Jenny Evans had just starred in her first film when everything came crashing down. Twin Town was a riot of drugs, fast cars and bad behaviour labelled the “Welsh Trainspotting”. She had a wonderful time making the movie, which was released in 1997. There was a feelgood atmosphere on set, and she got on brilliantly with her fellow actors (Twin Town launched the careers of Rhys Ifans and Dougray Scott). “Friends of the cast and crew were coming down from London to Swansea because the vibe was so good,” she says. “It was a great group of people doing something fun. It was a blast.” Twin Town became a cult success, and the 19-year-old from Abergavenny found herself hanging out with celebrities and looking forward to a career in the movies. Then she was sexually assaulted by a high-profile figure and his friend.
Almost 30 years on, she has written a powerful memoir. The assault is just the starting point. Don’t Let It Break You, Honey is the astonishing story of her fight for justice and how it led to a career in journalism, exposed corruption in the British press and the Metropolitan police, and played a role in the phone-hacking scandal that resulted in the closure of the News of the World.
We’re sitting outside a London bar and she is nursing a Diet Coke. Evans is a girlish 47, the Welsh accent has long gone, and she’s casually dressed in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt. Her gold name necklace glints in the sun, and I’m squinting to read it. Surprisingly, it begins with an F rather than a J. I look more closely. “Fuck it,” it says. She grins – a lovely, toothy grin. “It’s just to remind me that things matter less when you give a bit of time and space to them, and to not get so caught up in the moment.”
Despite the reminder, it’s obvious that things matter hugely to her. It’s what’s driven her on when she has seemed beaten. And, despite the many times she has been terrified, she has tackled those fears head on.
Evans, who now lives in Bristol, grew up in a family she adored. Her mother, a therapist, was active in the women’s movement and a regular at Greenham Common; her father, an English teacher and Labour councillor, took her and her older brother Will on long walks, spotting kingfishers, skimming stones and reciting poetry. Life was idyllic. Then, when she was 13, her father died after an operation went wrong.
Evans was devastated and disrupted by his death. She started to struggle at school and dropped out of A-levels twice. But she pulled herself together, found her tribe in youth theatre and was cast in Twin Town. Soon after the film came out, she met up with the team in London for a reunion. At the end of the evening, she tagged along with another woman to the house of a well-known man, unconnected to the film. When the woman left suddenly, she found herself alone with him and his friend, referred to in the book as The Famous Man and The Wolf. She asked them to call her a taxi, and that’s when they assaulted her.
After the men got bored with her, they let her leave. The Wolf eventually did call a cab for her. The driver, a caring man called Ken, said he thought she had been raped and asked if he could take her to a police station. Evans told him she needed to sleep. She was unsure exactly what had happened, but she knows it was a brutal sexual assault. “Assault by penetration is what it was. The truth is, I don’t know what the penetrating thing was.” Evans says she thought The Famous Man might kill her accidentally because of the pressure he applied to her throat. “It was so violent. I couldn’t breathe.”
Instead of reporting the attack, she withdrew into a web of self-loathing. Evans had always regarded herself as strong and independent, but not any more. “The assault revealed to me that I was not the adult I thought I was. I didn’t know when I was safe. I couldn’t read rooms. I couldn’t trust my instincts. I was totally out of my depth and I retreated entirely.” She left her mother’s house in Wales for London, but it was more of an escape than a move forward. She faxed her agent and told her she didn’t want to be in films any more. “Within a year I’d completely changed. I put a lot of weight on and I’d changed temperamentally. I was depressed. I felt my body had worked against me, so I wanted to change it. I began to dress drably. It was subconscious, but I felt I needed to be different because something about me made me unsafe.”
She worked in a bar for a few years. A year after the assault, she was raped by a manager when she was sleeping on a sofa following a night shift. He stopped when she woke up and pushed him off, and this time there were no injuries. But it confirmed to her that there was something weak about her; abusers could sense she was prey. Again, she didn’t go to the police because her self-worth was so low and she wanted to keep her job.
In 2001, when Evans was 23, Will was killed in a house fire at the age of 24. She was distraught at the loss of her brother, but decided she had to make something of her life for his sake. She applied to do a degree at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Evans no longer wanted to act, but she thought she would make a good teacher and fancied trying her hand at writing. She did well at Central, made many friends, moved in with a boyfriend, and recovered her equilibrium. It was seven years since the assault, and she finally felt her life had a sense of purpose.
Shortly before graduating, she came across an article in the Evening Standard saying that The Famous Man had been accused of rape. In her naivety, she had assumed the attack on her was an opportunistic one-off. For the first time, it struck her that he could be a serial offender and “other women might have been hurt while I was hiding”. She decided it was her duty to go to the police. They listened carefully and sympathetically. Although she found it stressful, she felt believed.
Four days later, her story appeared in the Sun. She wasn’t named (victims of a sexual crime are granted the right to lifelong anonymity in the UK), but The Famous Man was. The painfully personal details she had told the police in confidence were there for everyone to read. Evans became paranoid. She started to distrust those around her. Could her closest friends have betrayed her to the press? Had her house been bugged? Could her boyfriend, Neil, be responsible? But even he didn’t know some of the details that appeared in the paper. “I hadn’t told him there was more than one person involved, for instance. You downplay these things for people you love. I felt frightened, embarrassed, humiliated, violated. I felt shame.”
It was the early 2000s, a time when women who alleged sexual assault were often said to have been asking for it or simply making it up. The Famous Man’s PR team set to work. Interviews appeared in which he was portrayed sympathetically and he suggested that the allegations were false and had only been made because he was well known. Evans knew she faced an uphill battle. It was hard enough to get a sexual assault conviction when the media weren’t spinning for the defendant.
After a second interview, the police told Evans that the Crown Prosecution Service had ruled that her evidence was strong enough for The Famous Man to be charged. She asked about the other women who had also come forward, and was told that, although they were credible, their evidence hadn’t met the charging threshold. Evans was alone. She subsequently discovered that more than 40 women had made allegations against him.
One day, her friend Rachel discovered a letter Evans had sent her years before in which she wrote about the assault, named The Famous Man and talked about other occasions when she had been sexually assaulted. Evans was delighted, believing it was vital evidence, and proof that she wasn’t jumping on a celebrity bandwagon.
She handed it to the lead detective expecting his face to light up. But it didn’t. The letter was problematic, and would have to be disclosed to the defence. “The letter discredited me,” she writes in the book. “One assault is bad luck, two is careless – no matter the context – three, or more, you are now an undefendable, fantasist, lunatic slut.”
The police told her that she would have to tell them about the other assaults and that she would be cross-examined about them in court. Defence barristers would happily humiliate her to save their client. Shame, she says, is at the heart of her story. Ultimately, the prospect of being shamed publicly led to her refusing to talk about the other incidents. The CPS said it had no option but to “offer no evidence” against The Famous Man and a statement was released saying that the charges against him had been dropped. Today, Evans says, she wishes she had sought legal advice before disclosing the letter.
That Sunday, the News of the World devoted a double-page spread to her story. Again, she wasn’t named, but the details from her meeting with the police about the letter were all there. The article said she had kept secrets from the police, which was untrue, and implied that she had accused The Famous Man of assault simply because he was famous. The same questions kept circling in her head. How did the News of the World get this information? Did they pay for it? Was it legal to do so? And were the police involved?
Despite writing the book, she still finds it hard to tell her story. Her knees are tucked up to her tummy and her arms are wrapped around them. “My body language! It’s very guarded,” she says, laughing. “I just wanted to know what the fuck happened. This ball of fear in my gut turned into anger. I just went, this is not OK. I’m done. This is not OK.”
That day she applied for a place to do a postgraduate diploma in journalism at City, University of London.
After the case against The Famous Man collapsed, the lead detective told her she still might qualify for criminal injury compensation, paid to victims of a violent crime who have suffered mental or physical injuries. He offered to apply on her behalf, but she declined. When she discovered the journalism course cost £5,000, she changed her mind. That money helped pay her way through City University.
Why did she want to become a journalist when the press had tried to destroy her? “I wanted to understand what this beast was that had so violated me. I sensed something illegal had happened and I wanted to expose that on some level.”
A few weeks into her course, she attended a masterclass in investigative journalism by then Guardian reporter Nick Davies, who was about to start an investigation into the state of British journalism. She decided that could be her route to getting an answer about how her story had appeared in the Sun and the News of the World. Evans suggested they go for a cup of tea, and got straight to the point. Did Davies take on researchers, and, if so, would he give her a job?
She started working with him on his book Flat Earth News, which was published in 2008 and exposed some of the murky practices of British journalism. After graduating, she continued working with him on an ad-hoc basis but spent most of her time developing documentaries for television.
In July 2009, Davies wrote a Guardian news story headlined “Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims”. Evans had not been in touch with Davies for a while, because she had been abroad working on TV documentaries. She’d never heard of phone hacking, but it was a lightbulb moment – so this was how the tabloids stole secrets. Two years earlier, in January 2007, the News of the World’s royal correspondent Clive Goodman had been jailed for four months after pleading guilty to illegally intercepting mobile phone messages involving members of the royal household; his co-conspirator, private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, was sentenced to six months. At the time, News International (now News UK), which published the News of the World, claimed that Goodman was a solitary rogue operator. Davies did not believe this, and was convinced there was plenty more to come out.
Evans’s documentary work had come to an end, and she asked Davies if he had anything to tide her over. He said he needed someone “good at calling up strangers and persuading them to talk” – namely “current and former News of the World employees about the use of private investigators and any other dark arts”, such as “blagging” information from confidential databases and tapping live phone calls. Evans jumped at it. Davies did not know she had a vested interest.
Gradually people began to talk, and what she discovered horrified her. She was told stories about reporters sent on “punishment” missions to chase fictitious stories set up by editors to humiliate them. There was the reporter who was five months pregnant being ordered to get in a dinghy to look for a whale’s family, and another being left at the side of a road dressed as a “hooker” in the dead of night. One source alleged that he had seen editors pay police for stories, and that this had once led to the suicide of someone accused of a crime. Although News of the World editor Andy Coulson professed ignorance about phone hacking, “he was in it up to his earlobes”, according to another source.
“The more I found out about the tabloids,” Evans says, “the more fearful I became, because of their reach, their power, the corruption, the ruthlessness, the depth of the misogyny.”
She was not having much luck getting potential victims of hacking to talk to her. So Davies suggested that she should encourage them to ask the Met directly if they were on the database of names obtained from private investigator Mulcaire’s material. Few people knew the Met was obliged to give them this information, and that those who found evidence they may have been hacked could then sue the News of the World and Mulcaire. Davies put together a list of names of likely victims – largely people who had been exposed by the paper. At the bottom of the list was The Famous Man. Davies still had no idea of Evans’s connection to him.
There was no way she was going to approach him, but it gave her an idea. She emailed New Scotland Yard and explained that she thought she may have been hacked by Mulcaire. Three months later, the Met responded, saying: “There is some documentation in our possession to suggest that you may have been a person of interest to Glenn Mulcaire.” In the book, Evans describes her response to receiving the email with typical scatological brio. “Holy shitting fuck,” she writes.
Evans obtained photocopies of the relevant bits of Mulcaire’s notebooks. Alongside her name he had written “Fragile”, and had got her date of birth wrong. Next to her name was that of her friend Rachel, with the correct address and date of birth. This was even more alarming. After all, she was the friend to whom she had written a letter about the assault, the disclosure of which had resulted in the breakdown of her case and the double-page spread in the News of the World.
She went into meltdown. Although this was the proof she had long been looking for, she was petrified, not least because she hadn’t told Davies of her vested interest and now believed that it could undermine the integrity of his investigation. She couldn’t focus on work because she was in pieces, and she was penniless. She invoiced Davies for a number of shifts, and he got back to her asking why nothing seemed to have come from the work she’d done in that time. That’s when it all came out. She told him everything. Evans says she expected a bollocking. When she had finished, Davies said that he had experienced violence as a child from somebody who should have protected him, and it had given him a lifelong hatred of bullies. “We must stand up to the bullies, if we can, Jen,” he told her. “We can stand up to them together. If you still feel you can.” Not only was she relieved, she believed she had finally found her answer: she must have been one of many people who had been hacked by Mulcaire, although she could not remember discussing the details of her case on the phone. But even here, she was disappointed. She had not recognised the phone number Mulcaire had jotted beside her name, but thought that was because she’d changed it so many times. She rang the number to check it out. It turned out to be a different Jenny Evans; Mulcaire was looking for her but found the wrong number.
She finally realised that there could only be one answer to her original question. Apart from her and Rachel, only the Metropolitan police knew about the existence of the letter in which she discussed the assault. If Mulcaire had attempted to hack into her phone, he had clearly fallen at the first hurdle. The Murdoch press could have only got hold of her story from the police.
The more she found out about the Murdoch press, the more she had come to think that they were in cahoots with the Met, if not controlling them. In the investigation into the hacking scandal, it emerged that officers were paid for information (which is unlawful), and that senior officers frequently partied with and were treated to freebies by News International journalists.
After Davies’s 2009 story about the payouts to hacking victims, the Met initially promised to review all the material that the police had seized from Mulcaire when he was arrested in 2006 – six bin bags containing 11,000 pages of notes from his home. “We were all expecting that to take a long time, but 24 hours later they came back and said, ‘We’ve reviewed it all and there’s nothing to see here,’” an incredulous Evans says.
Why does she think the Met appeared so eager to cover up News International’s criminal activity? Evans says there isn’t a simple answer, but she points out that a number of senior police officers were having affairs that went on to be exposed by rivals of the Sun and the News of the World. It’s hard to believe that Murdoch’s newspapers, so skilled in exposing the secret sex lives of the rich and powerful, were unaware of these relationships.
Evans feels the true significance of the phone-hacking scandal has been downplayed because it involved celebrities. “It has landed in people’s consciousness as something to do with Hugh Grant’s voicemail. The breaches of privacy are terrible, but it’s actually a police corruption story. They tried to cover it up, to stay in the good books of the Murdoch press. When this was happening, we were talking about the power of Murdoch and the other tabloids, and now we’ve got the social media oligarchs who wield a similar amount of power. That’s why it’s still relevant.”
It took the hacking of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s voicemail to transform a marginal story into a national scandal. The case was reported in the Guardian in July 2011, a month after serial killer Levi Bellfield had been convicted of her murder. Ironically, on this occasion, the News of the World may well have been hacking Dowler’s phone for noble reasons – to try to track her down.
The fallout from the phone-hacking scandal was huge. In 2011, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson resigned from his new job as spin doctor to prime minister David Cameron, and six months later the 168-year-old newspaper, known to many as News of the Screws, was closed down. The head of the Met, Paul Stephenson, resigned after it was revealed he had accepted a complimentary 20-night stay at luxury health spa Champneys over a five-week period when recuperating from a knee operation. Champneys’ publicist was Neil Wallis, former deputy editor of the News of the World, with whom Stephenson had dined eight times between 2006 and 2010. His deputy John Yates also resigned. He blamed News International for failing to tell him how widespread phone hacking was. In 2014, Coulson was jailed for 18 months after being found guilty of a charge of conspiracy to intercept voicemails.
As for The Famous Man, he also got his comeuppance. Although he never was put on trial, his reputation was well and truly trashed after it was revealed that there had been multiple allegations against him.
Did Evans feel vindicated? “Yes, when the News of the World closed I felt very emotional. I felt like the bullies had been taken down. But even then, it was complicated. I had also met so many reporters who had worked for these newspapers and I liked them, so I was aware they were being demonised. I felt for them.”
She now knew at lot about the way the tabloids operated. But she still didn’t know how they had got her story. Evans wrote to the Met police’s directorate of professional standards (DPS), saying: “I have come to the conclusion that someone in the Met police either gave or – worse – sold my private information to the tabloids. And I would like to know the truth, please. So that I can move on.”
The DPS produced its final report in November 2013, two years later. The directorate upheld her complaint, but effectively cleared the Met in the process. It concluded that there had been one leak by a press officer to “journalist sources” about the police station that The Famous Man had been taken to, but there was no evidence that Evans’s letter to Rachel had been leaked by the police. The report said that the press officer had been suspended, that he had since died and that his files had been lost. It suggested that the fact that the News of the World article did not mention the letter was evidence that the letter had not been leaked, and did not attempt to explain how the paper had got hold of her information.
Evans Googled the dead press officer. He had been suspended months before the News of the World article about her was published.
She wasn’t done yet. Evans then took her case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (now rebranded as the Independent Office for Police Conduct), whose remit was to evaluate whether the Met had carried out a sufficient investigation into itself. The IPCC, which was largely staffed by former officers, concluded it had.
And still she wasn’t done. Evans was determined to get an apology. So she approached the lawyer Tamsin Allen, and asked if she could see a way forward. “I went to Tamsin and said, ‘Surely this is wrong, surely this is not OK?’” Allen agreed with her and said she thought Evans could make a claim for damages against the Met for giving away or selling her secrets to the Murdoch press. Evans was impressed by Allen’s desire to fight for justice. Allen told her: “It is hugely satisfying to represent an individual against a monolith.” This struck a chord.
When Evans opened the letter she received from the Met in 2014, she found herself “crying and laughing simultaneously”. She had finally got an apology for “the passing of information to the media” and “for the distress caused”, but again the Met blamed the dead press officer.
In the end, she never did get a satisfactory answer to the question that took her into journalism – how did the details she had revealed to the police find their way into the News of the World? But along the way she had helped Davies expose the dark arts of the Murdoch press, and bring down leading figures in News International and the Metropolitan police. She also received a life-changing settlement from the Met alongside the apology. It paid for IVF treatment, and after five rounds and eight embryo transfers, she gave birth to her son, Leo, who is now six. Allen then took on the newspapers on Evans’s behalf, a number of which paid her damages, although none admitted liability.
After working successfully as a documentary maker for 20 years (directing and producing films about refugees and asylum seekers, homelessness and, of course, phone hacking), she decided it was time for a career change in 2020. Inspired by Allen, she used part of her payout from the newspapers to retrain as a lawyer. Now she has qualified and is looking for her first job.
I ask if she has reached closure. Not through her dealings with the police, she says. “I was aware by the end that I wouldn’t get the name of the person responsible because that’s how corruption works. People just cover their arses: they change department names, they lose files, they scapegoat someone else, and suddenly it’s undiscoverable. But on one level the book is my closure. It’s pulling together all the research, everything I discovered, and saying, ‘Look at this, it’s not OK, is it?’”
That seems to be your motto, I say. Evans nods and grins. She glances down at her “Fuck it” necklace. “I think I’m going to change my necklace to ‘This is not OK’.”
