Rita Ora has revealed for the first time that she was sexually abused at the age of 14, when she was in a relationship with a 26-year-old man.
In an interview with Lifetime, she said:
“I mean I was 14 when I started, when I got my first relationship with a guy. I would say (he was) about 26, and you have to remember I hadn’t had a relationship before then at all. I didn’t have sex, I was very new to the whole world of a man and a female.”
When the interviewer pointed out that the relationship constituted child abuse, Rita replied: “It is child abuse, really, isn’t it.”
The relationship took place when she attended London’s Sylvia Young Theatre School. However, despite Rita correctly identifying the relationship as child abuse, she doesn’t want people to think she WAS abused.
“I mean I don’t want to say I suffered it, because I wanted it. I don’t want people to think I was forced to do it. I don’t want people to think I was abused as a kid, but I was definitely more mature than I should have been at the age of 14.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how confident I felt when a man was interested in me. I felt like I was sexy, I felt like I had a form of respect, I felt like he listened to me. Now I know he listened to me because he obviously wanted to have sex with me. I felt good that men fancied me.”
“I’d wear low tops. I’d put red lipstick on, I’d make my hair blonder.”
In answering a reader’s question about what she should do about her married high school coach whom whom she was sleeping with, Karley wrote:
“Despite you clearly being very smart and independent, what you might not understand now is that Coach is probably a pretty big loser. Any married adult who starts sleeping with a student where he works, starting when she’s 14, can’t be too impressive of a person. I promise, when you’re older you will look back on this and laugh – it will be a great drunken anecdote – but you will also realise how tragic Coach is, especially when you’re grown up and successful and even cooler and smarter than you are now.”
“He is the adult in this situation, and he should have been the responsible one and not slept with you. This wasn’t your mistake, it was his.”
Now can someone please point us in Rita’s direction so we can give her all of the hugs?
Image: Jason LaVeris via Getty Images.
