I Was Sexually Assaulted By A Stranger When I Was 7 Re-Issue

March 5, 2026·1 hr 4 min·6 clips

Alicia describes how a stranger posing as a council worker led her away, revealing the chilling manipulation she faced at age seven.

Alicia says she is quite okay, and she sounds steady. Then comes the memory no child should have to carry: at seven, she was taken by a stranger on the way home from school and sexually assaulted. She told her mother immediately. Police investigated, but the case went cold for twenty-six years, and Alicia grew up thinking the man would never be caught. Michelle Laurie gives Alicia space to talk plainly about coping, harm, and the way fear can settle into a child before she has words for it. Some details are painfully ordinary. Alicia slept with the lights on for a long time, less because she pictured him coming back than because the dark itself felt unsafe. Her fear also turned outward. She wanted him caught because she worried he would hurt somebody else, not because she thought he would return for her. The conversation is careful with the aftermath, including Alicia's honest account of treating intimacy as something without care or meaning. Michelle names that pattern gently, suggesting some survivors try to shrink the power of what happened by making sex matter less. Alicia agrees it did not help. Years passed with no updates. In September 2014, Alicia contacted police and asked them to look again. That review changed the case. Her offender was caught and convicted, which gives the episode relief, but not a neat ending. Michelle reminds Alicia that she helped take a rapist off the street. Alicia says she is speaking now because she hopes someone else seeks support. Lifeline, 1-800-RESPECT, and 13 Yarn are named for listeners who need help after this story.

As heard by us

Alicia revisits the child sexual assault case that went cold for 26 years, until her own push brought police back to it.

Alicia was seven when a stranger abducted and sexually assaulted her on the way home from school. She told her mother straight away, police investigated, and then the case sat cold for 26 years. In 2014, she asked police to look at it again.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a survivor-led cold case that ends with accountability, not just shock.

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