MP Natalie Fleet who fell pregnant at 15 after being groomed by an older man reveals the moment she realised she had been abused 25 years later
Labour MP Natalie Fleet has opened up about how she was groomed by an older man as a teenager, before giving birth aged just 15.
The politician, who represents Bolsove in Derbyshire , revealed last year that she was a victim of 'statutory rape' after being 'groomed' by a much older man who lived in her area.
Speaking to the Guardian, Fleet, who is now 41, revealed she only started to see her 'teenage relationship' as grooming and the 'sex' as statutory rape after she entered parliament last year.
The politician first opened up about the experience in an interview with GB News, just weeks after winning her seat in last year's general election.
She has spoken about her experience on a number of occasions since, and has used her platform to campaign for the strengthening of legal protections of children who are born by rape.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Fleet has shared further detail about the harrowing event, and now realises how it 'was just lies to have sex with a teenage girl'.
She described how she, a young girl weathering a multitude of storms, found herself looking for love in an older man who lived a few streets away.
'He told me he loved me and that I was amazing and I believed him,' said the MP, who has chosen not to name the father of her daughter, who is now 24.
'I thought we were in a loving relationship that would go long-term. I didn't know it was just lies to have sex with a teenage girl.'
After a three-month relationship with the man, Fleet became pregnant with her daughter, whom she now calls the 'love of my life'.
What had felt like a long time when she was a 'young and vulnerable' teenager, she now realises was 'not long at all'.
When she told her much older boyfriend about the pregnancy, he immediately told her to terminate it and threatened to deny paternity if she went through with it - a reaction that left her crushed.
She asked him how she'd managed to conceive if he'd been using protection, to which he 'mumbled' that he believed she'd been on contraception, despite never having asked.
While she knew about the risks of pregnancy and contracting STIs, she'd been 'too embarrassed' to ask about protection, believing her partner to 'know what he was doing'.
Admitting the pregnancy to her family was far worse, and described telling her mother as 'absolutely horrendous'.
Her grandfather, a miner from Nottinghamshire who played a big part in her upbringing, screamed so loudly it 'didn't sound like a human'.
He later came round and is now an incredibly doting grandfather and has regularly helped with childcare over the years.
During the early days of her pregnancy, Fleet was left racked with shame - partly due to the unreservedly negative reactions from her teachers, relatives and peers - with little to no blame attributed to her boyfriend.
Despite being under the care of a consultant, GP and midwife, no one enquired about the circumstances of her pregnancy, which she now believes was the result of 'statutory rape'.
She credits the help of a government initiative, Sure Start, designed to support families in disadvantaged areas, with helping her to get her GCSEs while also being a full-time mother.
Three months after the birth of her daughter, Fleet met her husband, who was three years above her at the same school.
Now a heating engineer, it was only when Fleet first began opening up in interviews about having been groomed as child that people realised her husband wasn't the biological father of her daughter.
She now views him as having 'chosen' to be the father of her first daughter.
With the help of Sure Start, Fleet was able to go to college and get her A-levels before getting a history and politics degree from the University of Nottingham.
By this point, she had given birth to her second child, a son, but found relating to her fellow students nearly impossible since their experiences of being able to 'roll out of bed' for a lecture was so far away from her own.
She struggled so much that she ended up dropping out of university, a decision she described as 'horrendous'.
'That's when I thought everything people had said was true. I'd ruined my life. It took me a long time to rebuild,' she said.
From there on, she had two more children, volunteered at a Citizens Advice bureau and joined the Labour party, later getting a job at the National Education Union, where she worked for three years right up until entering parliament.
Only when she started work as an MP did she begin to think about the past, and came to realise that what she'd experienced as a teenager was in fact 'statutory rape'.
When she spoke to her daughter, she was 'gobsmacked' that it her taken so long to cotton on to the cruel reality of her circumstances.
Since opening up about her past, Fleet has been in contact with many other women who have found themselves in similar situations - saying they've approached her in the street and have sent her letters.
She told the publication that her 'dream' was that women across the country will be able to come forward knowing they'll have 'an MP who believes them'.
Fleet also campaigns for the implementation of legal protections for children who are born as a result of rape.
'People don't believe me when I share that there is nothing stopping perpetrators having access to children conceived via rape,' she wrote in Glamour.
'They are horrified that a rapist can have legal rights over another human because of the crime they committed. A child conceived via rape cannot be the only proceed of crime that a convicted criminal has lifelong access to.'
She is currently fighting in government to protect women, who's babies are born by rape, their perpetrators still holding legal access to visit them through what she called a 'legal loophole'.
Fleet said more must be done to protect from the 'injustice' that keeps 'women silent for fear of further harm'.
Speaking to GB News last year, she said she wanted to use her platform to talk more about women in her situation 'and do something about it'.
She said: 'I really want to be a voice for all of those people, all of those women that have children in far from ideal circumstances.'
Adding that her childhood experiences still had a 'massive impact' on her, including 'weekly nightmares', she said she was still 'so excited about what the next Labour Government is going to do'.
She said: 'We're going to make sure that we're smashing down barriers to opportunity so that there can be more stories like mine.
'I am a product of the last Labour government. It wasn't a perfect government, but it changed my life and it was transformational.
'And that's the reason that it's worth doing a job where you can't go to the shop in your pyjamas anymore, but where you still have a panic alarm in your bag, your own children are potentially at risk, that's really awful.
'But when it means that you can make other children's lives, who aren't as fortunate, better, that's incredible.'
The politician recently became a grandparent, her first daughter having had a daughter of her own.
Fleet's husband has already committed to taking an active role in being a grandparent, having gone part-time so he is able to provide childcare .
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