After making the hard decision to report a celebrity who she said sexually assaulted her, Jenny Evans discovered confidential details printed word for word in a national newspaper.
Then only 19, she racked her brain – could a friend have betrayed her? Was she being spied on?
Without knowing it, Jenny found herself in the middle of a corruption scandal that would eventually bring down some of the most powerful players in the UK press and police.
Instead of hiding away, Jenny funnelled her anger into training to become a journalist to uncover the truth for herself.
Warning: Contains distressing details of sexual violence
Jenny grew up in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, and discovered acting through free community drama classes.
At 18, she was cast in Twin Town and shortly afterwards, in 1997, she was on a night out with the production crew in London.
Jenny, now in her 40s, told Asya Fouks for the Lives Less Ordinary podcast there was a celebrity – not associated with the film – who she found herself with, along with one of his friends, at the end of the night.
She asked to borrow a phone to call a taxi but they refused.
“He put his hand to my chest and just pushed me so that I would lose my footing. And then he and his friend pounced, and then there was a sexual assault,” she said.
When the men got bored with her, the famous man’s friend called her a taxi.
Jenny was retching and shaking when the taxi pulled up and the driver, named Ken, “kept saying to me ‘I think you’ve been raped. Let me take you to a police station’. And I just couldn’t speak.”
She was “too shocked and too scared” to go to the police and report it at that point – a feeling that lasted a long time.
Jenny wrote a letter to her friend about it at the time, and told her brother and mum.
She withdrew from life and it was only when her 24-year-old brother died when she was 23 that she decided to try “to live my life again”.
She studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and one night, when she was dancing with friends at a student bar, a friend arrived and dropped the late edition of the Sun on the table.
It reported that the famous man who had sexually assaulted her had been arrested after other women made similar allegations.
She said: “It was the first moment that it occurred to me that I hadn’t got myself into a difficult situation and that this man and his friend could be serially violent.”
This made her feel a “moral obligation to report” him, but said this was her experience and it was OK that most other survivors “don’t want to report or ever talk” about their experience.
She was interviewed by police twice and then, four days later, she was with her boyfriend who was reading a tabloid when he looked at her and said: “I didn’t know there was two of them.”
He knew something had happened, but she had protected him from the intricate details of the assault.
Jenny was not named, but there in black and white was the confidential report she made just days earlier in the police station.
“It was terrifying,” Jenny said.
She tried to figure out who could have sold the story to the newspaper, but no-one knew that level of detail.
Jenny told her case detective and he said he would come back to her, but he never did: “I was so young and naive, I didn’t push him on it.”
Jenny became “very paranoid”, searching her home for recording devices, keeping curtains closed and checking friends and family’s phones to see if they were speaking to journalists.
Then police told her there was enough evidence to charge the famous man for two counts of sexual assault, but none of the other women’s cases had met the charging threshold.
At the time the famous man was saying his accusers were “making it up, they just want money, they just want fame’.”
So just before the trial, Jenny’s friend gave her the letter she had written after the sexual assault, thinking it was evidence Jenny was not jumping on “a bandwagon”.
But because Jenny had detailed multiple instances of sexual violence that had happened to her, the police thought it discredited her.
She said it was hard to win any sexual assault case, but if it has happened multiple times the defence lawyers could make it “look as if you were asking for it” or “you’ve made them all up”.
She did not want to be cross-examined on the letter, so the charges were dropped.
The now defunct News of the World newspaper then published an article with confidential details about the case falling apart and Jenny said her fear turned to anger.
So she took it upon herself to train as a journalist to find out how it happened.
He tasked Jenny with getting the truth out of past and present reporters about dodgy newsgathering practices and finding people whose phones were hacked by Mulcaire.
She found her own name in his diaries but an incorrect phone number – so she knew this was not how her story was leaked.
The News of the World closed in 2011 after it was found to have been hacking into the phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians.
“I felt very emotional,” Jenny said.
“They bullied a nation in a way, and I felt a huge sense of relief.”
Jenny’s case was never solved due to corruption within the Met Police, but after hiring a lawyer she did receive an apology and “tens of thousands of pounds” as a settlement.
The Met Police has been contacted for comment.
Now, she wants people, “especially young women”, to know that when you feel “disenfranchised and powerless, there is real power in learning how to ask questions”.
If you’ve been affected by the issues in this story, help and support is available via Action Line.
