I needed to tell the truth”.
A spokesperson for Fremantle, the show’s producers, said: “While we believed throughout that we were doing our best to support Lucy in the aftermath of the ordeal, as Lucy thinks we could have done more, we must therefore recognise this. For everything Lucy has suffered, we are extremely sorry.
“Since then, we have done our very best to learn lessons from these events and improve our aftercare processes.”
While a spokesperson for ITV said: “The X Factor was produced by Thames [part of Fremantle] and Syco, who were responsible for duty of care towards all of its programme contributors.
“ITV is committed to having in place suitable and robust processes to protect the mental health and welfare of programme participants, and we have continued to evolve and strengthen our approach.”
Simon Cowell, the creator of The X Factor, said that what happened to Spraggan was “horrific and heartbreaking”.
He said: “I have always supported her wish to tell her story, as well as her efforts to bring about positive change.”
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