Britain’s Queen Camilla spoke about being assaulted by a stranger on a train when she was a teenager, describing how the incident left a lasting impression and forced her to “fight back.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4 Today, Queen Camilla recalled being attacked while travelling alone. “When I was a teenager, I was attacked on a train. I’d sort of forgotten about it, but I remember at the time being so angry,” she shared.
She said she had been reading a book when a man she did not know assaulted her. “Somebody I didn’t know… attacked me, and I did fight back,” Queen Camilla said, adding that she believed the attacker was “probably not a great deal older than me,” though she had perceived him as an “old man” at the time.
After getting off the train, Camilla
said her mother noticed signs of the struggle. She recalled being asked why her hair was “standing on end” and why a button was missing from her coat. The Queen said the memory of the incident has been “lurking in the back of my brain for a very long time.”
Details of the assault had previously appeared in an excerpt from the book ‘Power and the Palace’ by Valentine Low, a former royal correspondent for The Times of London. In the book, Guto Harri, who served as communications director for former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson during his tenure as Mayor of London, recounted Queen Camilla describing the incident.
According to Guto Harri’s account, Queen Camilla was about 16 or 17 and travelling to Paddington station when a man repeatedly moved his hand closer to her. When asked what happened next, Guto Harri wrote that Queen Camilla said she had struck the man with the heel of her shoe. She then alerted a uniformed official on arrival, leading to the man’s arrest. Buckingham Palace did not issue an official comment at the time of the book’s release.
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