I was 13 when a man sexually assaulted me & the police thought I’d made the story up – 10 years later, it happened again

SEEING the brand new playground with its blue climbing frame and shiny red slide, my two younger brothers and I raced to the gate.

It was 2009 and my summer holidays had just begun. Aged 13, my sense of freedom and excitement about the new park just round the corner from our house was palpable.

But just 30 minutes later, my childhood would be brutally ripped away from me in an attack which still haunts me to this day - and one for which no one was ever punished.

The man with the orange crossbody bag

While the evening started no differently than any other that summer, when we arrived at the park in Riga, Latvia, I immediately noticed a lone man, in his 30s, wearing a bright orange cross-body bag roaming around by himself.

He had a deep scar under his left eye and a bald skinhead - but I didn't pay much attention to him.

About half an hour after arriving, I realised I desperately needed the loo and nipped into the woods at the edge of the park - one I knew by heart and had cycled through so many times.

As I was getting up to leave, the man who had been watching us appeared out of nowhere.

I immediately sensed danger and my body froze. I could tell he was drunk by the smell of vodka as he pushed me onto the ground.

I screamed as loudly as I could. I hoped someone - my brothers, the other families - would hear me. But no one came.

At just 5ft 7, I was so much smaller and weaker than him, a fully grown man.

I laid there helpless, hearing the shrieks of my friends having fun in the playpark just 100 metres away. 

He pulled at my clothes and ripped down my dark denim jeans and I knew what he was going to do.

Next he removed my knickers and sexually assaulted me in the most brutal way. 

Although I begged him to stop - and promised the incident wouldn't be reported - he wasn't done.

''You have really nice breasts,'' he said after ripping up my top and unclasping the neon green bra I was wearing.

I remember staring up at the leaves of the pine trees swinging above and thinking about my poor parents finding me here stabbed or strangled when he’d inevitably kill me afterwards. 

When he’d finished, he whispered in my ear: “You can go if you keep your mouth shut. Forever.”

Terrified, I nodded, pulled my clothes back on and legged it.

The missing phone - and the dismissal

Back home, I found my parents and told them that a man had just attacked me. All of us were shaking and crying.

My dad called 999 and the police arrived within 30 minutes. They put me in the police car with my dad and drove me back to the scene of the crime.

I recited the incident to the officers, pointing at the flattened grass where the thug had taken my innocence so mercilessly.

Amongst the bushes, I found my black Samsung flip phone which had fallen out when my attacker had ripped my jeans off.

That very phone, I learned years later, played a crucial part - not in the investigation process. But why my claim was never taken seriously. 

An investigation was opened but it wasn’t until six months later that I was called into the local police station to try and identify my perpetrator by looking through mugshots of predators in the area.

The file, which felt never-ending, contained photos of men, women and even kids younger than me - something I struggle to digest up until this day.

But his mug - one I will never be able to erase from my memory - wasn't there, and the police closed the case, dismissing me as a lying child who made up a story to cover up losing her phone. 

Business as usual and back to school

Their child had just been raped - a situation no parents could ever be prepared for or would know how to react to.

Although it wasn't like the assault was swept under the carpet and both my dad and mum were there for me, the rape was not something we'd talk about a lot.

Looking back at it now, perhaps they didn't want the conversations to serve as a constant reminder that something so horrific had happened to me - or to prevent me from spiralling into depression.

They didn't want to lose their bubbly little girl, always outgoing and smiling - and for years, my parents, a business owner and an ophthalmologist, didn't.

Life seemingly returned back to normal - as normal as it could be - and I even found myself at the same playground a few weeks later, albeit under my parents' supervision.

September, the new school year, arrived and none of my teachers or classmates, even the closest ones, could tell that a man had a man had assaulted me by penetration just months earlier.

My academic performance and everyday life hadn't been affected - I was still one of the top students in class and would do things every normal teenager girl does, such as hanging out with my pals and hitting the clubs in the old town.

But it all changed ten or so years later when it happened again.

Dinner date, drinks and Uber back home

In 2019, aged 23, I had been living in London for four years after leaving Riga to pursue my journalism degree in the UK.

After suffering a brutal break up, I decided to join Tinder, and I matched with a man a few years older than me.

We enjoyed a lovely dinner at The Ivy in South Kensington and the pair of us headed for drinks at a nearby pub.

The booze kept on flowing and flowing - at some point I remember having come back from the loo and finding yet another round of gin and tonic on the table.

Although I'd been drinking since the unripe age of 13, even this amount of alcohol proved to be more than I could handle.

With no trains that could take me home, my date arranged an Uber - which I immediately passed out in.

''Kate, we're here,'' he said, before asking if he could stay the night as his home was quite a bit of a trek away.

Hands like octopus

At some point in the night, I'm awaken by my panties getting pulled down - he wanted to have sex.

Bleary-eyed and still intoxicated, I said no and pulled myself further away from him - but he didn't take my ''no'' for an answer.

Like an octopus, his hands were everywhere, desperately trying to initiate intercourse, whether I wanted it or not.

After what felt like half-an-hour of pestering, I stopped - and he took the silent ''no'' as a ''yes''.

It wasn't until I'd been recommended to watch the gripping BBC series I May Destroy You, written by Michaela Coel, that I realised what had happened to me that November wasn't just a guy trying to have sex with me.

When talking about rape and other forms of sexual offences, there's this common misconception that it's always violent, by a stranger and in a dark alleyway.

The harsh reality is that the scope is much wider - there's date rape, coercion into having sex, acquaintance rape, groping, forced kissing, to name a few.