X FACTOR starlet Janet Devlin has bravely spoken about a terrifying sexual assault when she was just an innocent teenager.
Janet made it to the quarter-finals on the live show of the hit series in 2011, when Little Mix were crowned the winners.
But she was hiding a secret battle with booze, depression, self-harming and suicidal thoughts when she was on TV.
And to make matters worse, she was also living with the mental scars of being subjected to a horrific incident when a boy forced himself on her at a house party.
HUGE IMPACT
Janet, from Gortin, Co Tyrone, was just 16 when she first appeared on the singing contest — but a year earlier, she suffered the ordeal which she said had “a huge impact on me”.
Now 25, Janet said: “After a while, I was ready to go home but my friend wanted to stay a little longer, so I said I’d go and lie down upstairs until she was ready to leave.
“As I was trying to get to sleep, a boy from the party came in the room and got into the bed next to me, claiming to be tired too.
“Though I was uncomfortable with the situation, I didn’t want to make a fuss. I was drunk and tired. I tried to get to sleep and assumed he had too.
“Out of nowhere, I could feel his hand slide up my dress and his palm come to rest on my upper thigh.
“I assumed that he’d move it as soon as he moved position again, and that it was just a sleep reflex.
“It wasn’t. It was a test to see if I was sleeping. As I didn’t move when he did this, he proceeded to move his hand inside my knickers.
“I froze. As his fingers continued to wander I snapped out of it and mustered up the courage to say ‘No!’ in a firm whisper.
“I grabbed his hand and shoved it away. I made sure he knew I didn’t want that. Not that he’d bothered to ask anyway.
“With a monosyllabic mumble, he shuffled and went still again. I lay there, in complete shock of what had just happened.”
‘I FROZE’
But despite telling the boy ‘no’, Janet said her attacker targeted her again minutes later in the bedroom.
She candidly revealed: “A short while later, the silence was broken again by the same stirring. This time there was no test or warning.
“His fingers went straight to the inside of my underwear again. I froze for the second time and he got even further than he had before.
“It was as if I’d mustered up all my courage in my initial outburst. I willed for my body to move but it wouldn’t.
“It felt as though my every limb was weighed down by concrete. ‘Why is he doing this?’, ‘Why won’t he stop?’ and ‘Why won’t you f***ing move, Janet?’ were the questions screaming inside my head.
“After a few minutes — and it was minutes — I got so mad at myself that I managed to grab his hand again and remove it from inside me.
“I could feel his body tense with shock, as though he was surprised I was awake. ‘I said no!’ I whispered loudly as I shoved myself off the bed and left the room.
“I went straight to the bathroom and slid down against the closed door. There I sat, on the warm tiles, staring at my feet.
“Battling to string a coherent thought together through the remaining daze of booze. Wishing with all my might that boy hadn’t done what he just did.
“Wishing that I couldn’t feel the ghost of his fingertips on my skin.
“I was left with more questions than answers. Mainly, what would he have done if I were asleep? With these thoughts filling my mind, I left the party without telling anyone what had happened.
“I did finally tell my best friend a few days later. She was as shocked as I was. I told my counsellor too.
“When they asked what I wanted to do about the situation, I had no answer. I didn’t know.
“I didn’t want to cause a fuss over something that had happened while this boy was drunk. Though I must admit, it stung me to my core to think there was no acknowledgment of what he had done.
“That was my own fault. I allowed that to happen by not wanting to make that moment all about me. To this day, I still think about what I should have said to him — just so he knew that what he did was not right.”
ROCK BOTTOM
Janet also laid bare her battles with alcoholism in her memoirs and admitted that her “rock bottom” moment came on Tuesday, September 9, 2014, when she was invited to the premiere of a video game called Destiny in London.
She said she had still been drunk from the night before which meant her planned recording studio work was stood down.
So she headed straight to the off licence instead and set about getting even more loaded on the way to the bash.
She said: “I was drinking gin straight from the bottle on the train, not caring who stared at me or for how long.
“But, for whatever reason, the booze wasn’t hitting me the way it usually would; the effects weren’t coming quick enough to pacify me. This led to me drinking faster on the train.
“By the time I arrived at King’s Cross Station, I blacked out. The bottle was empty. My next memory is being stood outside the bathrooms at King’s Cross with police officers asking me questions I didn’t want to answer.”
She continued: “Just as I could no longer hold my head up, I could see MJ, the digital music manager at my management company, entering the station.
“I pointed, assuring the police officers, ‘That’s him, that’s him! That’s MJ, he’s picking me up. Can I go now?’
“Poor MJ swept me off my feet before I collapsed, with the promise to the police officers that I was to be taken straight home . . .
“I always think I came this close to losing it all. I was a role model to the fans who were starting to listen to me as an artist, my dream, but my halo had slipped off completely.
“I was an alcoholic at 19 years young. I needed to get help.”
In her new autobiography, My Confessional, she also spoke about going bankrupt in 2013, just two years after The X Factor.
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She said she had been taken advantage of by a man she calls ‘Voldemort’, after the Harry Potter movie baddie, and it made her self-harm, not for the first time.
She added: “So many things were going wrong in this period of time in my life. I found out I was bankrupt, I’d been scammed out of thousands of pounds, I despised my debut album, I loathed myself and I was feeling like a burden to everyone around me. I was emotionally desolate . . .
“My decision to cut myself again was a reflex, triggered by the numbness. I decided one night when I was home alone that I was going to self-harm again.”