Lily Allen has opened up about her harrowing ordeal with a stalker in a new interview with The Guardian, describing what she feels was the ineffective attitude police took towards her situation, which has left her “a changed person”.
As Allen recounts in the interview, the UK pop songstress first became aware of Alex Gray in 2009 when he created the @LilyAllenRIP Twitter channel and began sending threatening letters to Allen via “my record company, my management offices, my sister’s shop, my flat”.
Allen said at first her interactions with police were of comfort to her, but the comfort quickly eroded when she discovered that police were unwilling to take her complaints against the increasingly menacing Gray seriously.
“I felt very alone. I have some trust issues now, not least with the police. Who can you trust if you cannot trust institutions like the police?” she said, citing one interaction during which police refused to provide her with a photo of Gray.
In October last year, a man, whom Allen believes was Gray, broke into her house after the singer forgot to lock her back door before bed. The singer was asleep, with her children in the house, when a loud noise awoke her.
“I sat up and looked and the door-handle was twisting round,” she told The Guardian. “This guy came steaming in and I didn’t know who he was. I recoiled and he ripped the duvet off, calling me a ‘fucking bitch’ and yelling about where his dad is.”
A friend who’d been sleeping in the same room as Allen eventually pushed the intruder out of the house, but police dismissed the incident as simply a burglary after discovering that the singer’s handbag had been stolen during the altercation.
“The police made me feel like a nuisance, rather than a victim.”“For me, the burglary was like this insignificant thing compared to what he was doing to me and my life,” said Allen. Police apparently failed to recognise that Gray’s sister had recently reported him missing and his mother had given police an email from Gray saying he was in London to “murder a celebrity”.
“For me, it was too much of a coincidence that the only night I had left the shutters up, this man came in. I believe he had been spending a lot of time out there in my garden, watching,” Allen said.
“It’s difficult to articulate it when you have no definition, when the police are saying, ‘right, it’s burglary if you want this guy to get a prison sentence’, and you’re thinking, ‘but I don’t give a shit about my handbag. What I give a shit about is a man who is saying he wants to put a knife through my face.”
Gray is presently awaiting sentencing on charges of burglary and harassment and Allen remains in limbo in the meantime. She’s had to leave the flat she previously called home and said she still sees Gray’s face on people in the street.
“It was not special attention I looked for. It was reassurance and validation. The police made me feel like a nuisance, rather than a victim,” she said. You can read the full interview with Allen via The Guardian Observer here.
