In an interview Wednesday, Britain’s Queen Camilla spoke publicly for the first time about an assault she experienced as a teenager. The incident, which occurred in the 1960s, helped convince the queen to make opposition to domestic abuse one of her royal causes, she said during a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, which airs on New Year’s Eve.
Now 78, the queen said in the interview that “When I was a teenager, I was attacked on a train. I’d sort of forgotton about it, but I remember at the time, being so angry.”
The attacker was “somebody I didn’t know,” she said. “I was reading my book and, you know, this boy—man—attacked me, and I did fight back.”
The incident she described was first detailed in Power and the Palace, a book published in September that explains the present day relationship between the UK’s monarchy and its elected officials. According to author Valentine Low, Camilla told Boris Johnson, who was London mayor at the time, about the attack in 2008, three years after she had married the then-Prince of Wales.
King Charles and Queen Camilla on September 08, 2024 in Braemar, Scotland.
Chris Jackson/Getty Images
When Johnson asked how she responded, Low writes that the queen replied, “I did what my mother taught me to. I took off my shoe and whacked him in the nuts with the heel.” Buckingham Palace did not confirm that that conversation had taken place when it was reported last fall, nor had King Charles III or the queen addressed the incident previously.
Camilla told Johnson about the attack during a conversation about plans to open three sexual assault crisis centers in London, Low writes, saying the queen would eventually visit some of those centers. “Nobody asked why the interest, why the commitment. But that’s what it went back to,” Low writes.
