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Dame Jilly Cooper has revealed she was silenced and abused after she was almost raped by a fellow author.
The 87-year-old author, who has sold more than 12 million books and is one of Britain’s most prolific novelists, said the attempted sexual assault happened early in her career.
In her new documentary In My Own Words: Jilly Cooper, she said the author was “a very big, gross creature” who “ripped off” her clothes in a taxi.
Dame Jilly, who has decided not to name the man, said: “I remember being in the publicity department of a major publishing house and one of their authors took me out for dinner. And suddenly, in the back of a taxi, he ripped off my clothes, all of them.”
She said she managed to get away and sought help, recalling: ‘I struggled away, so I collapsed in the office and a man said to me, ‘Jilly, why are you crying? What happened?”
Dame Jilly Cooper has revealed she was silenced and abused after she was almost raped by a fellow author
The author, who has sold more than 12 million books and is one of Britain’s most prolific novelists, said the attempted sexual assault took place early in her career. (Cooper is pictured in 1978)
‘I said, ‘Someone tried to jump on me in a taxi. He tried to rape me, it was horrible.” And so he said, ‘You have to tell me. We’re going to the police. No one should rape my Gillian in a taxi. We have nothing to do with that at all.” Finally I mumbled the person’s name and he said, “Oh. That’s one of our authors. Out.” I was very shocked.
‘I was almost raped and there I was thrown out of the office. It was an attempted rape. He didn’t actually rape me, but he tried very hard.
‘It was just terrible. I was a junior member of the publicity department and he probably thought nothing would happen.”
She added: ‘Everything that happened to me I remember and probably put into a book later.’
Dame Jilly said that men ‘were all macho then – hugely bossy men, very dominant men’. She added: “All male chauvinist pigs. Not that they aren’t macho now. In those days they told you much more forcefully what to do.’
In the BBC documentary, Dame Jilly also gives access to her personal archives and delves into her childhood.
She describes her experience growing up in Yorkshire, where she developed a passion for horses, dogs and charming men, and beginning her career in journalism and publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, when ‘fiction was very difficult because you couldn’t. include any part of the waist, below the leg or above the knee’.
The film also takes Dame Jilly back to her former home in Putney, south-west London, where she lived with her late husband Leo and their children.
In her new documentary In My Own Words: Jilly Cooper, she said the author was “a very big gross creature” who “ripped off” her clothes in a taxi.
In My Own Words: Jilly Cooper airs tonight at 10.40pm on BBC1 and iPlayer
It was there, in the late 1960s, that she rose to prominence thanks to her candid ‘ahead of its time’ column in the Sunday Times about marriage, sex and society.
In the documentary she looks at her previous appearances on chat shows with Russell Harty and Terry Wogan, and talks about her marriage, sex and her move to the Cotswolds.
She also discusses the success of her 1985 novel Riders, the first in the Rutshire Chronicles series, which she credits with saving her from selling her Cotswolds home.
In My Own Words: Jilly Cooper airs tonight at 10.40pm on BBC1 and iPlayer.
