A Labour MP has revealed she was “groomed” by an older man when she was just 15 and dropped out of school when she became pregnant.
Natalie Fleet, who won Dennis Skinner’s former Red Wall seat Bolsover on July 4, told GB News that she endured times of “struggling” growing up.
She said to host Gloria De Piero that she now wants to be a voice for “all those women that have children in far from ideal circumstances”.
She said: “At the time, when I was 15, I felt full of shame and guilt and responsibility.
“And all I was determined to do was make sure that she [the baby] had a life that was as good as she would have had to any age parent. That was what I was determined to do, I didn’t think about me or the impact.”
Moved by @Nataliefleet MP’s interview with @GloriaDePiero.
— Tom Hayes MP (@TomHayesBmouth) July 20, 2024
Many women haven’t got the support they need, and that’s wrong.
With Natalie in Parliament, they’ll have someone, on their side, who knows their suffering and how to bring change. https://t.co/Nn5qtR7Whm
Ms Fleet entered the Labour party as a teenager and, having dropped out of school and university, worked for trade unions.
Her daughter is now 23 and she has had three further children.
Ms Fleet said that as a teenager she experienced poverty and had knew little of her rights and sex education.
“That was an older man,” she told De Piero - a former Labour MP.
“That was potentially, I mean now we have labels like grooming that we didn’t have then.
“I didn’t know we were having unprotected sex. I was a child and this is statutory rape. You know, at the time this isn’t something that we were talking about. It’s not how I saw myself.”
Ms Fleet added that she had a lack of support during this period and has said she had no access to any organisation that helped women in her situation.
To this day, she said she has weekly nightmares about her experiences and that the attacker had asked her to have an abortion.
Instead her eldest daughter has become the “love of her life”.
She added: “I really want to be a voice for all of those people, all of those women that have children in far from ideal circumstances.
“We’re going to make sure that we’re smashing down barriers to opportunity so that there can be more stories like mine.
“I am a product of the last Labour government. It wasn’t a perfect government, but it changed my life and it was transformational.”
