She remembers becoming conscious that her terror was “his thrill”, thrashing and kicking free of his grasp and hearing his laughter behind her as she ran through the darkness of the tunnel into the light. To her frustration, her assailant (believed to have assaulted other girls) was not caught. And from then on, her father insisted on driving her to school the long way around.
Around this time – possibly triggered by the attack – Lancaster began to suffer from a chronic sweating condition called hyperhidrosis. This compounded a cycle of bullying (she was picked on at school because of her height) and social anxiety, ensuring that Lancaster felt more comfortable with adults than her peers and, perhaps, paving the way for her later marriage to an older man. Told she would “never amount to anything” on the academic front by one teacher, her school’s careers officer advised modelling.
“Suddenly I was praised for the way I looked,” she says today. In those early years – despite photographers regularly pointing out that one of her breasts was larger than the other – she modelled underwear for M&S, swimwear for C&A and face cream for Ponds. “The work had moments when it was very empowering. But then I got wrapped up in the darker side, too.” Fluctuating between a size 10 and 12, she was constantly told to diet, but because of her larger bone structure could only lose so much weight before looking “all skin and bones”. Now she says the job “permanently altered my relationship with food” and worries about the “six pounds added by the TV camera, especially after I’ve indulged a bit with food and drink”. But she has learned to become “less critical of my imperfections” with age and “continues to resist Botox.”
She was just 17 when she was assaulted by an industry figure who was “old enough to be my father”. This man had promised to take her out to a networking event, but first took her to his luxurious home, where he handed her a Martini. She only recalls the first few sips. In her memoir, she describes later waking in a “semi-conscious state” with “lead-heavy eyelids”.
“I wasn’t in the living room any more,” she writes. “I was face down. On a mattress. On a bed. Every instinct was telling me to call out and struggle, but I couldn’t. Whenever I tried to move, my body was completely paralysed.” After the sexual assault, this man threatened the teenager to keep quiet. The next day, he phoned her home and offered diamond jewellery, which she refused. She told her mother she had a “bad feeling” about the man, but decided against going to the police. That year had seen the release of the film The Accused, starring Jodie Foster as a rape victim who had found her own reputation on trial after a violent gang rape. Lancaster couldn’t face that, although today she struggles with the likelihood that her attacker went on to subject other girls to similarly premeditated assaults.
