Last October, Lily Allen awoke one night to a loud banging on the wall. “I sat up and looked and the door handle was twisting round,” she recalls. “This guy came steaming in, and I didn’t know who he was. I recoiled and he ripped the duvet off, calling me a ‘f—ing bitch’ and yelling about where his dad is.”
Allen, who believes that the man had a knife on him, was home in London with her children and a friend at the time; the friend was able to get the stranger — who turned out to be Alex Gray, a man who Allen alleges has stalked her for years — out of the house while the singer rushed to see if her kids, in the bedroom across the hall, were OK.
“There was this second outside my kids’ room when I was terrified to go in, in case of what I might find,” Allen says to British newspaper The Observer, opening up about the scary experience and seven years of dealing with a stalker. She tweeted a link to the article on Saturday (April 16).
That night, she tells the newspaper, happened to be the one night that she burned dinner and forgot to lock the back door after airing out the house. “For me, it was too much of a coincidence that the only night I had left the shutters up, this man came in,” she says. “I believe he had been spending a lot of time out there in my garden, watching.”
Allen claims that police assumed that the intruder may have just been someone who was drunk and entered the wrong home – and that they only acted on her report when she realized that her handbag had been stolen, categorizing the incident as a burglary.
“Every time I tried to talk to someone about it, it was like hitting a brick wall,” she says. “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.”
“For me, the burglary was like this insignificant thing compared to what he was doing to me and my life,” Allen explains. She says that she later found her handbag on her car outside her home, with all its contents either cut up or burned — and that Gray’s mother provided an email from him to the police in which he wrote that he was in London and planning to murder a celebrity.
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This incident was part of a years-long experience with her alleged stalker that she says began in 2009 on social media, where he used the Twitter handle @lilyallenRIP and claimed to have written her song “The Fear.” Letters, accusations and suicide threats followed, according to Allen, who says that he left notes at her record label and management’s offices, her sister’s store and her home. She believes that he also showed up to one of her concerts holding up an “I Wrote ‘The Fear’” sign. Nervous about his actions, she had gone to the police.
Following the home invasion, Gray was convicted of burglary and harassment and will be sentenced in May, but the charge reportedly does not include anything that occurred prior to 2015. Allen says that police told her that they had gotten rid of the letters dating back to 2009 “according to protocol,” with no further explanation.
Allen has taken the steps to protect herself by moving and getting a lawyer — and seems thankful that she has the resources to do so, since many in her situation may not. But she claims that the police have treated her like “a nuisance, rather than a victim” throughout the ordeal.
“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. I’m very aware of trying not to overdramatize 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,” Allen says. She tells The Observer that she is not angry at Gray, who she says has a mental illness, but that she won’t feel safe “until he gets the right treatment.”
“You can throw the book at him, put him in jail, but he’ll still be coming out. And the victim is never safe,” says Allen. Read her full story, as told to The Observer, here.