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Britain’s Queen Camilla has spoken publicly for the first time about how she had to “fight back” after being assaulted by a stranger on a train as a teenager.
“I was attacked on a train when I was a teenager,” Camilla told BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Wednesday. “I’ve forgotten all about it, but I remember being very angry at the time.”
“(It was) someone I didn’t know. I was reading a book and this boy attacked me and I fought back,” she said.
After getting off the train, Camila said her mother asked her why her hair was standing on end and why her coat was missing a button, pointing out the physical nature of the assault.
The identity of the attacker is unknown, but Camilla said at the time that she thought he was an “old man” but “probably not much older than me.”
She said the memory of the attack had been “lurking in the back of my brain for a long time.”
The Queen revealed the incident during a radio debate on violence against women with BBC commentator John Hunt, whose wife Carol and two daughters Louise and Hannah were murdered by Louise’s ex-partner. The couple’s surviving daughter, Amy, also weighed in on the discussion.
Details of the train attack were previously published in excerpts from the book Power and Palaces, published earlier this year by Valentine Rowe, a former royal correspondent for The Times.
The book contained further details about the incident told to Mr Lowe by Guto Hari, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s communications director from 2008 to 2016 when he was mayor of London.
“She was on the train to Paddington. She was about 16 or 17, and someone was moving her hand further and further away,” Hari told Lowe in the book, recounting a story Camilla is said to have told Johnson at Clarence House.
At that point, Hari told Lowe, Johnson asked what happened next. According to Hari, Camila replied, “I did what my mother taught me. I took off my shoes and hit him on the base with my heel.”
“When she arrived at Paddington, she got so carried away that she jumped off the train, saw a man in uniform and said, ‘That man attacked me,’ and she was arrested,” Hari continued.
At the time of the book’s release, Buckingham Palace had not released an official statement.
Camilla, who became Queen in 2022, has made it her mission to raise awareness of violence against women and girls. Last year, she collaborated with an all-female production crew to create a powerful documentary in which she vowed to continue working to end domestic violence.
CNN’s Jack Guy contributed to this report.
