It started with a tweet. It ended with a stranger breaking into her bedroom as she slept, intending, he told police later, to stick a knife through her face.
A seven-year ordeal, which has left Lily Allen “a changed person”, feeling isolated from friends and family and let down by the police, this month saw a man convicted of harassment and breaking into the singer’s London flat when she was at home with her friend and two young children.
In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Allen says she remains in limbo awaiting the sentencing of Alex Gray, the stranger who threatened her life. Gray steadily undermined her confidence and security after popping up on a social media account in 2009, claiming to having written her hit song, The Fear, and using the handle @lilyallenRIP.
Then came letters, abusive rants, accusations and suicide threats. “He would drop off these letters at my record company, my management offices, my sister’s shop, my flat,” she said. “It was freaking me out a bit and I’m not easily scared, so the fact I went to the police with the letters shows how serious I felt it was. Alarm bells were ringing. But I felt comforted by the fact that I was telling the police, I was keeping a record,” she said.
The man approached Allen’s assistant and other colleagues, who described him as “frightening”. “They just said, ‘He looks like Phil Mitchell [the EastEnders character],’ so I’d be looking at scruffy blokes on every street corner. Then I was on stage and someone holds up a banner saying, ‘I wrote The Fear’.” Allen finished her song, then called police. They lent her a panic alarm for a few months before asking for it back. Things went quiet for a while, and then she had a call from the police. “They just said, ‘Alex Gray is active again.’ I had no idea what that meant. I did all my own digging, got my own lawyer, put measures in place to protect my family. I didn’t even know what he looked like.”
Allen again approached police, begging to see a picture of Gray. At first she was refused, then finally officers came and showed her a photo, which they took away afterwards. “I felt very alone. I have some trust issues now, not least with the police. Who can you trust if you cannot trust institutions like the police?”
Like the vast majority of the 700,000 victims of stalking in England and Wales every year, Allen had no idea that this was a crime that more often than not followed a pattern. Stalking was not unique to celebrities, said Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality party and their candidate in London’s mayoral race. She sees Allen’s case as an example of how anti-stalking measures are not working. Backed by Allen, they are campaigning for a register of stalkers to be kept, in the same way as with sex offenders, allowing police to keep track of people who are often repeat offenders. With only 1% of stalking cases and 16% of harassment cases ending in prosecution, Walker believes there are “appalling” failures in tackling the crime and understanding the impact on victims.
Police could have put Allen in touch with Paladin, an advocacy charity that would have supported her. Instead, she feels no one took the risk seriously, even as Gray progressed from letters and tweets to banging on doors and spending nights in her back garden.
In October last year, Allen burned her dinner. “I had had all sorts of metal shutters and locks on the doors, but I’d been cooking and burned a pan and opened the back door. I closed it but forgot to lock it when I went to bed.” Asleep with her friend, her children in their room across the hall, Allen was awoken in the early hours by a terrific banging on the wall. “I sat up and looked and the doorhandle was twisting round. This guy came steaming in and I didn’t know who he was. I recoiled and he ripped the duvet off, calling me a ‘fucking bitch’ and yelling about where his dad is.”
The man had an object stuffed inside his jacket that Allen is convinced was a knife. She believes he was caught off guard when he found she was not alone, and her friend was able to shove the man out of the house as she ran to check that her children were safe. “There was this second outside my kids’ room when I was terrified to go in, in case of what I might find.”
The police told Allen the intruder was probably someone who had stumbled into the wrong flat after too much to drink. “For me, it was too much of a coincidence that the only night I had left the shutters up, this man came in. I believe he had been spending a lot of time out there in my garden, watching.”
Calling the police back the next day, Allen told them she thought the intruder could be the same man who had been threatening her. “But they were uncomfortable with the idea. Then I realised my handbag was missing and the change in atmosphere was palpable, it was like a sigh of relief: ‘now it’s burglary – we understand that’.”
In Scotland, Gray’s sister had reported him missing and his mother had sent an email from him to police in which he said he was in London, planning to murder a celebrity. Allen believes she was – and remains – his target. In his pocket Gray carried a photograph of the singer dressed in hospital scrubs at a Halloween party. He was convinced the costume was a message to him, as were sleeve notes on her album.
Her experiences made her determined to speak out against what campaigners call “a life-altering crime” and one which is rising at a rapid rate, just as specialist services for victims, and mental health provision for perpetrators, decline.
Walker and her party have a clear list of demands to set the justice system straight on stalking. “The rise in sexual violence and harassment crimes is appalling. This is not a story about a celebrity, but about a woman.
“With a justice system that is obsessed with property rights, there’s little space for keeping women safe. [It wasn’t] until the burglary that Lily felt her case was taken seriously.
“These are not isolated incidents; they are part of structural violence against women because of their gender – 85% of young women in London have experienced sexual harassment – 85%! We know the reporting is improving, which is great, but support and services are disappearing for women. And 80% of victims are women; 70% of perpetrators are men. Understanding, reporting and responding to crimes as individual incidents means stalking often goes undetected, because it is not the individual episodes that are necessarily extraordinary, but the pattern.”
For Allen, there was still no joining up of the dots by the police. “For me, the burglary was like this insignificant thing compared to what he was doing to me and my life. After about a week, I went out as I was due to DJ at an event. I hadn’t had any contact from police, I presumed they were actively searching for him; it’s now apparent to me that wasn’t the case. When I arrived home, my handbag was on the bonnet of my car outside my house. Burnt. Everything pulled out and cut up or burned and the bag burned.” Gray was subsequently caught and charged with burglary.
“Every time I tried to talk to someone about it, it was like hitting a brick wall. You feel very disconnected and that makes you disconnected to people around you, too. It’s difficult to articulate it when you have no definition, when the police are saying, ‘right, it’s burglary if you want this guy to get a prison sentence’, and you’re thinking, ‘but I don’t give a shit about my handbag. What I give a shit about is a man who is saying he wants to put a knife through my face’.
“I wrote to the police and asked why they weren’t using these letters going back to 2009, and then I got a short note saying they had been destroyed ‘according to police protocol’. No apology, no explanation.”
A charge of harassment was finally added, not covering anything that happened before 2015, and Gray was convicted this month at Harrow crown court of burglary and harassment and will be sentenced next month. This week the Women’s Equality party will launch its policy campaign for a serial stalkers’ register and a new charge of serial offending, as well as campaigning for specialist help for both perpetrators and victims.
“No one says to you, ‘Yes, this is stalking and it’s dangerous and it’s scary, but we’re going to try to make sure you’re safe now.’ Or, ‘These are the things you can do to keep yourself and your children safe.’”
Allen has gone from being a woman with a busy social life to someone who is careful about where she goes and who she goes with. Her celebrity has curtailed her ability to talk it through with other people – because what happened is too traumatic for her to bear it being treated as gossip. “It has affected how I live my life. I’m very wary, I have trust issues. It impacts on your relationships, everything. I’m practically a hermit now!” she smiled apologetically. “I’m very aware of trying not to overdramatise what’s happened, I’m aware that some fears are irrational; I know he is in prison. If I hear a bang, every little noise makes me start. I see his face in people in the street. I’ve had to leave the flat I loved, move nearer a main road with lots of CCTV about.
“It was not special attention I looked for. It was reassurance and validation. The police made me feel like a nuisance, rather than a victim. I feel lucky I had resources to protect myself, I could move house, get a lawyer, but if you don’t have that money, how much more terrifying must it be?
“I’m not angry at Alex Gray. He has a mental illness. The system has failed him. But until he gets the right treatment and the right help he needs, then I’m not safe. You can throw the book at him, put him in jail, but he’ll still be coming out. And the victim is never safe.
“I want some answers from the police. I’m a famous person and had the inclination to push things. If they treat me like this, how the hell are they going to treat someone else without those resources, without clout?”
The Met said it was not able to respond to specific allegations, but stressed that it took stalking extremely seriously.
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