“He had sex with me and I was so ashamed”

Shirlaine Forrest/Getty Sophie Ellis Bextor

British musician Sophie Ellis-Bextor speaks out about being raped at the age of 17.

“I heard myself saying ‘no’ and ‘I don’t want to,’ but it didn’t make any difference,” the “Not Giving Up on Love” singer reveals in her upcoming memoir. Spinning plate.

“He had sex with me and I was so ashamed,” adds Sophie, now 42, about the “dark and gloomy events.”

“It made me lose my virginity and make me feel stupid,” she continues. “I felt grubby but also insecure about my own feelings since I had no other experience to compare it to.”

Ellis-Bextor’s harrowing experience began innocently enough. In her memoirs, published in Post on SundayShe tells how she attended a gig as a student and later chatted with a 29-year-old musician named Jim.

At the end of the show, Jim invited her back to his apartment to look through some history books, but things quickly changed.

“Before I knew it, we were lying on his bed and he was taking off my underwear,” Sophie writes.

Despite being the victim of a serious sexual assault, the singer, now a mother of five sons, said the attack left her completely confused as it was not any other form of physical aggression that she had been led to believe that she said this was a fundamental part of rape.

“No one had held me down or yelled at me to obey,” she writes, adding that in the 1990s, when the attack occurred, rape was viewed as “associated with aggression,” rather than today’s more nuanced sexual view Consent .

“My experience was not violent,” she adds. “The only thing that happened was that I wasn’t listened to. Of the two people there, one said ‘yes,’ the other said ‘no,’ and the ‘yes’ person did it anyway.”

This lack of non-sexual violence led Ellis-Bextor to believe she had “no case” against her attacker. So instead of taking legal action, she gathered the courage to move on with her life and not let him win.

Her memoir is an attempt to go one step further and use her personal experience to help other people understand “where the line between right and wrong lies.”

Sophie Ellis-Bextor/Instagram Sophie Ellis-Bextor and her family

“I thought so much about why I wanted to write about this,” Ellis-Bextor writes in her memoir. “My life is happy now and I wouldn’t say I felt overly traumatized back then, and yet I feel that the culture that surrounded me – the things I saw and read and the way how sex was talked about – made me believe in it.” had no case.

Ellis-Bextor goes on to reveal that she has “no interest in naming and shaming the man involved,” but she did ensure that the subject of consent was introduced “fairly early” into the lives of the five sons, which she shares with musician husband Richard Jones.

“I want to raise considerate, kind people who can take other people’s feelings into account,” writes the singer. “I want them to actively want the other person to be happy too, not just stop because they have to.”

She adds: “The older I got, the more blatant it seemed to me that this 29-year-old man was ignoring me as a 17-year-old.”

Spinning plate will be released on October 7th.