Lucy Spraggan was a 20-year-old musician when she was cast on the UK version of the X-Factor show. Spraggan was no ordinary contestant, she became the first contestant to perform her own songs and play an instrument. Her audition, in which she performed the song Last Night—"Last night I told you I loved you / I woke up, I blamed vodka"—was the fourth most viewed YouTube video in the world that year, and she became the most Googled artist in the UK. A star was about to be born, he had everything to succeed, but everything changed overnight.

X Factor viewers voted for her on the first three live shows before the show announced that Lucy had had to quit musical talent due to illness. Only she wasn't sick.

Eleven years later, Spraggan, now 31, is finally ready to talk about why she disappeared. Lucy Spraggan has waited 11 years to write her memoir and tell what happened in 2012. A memoir in which she reveals that she was raped during the production of X Factor and the devastating impact it had on her life. "My working title for the book was Are You That Girl?" he says in an interview with The Guardian. "Because for years I was terrified of being known as the girl that happened to. She was deeply and chronically ashamed. Now I understand that what happened was not my decision, it was out of my hands. And in order to rebuild and move forward, I needed to tell the truth," he says.

The artist tells in the book that the aggression occurred one night when she was celebrating the birthday of her partner Rylan Clark in a club in the London neighborhood of Mayfair, attended by members of the X Factor production team.

According to the singer, she felt let down by how ITV, the largest television producer in the United Kingdom, handled the incident: "It was not appropriate for anyone, including the contestants, to be drunk. How can (ITV) meet its duty of care when alcohol is involved?"

The artist, who details the event in the book Process: Finding My Way Through, recalls that she fell unconscious and was escorted back to the hotel by a member of the production team and that, once at the hotel, a doorman offered to help her back to her room.

Spraggan says the doorman later used an "electronic key" to enter her room and assault her. "I woke up the next day with this sense of panic. I don't think I've ever felt this level of confusion since," he said.

"I knew I had been raped, but I couldn't prosecute it. So I put on my clothes and kept running on autopilot," he added. While the production team called the police and an arrest was made, Spraggan believes that ITV were "not prepared" to deal with what happened.

"I've had to lie almost every day since. When I'm introduced to a podcast or written about me in the newspaper, it's always 'Lucy Spraggan, who quit X Factor due to illness.' People still ask me why I left the program. And with every lie comes an avalanche of extremely painful memories. It is not good to lie, hide, harbor. But that's why we're here," he writes in his book.

Spraggan was born in Canterbury, Kent, and lived with her mother, Anstey, then a teacher, and three siblings after her parents divorced when she was very young. Growing up in a party home, "our neighbors hated us," she writes in her memoir, surrounded by her mother's creative friends. Her earliest memories in music were at school performances, where she sang funny songs she had written about her teachers, until one became offended and stopped Lucy's performances. She did her first show at 13, and by the time X Factor invited her to audition, she was performing on the same circuit as Ed Sheeran, and their names were regularly being replaced on the boards of pubs across the country.

In 2012, X Factor was one of the UK's most-watched TV shows and Spraggan became an overnight sensation when millions of people watched his audition. "From that moment on, my life changed forever," he told the BBC.

"From the beginning, they make you a kind of caricature of yourself. It's almost like there's a story written for you," he adds. Spraggan claims that the contestants were immediately under great pressure. "From the very first stage, that message was repeated over and over again to the point where that's all you believe: 'it was the biggest opportunity of my life.'"

Now 31, he says he's never experienced a situation where "someone takes charge of my life completely." "If I had experienced that again, as a normal human being, I would have claimed to be in an abusive relationship."

In his book Spraggan relates that while the other contestants were housed in a private flat with 24-hour security provided by the show, Spraggan and his good friend Rylan Clark, also a contestant, were exiled to a hotel on Edgware Road.

Shortly after that, Clark celebrated his 25th birthday at Mayfair's Mahiki nightclub. The drinks were free and unlimited, and the X Factor team, journalists and paparazzi were there to capture the resulting chaos, the role Lucy had played, by her own account.

"At this stage, I knew my role: getting drunk, doing something funny, making headlines the next day," Spraggan writes. Images duly appeared of her picking up a beer bottle with her teeth and drinking it, hands-free. Some members of the production team were also drinking.

Spraggan ended up fainting. A member of the production team escorted her back to the hotel, where a hotel bellboy offered to help Spraggan back to his room. When they left, the doorman opened the security latch on their door to prevent it from closing behind them. Some time later, Clark went to Lucy's room and made sure her door was locked when she left. Her decision meant that when the doorman later returned to Spraggan's room to attack her, she had to use a traceable card. "I woke up the next day with this feeling of sheer dread," she says. "I don't think I've felt that level of confusion since. I knew I had been raped, but I couldn't process that. So I put on my clothes and went on autopilot."

Although she was provided with financial and medical support in the aftermath, the singer regrets, however, that no other help was given to her after her attacker was prosecuted.

"No one contacted me again to ask if I was okay. No one called or emailed me when the trial was over and he (the rapist) was prosecuted. No one offered me rehabilitation or mental health treatment. I was left alone," she laments.

At first, Spraggan wanted to make public the reason for his departure from the competition. "At first I said, 'Just tell them what happened.' But I quickly realized that it wasn't going to be that simple. I remember several people saying, 'You've got your whole career ahead of you and you can't go back on this.'"

Spraggan left the contest, which James Arthur won that year, during the live shows, citing illness, although she now admits that the side effect of a drug given to prevent AIDS made her feel too unwell in the days after the rape.

  • United Kingdom

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more