Ashley James reveals she was raped at university and spent years ‘living in shame’

Ashley James has bravely opened up for the first time about being raped as a university student.

The This Morning star, now 38, says the attack of almost 20 years ago still haunts her ‘every day’.

Aged 21 at the time and studying at Nottingham University, Ashley was raped by her male friend while unconscious following a club night out.

‘It’s something I’ve never spoken about, and yet I’ve thought about it every day since – increasingly so since having children,’ she recalled of the ordeal as a mum to five-year-old Alfie and two-year-old Ada.

She added to The Mirror that it was ‘one of the very worst moments of [her] life’ and ‘hugely traumatic’.

The TV host insisted that she is ‘not telling the story to shock’, but rather to highlight how ‘common’ such experiences are and how ‘broken the support system is’.

She also felt inspired to speak out by Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman whose case dominated global press last year after her husband, Dominique Pelicot, raped her over several years and invited dozens of other men to do the same at the couple’s home.

Gisèle, 73, earned widespread support for her courage in speaking publicly on behalf of all victims of sexual assault, powerfully declaring in a now-famous phrase that ‘Shame must change sides.’

The quote had a deep impact on Ashley in particular, who is sharing her own harrowing experience to help change the warped misconception that rapists are ‘only a few bad apples or strangers in alleyways’.

‘Sexual assault is an area where there’s still a lot of shame and taboo,’ Ashley stated.

‘The system still doesn’t support women. It almost feels like the woman is put on trial more than the man who is accused of rape.’

Despite liking to think society has progressed with its views on such matters, Ashley says that we haven’t.

‘It’s a culture that is still not giving boys the tools to learn how to navigate rejection or how to really understand what consent is.

‘We still ask questions like, “What was she wearing? Was she drunk?” Most of us have stories.’

Ashley, who has appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and Made in Chelsea, further recalls what he went through in her new book, Bimbo.

She writes about enduring years of ‘shame and silence’ and her hopes of ‘changing the conversation’ around victim blaming and not believing women.

Ashley also explains that she struggled to process what had happened to her because the perpetrator was a close friend, meaning she didn’t view him as a rapist and, instead, directed blame towards herself.

On choosing not to report what happened, she pens: ‘I didn’t come forward. Not because I thought the police wouldn’t believe me or that the courts would fail me, but because the man wasn’t a stranger in a dark alley. He was a friend. 

‘And because of that, the only person I blamed was myself. For years. Even after it happened, I was more worried about him not liking me than I was about my own trauma. I was worried he’d tell other people and everyone would think I was a s**g.’

Ashley didn’t tell anyone about the rape and even tried to stay friends with her attacker.

Still today, she ‘finds it hard to think about him as a rapist’.

‘Even though that’s what he was, because I wasn’t asking for it. In fact, I was unconscious.

‘I’d worry about ruining his life. Yes, I was drunk. Yes, I was wearing going-out clothes, having come from a club. But I was with friends — people I trusted.

‘We don’t teach girls that, one day, if they get the chance, their male friends might try to rape them.

‘It doesn’t matter what you are wearing [or] if you had zero drinks or 1,000 drinks.’

Ashley is keen to convey the message that ‘we need to tell our daughters to stop modifying their behaviour’ and others to ‘stop questioning what people are wearing’ after they have been assaulted.

In the latest statistics, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that around 900,000 people aged 16 years and over experienced sexual assault in the year ending March 2025. This was made up of 739,000 females and 162,000 males.

Rape offences have ‘increased substantially’ in recent years.

In 2024, data obtained by the BBC found that a rape offence was reported every hour in London, with more than 8,800 incidents reported to the Metropolitan Police in 2023 – an average of 24 per day.

In response, the Met said it would be ‘striving to do better’ in tackling sexual violence and minimising the impact on victims afterwards, saying the number of rape charges has more than doubled since 2022.

Charities have also expressed concerns over the ‘horrifying’ figures of recent years, but warn that the true extent is unknown and the real numbers are likely to be higher since many attacks go unreported.