Danica Kirka
London: Queen Camilla spoke publicly for the first time about her personal experience of indecent assault, saying that speaking out was one way she could use her royal platform to shine a light on the epidemic of violence against women.
Camilla, who has made fighting domestic abuse one of her signature causes, recalled fending off a man who attacked her on a train in the 1960s when she was a teenager.
“I was reading my book, and you know, this boy, man, attacked me, and I did fight back,” Camilla told the BBC on Wednesday, London time.
“And I remember getting off the train and my mother looking at me and saying, ‘Why is your hair standing on end?’ and ‘Why is a button missing from your coat?’”
While the attack made her “furious,” Camilla said, she kept it quiet for many years until she heard other women recount their own stories.
She said she had “sort of forgotten” what had happened but the memory had been “lurking in the back of my brain for a very long time”.
The Queen said she decided to speak up because domestic violence has been a “taboo subject” for so long that most people don’t realise how bad the situation is.
“I thought, well, if I’ve got a tiny soapbox to stand on, I’d like to stand on it,” she said. “And there’s not a lot I can do except talk to people and get people together.”
The comments came in a group interview with the surviving family members of Louise Hunt, 25, her sister Hannah, 28, and their mother Carol, 61, who were murdered by Louise’s ex-partner at their home outside London in July 2024.
The queen praised former racing commentator John Hunt and his daughter Amy for their work fighting domestic violence.
“Wherever your family is now, they’d be so proud of you both,” Camilla said.
“And they must be, from above, smiling down on you and thinking, ‘My goodness me, what a wonderful, wonderful father, husband, sister.’ They’d just be so proud of you both.”
While this is the first time Camilla has spoken publicly about the attack she experienced, it was previously recounted in the book Power and the Palace, published this year by Valentine Low, a former royal correspondent for the Times of London. That account was based on what the queen told former prime minister Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London.
According to Low’s book, Camilla was on a train to London’s Paddington Station when the man sitting next to her reached out and attempted to touch her.
She fought him off by removing her shoe and bashing him in the groin. When she got to Paddington she found a man in uniform and told him what had happened, and the man was arrested.
UK special envoy for women and girls Baroness Harriet Harman said it was “so important” that the Queen had spoken publicly about her experience.
“It used to be the case when a woman was killed by a husband or partner the consensus was that she must have brought it on herself and the women’s movement pushed back against that argument,” Harman told BBC Radio.
“We now see a new form of that argument emerging amongst the likes of Andrew Tate and on social media, a new sort of toxic masculinity that basically says men are struggling with their identity and the fault is women, because women’s advance has undermined men’s sense of themselves and sometimes this causes them resorting to violence.”
Harman also described her own experiences.
“It has happened to me at work, it happened to me at university, it happened to me as a young girl travelling around London and as a young girl going to the cinema,” she said.
“For so long there has been a sense nothing can be done, no action will be taken, I’ll be blamed, I’ll be told I brought it on myself.”
AP
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