Lucy Spraggan was a 20-year-old gigging musician when she was scouted by producers to compete on The X Factor. This was 2012, and Simon Cowell’s primetime star-maker was at the peak of its influence, having produced One Direction and Little Mix in its previous two series. Spraggan became the first contestant to perform her own songs and play an instrument. Her audition – an ode to “beer fear” called Last Night (“Last night I told ya I loved ya / Woke up, blamed it on the vodka”) – was the world’s fourth most-watched YouTube video of that year, and she became the UK’s most Googled artist. Lily Allen tweeted that Spraggan reminded her of a young version of herself, and she was the bookies’ odds-on favourite to win the show. Viewers voted her through the first three live shows before being told that she had left the competition due to illness. Only, she wasn’t ill.
Eleven years later, Spraggan, now 31, is finally ready to talk about why she disappeared. We meet in a light-filled attic studio, and though she later admits that she is incredibly nervous, she appears measured and resolute, choosing her words with the care of someone who has spent a great deal of time weighing them. We’re here to discuss her new memoir, in which she reveals that she was raped during the production of The X Factor, and the devastating impact that this had on the subsequent decade of her life. “My working title for the book was Are You That Girl?,” she says. “Because for years I was terrified of being known as the girl that that happened to. I was deeply, chronically ashamed. Now I understand that what happened wasn’t my decision, it was out of my hands. And in order for me to rebuild myself and move on, I needed to tell the truth.”
Spraggan was born in Canterbury, Kent, and lived with her mum, Anstey, then a teacher, and three siblings after her parents divorced in her early childhood. She grew up in a party household (“Our neighbours hated us,” she writes) surrounded by her mother’s creative friends. Her earliest memories of performing were in school assemblies, where she sang funny songs she’d written about her teachers, until one took offence and put a stop to them. She booked her first show at 13, and at the time she was invited to audition by The X Factor, she was gigging on the same circuit as Ed Sheeran, with their names regularly replacing each other’s on pub chalkboards up and down the country. (In the book she recalls asking a promoter: “Who the fuck is that guy? He’s playing as many gigs as I am.”)
She had always written her own songs, and was sceptical about appearing on a show in which contestants sang covers. “If I look back, my instincts were telling me it’s not what I should do. But The X Factor was huge, and felt very sparkly. I was also a raving opportunist, and believed that I could change the show.” It helped that the talent scout was a beautiful woman who Lucy says offered to take her out if she signed up (the date never materialised).
During the early stages of the competition, Spraggan could feel producers fishing for juicy backstories from their contestants. She was asked if anything tragic had ever happened to her, or if she was auditioning for anyone else (perhaps a sick relative?). There had been difficult elements to her upbringing – she writes of her violent father and how she’d been in trouble with the police for fighting – but she didn’t feel like divulging any of that to millions of viewers. “I didn’t want there to be a narrative that didn’t feel authentic,” she says, “but getting pissed out of my head was authentic.” So, she played up her persona as a party girl who sang about hangovers. It worked: audiences lapped it up. “You tell producers things about yourself, and they say, ‘The public is going to love that.’ They encourage you to be a caricature of yourself.”
Having successfully commodified herself for the cameras, Spraggan played her role with gusto. She soon found an ally in another queer contestant, Rylan Clark, and together they revelled in causing mischief – staging unsanctioned breakouts from the luxury London hotel where contestants were holed up, and being papped pretending to flag down a stationary bus after a night out. Their antics attracted welcome press for the show. “We were always told to tell the publicist anything that worried or concerned us,” she writes. “But once you did, as if by magic, it was those stories that ended up being printed [in the tabloids].” Mostly, she writes, it was harmless.
In the fourth week of the live shows, Spraggan and Clark were told by production that they were being kicked out of the hotel, ostensibly for bad behaviour. “I remember thinking, ‘What? We haven’t even done anything!’ Nothing that would’ve warranted being chucked out of the hotel. Rylan is the most polite, respectful person in the world and he tried to get to the bottom of it, and got the impression that it was all helpful to our storyline [for the show].” While the other contestants would remain on a private floor at the Corinthia just off Whitehall, with 24-hour security provided by the show, Spraggan and Clark were exiled to a hotel on Edgware Road.
Soon after, Clark celebrated his 25th birthday at Mayfair nightclub Mahiki. The drinks were free and unlimited, and X Factor crew, journalists and paparazzi were all there to capture the ensuing chaos. “By this stage, I knew my role: get drunk, do something funny, appear in the headlines the next day,” Spraggan writes. Pictures duly appeared of her picking up a beer bottle with her teeth and downing it, hands free. Some of the production team were drinking, too. “It was inappropriate for anybody – including contestants – to be drunk,” she says. “How can you fulfil your duty of care when free alcohol is involved?”
Spraggan ended up passing out. She was escorted back to the hotel by a member of the production team, where a hotel porter offered to help get Spraggan back to her room. As they left, the porter flipped the security latch on her door to prevent it locking behind them. Some time later, Clark checked in on an unconscious Spraggan and made sure that her door was locked when he left. His decision meant that when the porter later returned to Spraggan’s room in order to attack her, he had to use a traceable keycard. “I woke up the next day with this sense of sheer dread,” she says. “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.”
Clark was the first person whom Spraggan told about her rape, and he became her fiercest advocate (they remain friends today). The police were called by the production team, who took Spraggan to a specialist unit. An arrest was quickly made thanks to the keycard, but she believes that the production team was “unprepared” to deal with what had happened.
Spraggan’s mother recalls standing in the street outside a restaurant when a member of the production team informed her over the phone that her daughter had been raped. The news was quickly leaked to the press, Spraggan believes by the Met police. Her right to anonymity prevented her from being named, and cyber experts were employed to delete rumours circulating on Twitter and comment sections. During her attacker’s trial the next year, the gallery was full of journalists, but reports referred obliquely to a “television star”.
The few days after the assault passed in a blur, and the side-effects of Pep (Pep – post-exposure prophylaxis – a drug that, if taken within 72 hours of exposure, prevents HIV) made Spraggan too unwell to consider continuing with the competition. She remembers being initially sequestered in a room on the 11th floor of the Park Lane Hilton. “That evening, I had to relentlessly shake away the constant pull to go towards the balcony doors,” she writes. “‘All of this could go away so quickly,’ I thought.”
Initially, Spraggan wanted to make public the reason for her exit from the competition. “At first I said, ‘Just tell them what happened.’ But I realised straight away that it wasn’t going to be so simple. I remember various people saying, ‘You have your whole career ahead of you and you can’t retract this.’” [Independent privacy and criminal lawyers, and the police, advised her of the implications of deciding to waive her anonymity.]
Tulisa Contostavlos, the X Factor judge assigned to mentor Spraggan, paid her a visit. In the book, Spraggan writes that, “I was grateful that she’d come to see me, but I felt like I had no independent advice.” Contostavlos said how sorry she was, before telling her: “This will stay with you for the rest of your life.” I’m curious to know whether Spraggan interpreted her comment to mean that the trauma would stay with her (as with any survivor), or that speaking out would mar her career? “I got the impression that she was saying that it would be a stain. But I don’t know if she was regurgitating something someone else had told her to say. I had no idea until I started writing the book that she was only a couple of years older than me. It was fucking inappropriate that she was called into that situation.” [A representative for Contostavlos told us that she visited Spraggan of her own accord and was “referring to the trauma Lucy would personally feel”.]
Whatever the motivation for Spraggan not speaking out about what had happened until now, the result was that neither ITV nor Fremantle had to publicly address the rape. Production staff later told Spraggan that they were offered a single session of counselling, but while she received both financial and medical support in the immediate aftermath, she wasn’t given any kind of support after the trial. “No one ever contacted me to ask if I was OK,” she writes. “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.”
Because the defendant pleaded guilty, Spraggan did not have to be present for the trial, in which he was sentenced to 10 years. Her friends hate it when she refers to herself as a “lucky victim”, but she persists in doing so. “People don’t understand how lucky you are as a victim of rape to get a conviction. Evidence is a privilege, which is a fucked-up thing to say. I was lucky because my door was locked. Had I been unconscious in the hallway, it’s not the same story. I’m still a victim, it’s still traumatic, it’s still horrendous. But I’m lucky because Rylan shut that door.”
* * *
For the first 10 years of her life, Spraggan identified as a boy and went by the name Max. Max used the boys’ toilets, had a short back and sides haircut, and would cry for hours if referred to as Lucy. During primary school, a group of boys heard a rumour that their friend Max was actually a girl called Lucy, and demanded that he pull down his trousers to disprove their suspicions. When Max revealed a pair of blue and white striped boxer shorts, the case was considered closed.
At the approach of puberty, Max’s mum asked what he wanted to do and he, as Spraggan writes, “began to shed my Max skin and started looking for my Lucy skin”. If Spraggan were growing up today, she believes she would be given the opportunity to transition. She is sanguine at the idea, reasoning: “I think I would have loved to have been that man. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love being a woman now.” Still, she tells me, “after puberty something really changed for me and I was really challenged by myself”.
In the book, Spraggan recounts her early abuse of drugs and alcohol; she began smoking weed aged 13 before progressing to ecstasy. After her experience on The X Factor, things escalated.
Does she imagine that she’d have had similar struggles without what had happened? “I can’t envision that I would have tried to kill myself,” she says, plainly.
After the end of the competition, and without any professional support network, Spraggan threw herself into work, and within two months was doing up to four personal appearances in a weekend. She felt that nobody might have considered that she might struggle to stay in unfamiliar hotel rooms, and she drank to the point of oblivion in order to blot out the symptoms of PTSD, which would see her heart pound and her vision blur. She was signed to Columbia Records, and her major-label debut album went Top 10, but her drinking was out of control. She’d get blackout drunk, sleep with her support acts, and, on one occasion, wake to find that she’d wet the bed on her tour bus. Her tour rep quit, saying that he’d worked with Marilyn Manson, and she was worse.
Before long, she had been dropped by her label and was spiralling. In 2014, she attempted suicide. “I was alone on an island with absolutely no plan of where to go next. I was wrung out. At that point, I couldn’t be alone, because I knew that, if I was, I was in danger of dying.”
Later that year, Spraggan met her now ex-wife, Georgina. They embraced the lesbian stereotype, and moved in together within three weeks. Georgina was a born caregiver, and made Spraggan feel safe. She continued to drink, but also made impressive inroads in her career – building a devoted fanbase, becoming the first X Factor contestant to play Glastonbury and releasing three Top 20 albums independently. Then, in 2017, four years after the trial, the allegations against Harvey Weinstein arose, leading a number of high-profile women to recount their experiences of historical sexual abuse. “I watched the #MeToo movement come and go and it was almost like [she mimes being poised to spring up from her seat] ‘I think this is when I’m supposed to talk?’ And then I thought, ‘I just fucking can’t, because it might break me.’”
It was the death of Caroline Flack that finally persuaded her to go public. In February 2020, the Xtra Factor presenter, whom Spraggan had got to know while competing on the show, took her own life after being charged with assaulting her boyfriend. “I believed that Caroline’s death would be the start of a huge industry shift,” Spraggan says. “That there would be a realisation that ‘we’ve been treating human beings like corporate commodities. How do we change this? First of all, we need to go back into the hole and get everybody out.’ I just thought somebody is dead. And not just somebody – a great and formidable and loved and talented human being is dead. I really thought she might be a martyr for change, and it fucking ruined me that that didn’t happen.”
By now, Spraggan was separated from her wife and 18 months sober. She was tired of having to lie whenever fans asked why she’d left The X Factor. But she was scared of becoming “that girl”; of being defined by an event that had caused her so much pain. She decided that if her next album went Top 10, she would have proved herself enough as a musician to reveal what had really happened. “It’s funny that I thought, ‘If I adhere to this weird industry thing that’s completely made up then I’ll be good enough to tell my story,’” she laughs. The album went Top 5.
Spraggan started writing in a stream of consciousness, and realised that she still had questions about her rape and the events that followed. In 2021, she wrote to the companies behind The X Factor: ITV, Fremantle and Syco, detailing her experience and requesting answers. “This letter is to offer you an opportunity to respond,” she wrote, “and, if you consider it appropriate, apologise.” Two months later, ITV did respond, apologising that her experience of The X Factor had been an “unhappy one” and acknowledging that what happened to her “must have been devastating”, but disagreeing that they lacked in their duty of care towards reality TV participants. In Spraggan’s view, it was too little, too late. “After 10 years of healing, I then had a huge corporation say, ‘We never gave a shit about you in the first place,’” she says, her voice breaking for the first time during our conversation. “It cracked me. For a second I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I am a piece of shit. Nobody ever did give a fuck. I’m not worth anything. I’m not even worth a proper apology.’”
Soon afterwards, a representative for Simon Cowell contacted her to arrange a phone call with him. At first, Spraggan was hesitant. “I thought, ‘Do I want to get battered any more?’ I went on the call thinking I’d give him a piece of my fucking mind. But instead of breaking my heart, he put it back together. It sounds weird, and it was weird. I didn’t know that that was what I needed.” Cowell hadn’t worked on Spraggan’s season of The X Factor – he’d been in the US filming America’s Got Talent – but he had known what had happened to her. “I have thought about you many, many times over the years, about what happened to you, about how I should’ve been there for you,” he told her. “I want you to know that I am truly, truly sorry.”
The pair have since grown close, and Spraggan is now signed to his music publishing company. Cynics might infer that Cowell made a calculated move to mitigate any fallout from the allegations that she’d go on to make. “Of course,” Spraggan agrees. “At first I was thinking, Is this machiavellian? Are you playing a game? And I have no idea whether that was happening. But the amount of trauma that I’ve gone through makes me a hypervigilant reader of people’s micro-expressions, the way they talk, their consistency. His behaviour towards me is authentic. Despite what quite a lot of people seem to think, he’s a human being. And I reckon every legal adviser told him, ‘Don’t go near that girl.’” The phone call with Cowell was transformative for Spraggan. “The ‘sorry’ that Simon chose to give me closed one of the most uncomfortable chapters of my life,” she writes.
Cowell told the Guardian that what happened to Spraggan was “horrific and heartbreaking” and that, “when I was given the opportunity to speak to Lucy, I was able to personally tell her how sorry I was about everything she has been through. Although we met under tragic circumstances, a genuine friendship and a mutual respect has developed between us. Lucy is one of the most authentic, talented and brave people I have ever met. I have always supported her wish to tell her story as well as her efforts to bring about positive change.”
These days, Spraggan works hard to maintain her mental health. “People say, ‘Is it your sobriety?’ But my sobriety is me, it’s my choices. Once you feel worthy, you see things for what they are. You see success for what it is, because it’s so subjective. At one point, success for me meant getting out of bed. Then it was playing Glastonbury. Now it’s being a lesbian succeeding in the music industry. I’m really happy with the things I’ve achieved, and I have to attribute my successes to me. I’m not just ‘that girl’.” She lives in Manchester with her girlfriend and her dog – “Eve and Steve” – although she’s eyeing a move to the countryside. In August, she will release her seventh album, and will support Robbie Williams on his next tour.
More than anything, she wants to make sure other contestants are offered more support. “I have no interest in tearing anything down. Rebuilding myself taught me that the most powerful thing you can do is build. My goal is for the introduction of an industry standard where reality-production companies take a percentage of their budget and deposit that into a mental health pension scheme that production staff, presenters and contestants can access for the rest of their lives.” As well as Flack, she refers to Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, two Love Island contestants who killed themselves after appearing on the show, and Steve Dymond, a guest on The Jeremy Kyle Show, who also took his own life. “Let’s put some more preventive measures in place to stop this happening. Let’s stop people dying, let’s stop people being raped. I’m an expert in being a reality TV contestant and having a shit time. So if anybody would like to have a conversation about positive change based on my negative experience – let’s do it.”
In response to the issues raised in this interview, a spokesperson for Fremantle said: “The serious sexual assault suffered by Lucy Spraggan in October 2012 was a truly horrific criminal act for which the perpetrator, who was not connected with the programme, was rightfully prosecuted and imprisoned. Anyone should feel safe when they are sleeping in a hotel room – and it is abhorrent to think that a hotel porter abused that trust in such a vile way.
“To our knowledge, the assault was an event without precedent in the UK television industry. 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 we have worked hard to try and protect Lucy’s lifetime right to anonymity, we applaud her strength and bravery now that she has chosen to waive that right.”
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. We expect the producers of commissioned programmes to have in place appropriate procedures to look after the mental health of participants as well as their physical safety. In an event of such a distressing nature, welfare and support towards the victim would always be of the utmost priority.
“We have the deepest compassion for Lucy and everything she has endured as a result of this horrific ordeal. We commend her resilience and bravery.”
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found here
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
