I was sexually assaulted as an F1 grid girl… I just wanted to feel loved, reveals Melinda Messenger
MELINDA MESSENGER has revealed how she was once sexually assaulted when working as a grid girl for Eddie Jordan’s Formula One team.
The former model, who had the grand prix gig in the late Nineties with fellow glamour girls Katie Price and Emma Noble, says it was one of HUNDREDS of such encounters she experienced during the height of her fame.
But she only felt unable to stand up to an attacker on one occasion.
In an exclusive interview, Melinda, 51, says: “On the team there was a masseur for the drivers and he offered massages to the girls as well.
“In my foolish naivety, I was like, ‘Oooh, a massage, that would be really nice’.
“But then, while having it, I suddenly thought, ‘No, this is all wrong’.
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“Fortunately I was able to get myself out in the nick of time. I didn’t report him. I put it behind me.”
But Melinda feels haunted by the experiences she never reported.
She says: “There have been hundreds of those. Really. Hundreds.
“But I have to think, it is what it is. I’ve lived a very full life and opened myself to lots of different experiences and with that some are good and some are not so good.
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“I didn’t have the ability to protect myself properly.
“I had terrible boundaries. Non-existent boundaries. I didn’t know how to say no.
“I didn’t know how to keep myself out of situations that could be potentially, you know, not great.
“But now I know how to look after myself. Now I know what caring for yourself really means.
“I was willingly exploiting myself, don’t forget. I was quite happy to go and get paid to look glamorous. So that’s a self-exploitation.
“But I’m all right with that. That’s my part in the game.
“The only time I’ve ever called somebody out on it was when I was doing a photoshoot in my twenties for a catalogue.
“The photographer was really inappropriate and making loads of sexual comments and really coming on and being aggressive and quite predatory.
“Other times, I’ve let it slide.
“But I walked out of the shoot and refused to go back.
“I’d been flown out to LA to do it and it caused a big old fuss and he called me up and said, ‘You’ll ruin my reputation, why are you doing this?’
“I fear for young women doing pictures now. I’d say, ‘Make sure you’ve got really good boundaries and that you value yourself.
‘NOTHING IS WORTH THAT’
“Don’t put up with it. Absolutely don’t put up with it. Nothing is worth that.”
Mum-of-three Melinda shot to fame after she was spotted in Swindon in 1997 on a billboard for a windows firm.
Within months she was a household name.
Today she admits she hid behind her looks to deal with crippling insecurities.
She says: “Heavy make-up and investing heavily in how I looked was to cover insecurities of not really feeling good enough.
“For me it was a mask. It was a way of trying to make myself feel good because I didn’t feel that way on the inside.
“I had to work really hard to cope with red carpets, I was really nervous of being in front of a big crowd of people.
“Inside, I was terrified, like a skitty horse ready to bolt off.”
Melinda is mum to sons Morgan, 22, and Flynn, 20, as well as daughter Evie, 18 — and despite the amazing modelling career she has had, she hopes her daughter does not follow in her footsteps.
She says: “I don’t want her to feel that that’s her only role, you know, to look glamorous.
“I can talk to her now because I went through that experience.
“I unconsciously exploited myself. All I ever really wanted was to be wanted and to feel loved.”
After finding fame, Melinda’s life instantly changed.
She says it went “from hanging out in the same five or six bars in Swindon to hanging out at film premieres in London overnight”.
She adds: “Once I found myself at a party after a film premiere with the actor playing Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, and he started chatting me up.
“He kept coming up to me.
“I was with a couple of friends and he was dancing with me and I didn’t know who he was.
“His PR came up and said who he was and did we want to go out on a date?
“I had a boyfriend and said no, but it freaked me out.
“On another occasion Val Kilmer asked me out on a date, via my agent.
“I was sat at home thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s that Batman?’ I had a crush on him but I blew him out, too.”
‘I HAD IMPOSTER SYNDROME’
Yet she says: “I never saw myself as famous. I felt like a normal person, which I was, in this extraordinary world.
“I had imposter syndrome, and I still do.”
Melinda married her boyfriend, Wayne Roberts but they split in 2012 after 14 years of marriage and having the children.
Since then, she has dated a ski instructor she met while appearing on Channel 4 reality show The Jump, and had an eight-month relationship with a man she met on Channel 4’s First Dates.
But now Melinda, who will complete a psychotherapy degree this year, is looking for love again and has joined the Sara Eden matchmaking agency after a series of disastrous relationships.
She recently dumped a man because he was determined to take her on a £20,000 holiday.
She says: “I was introduced by friends but red flags started to emerge.
It started off with, ‘I really want to treat you and look after you’, which sounded nice, then he said he wanted to take me on holiday after a couple months.
“It was big pressure — and it was something like £20,000. He was very insistent and had gone ahead and booked it.
“Then he said, ‘I want to take you shopping’, and I was like, ‘Why? I’m perfectly capable of taking myself shopping’.
“He wanted me to have a bikini for every day of the holiday, as if I couldn’t do my own shopping.
“It felt like a transaction of him buying me lovely things to look a certain way, not a relationship.
“I’m no trophy and I don’t want to be one.”
‘I’VE DEALT WITH EVERY RED FLAG’
Instead of the week-long holiday she was persuaded to go away for a weekend with her suitor to a posh ski resort.
She recalls: “He said, ‘Dating you is like winning the Lottery’.
“He was totally unaware . . . then he was saying how attractive a waitress was . . . and then, when this poor woman passes our table, he grabs her by the hand, kisses her full- out, and I just sat there thinking, ‘What the hell is going on? This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen’.
“Luckily, we were going home the next morning.”
Melinda insists she has no urge or wish to get married, but she would like to find someone to share her life with.
She says: “I have been the classic Mrs Fixer before. I have dealt with every red flag you could ever imagine.
“I see the potential and think I can help someone work through their rubbish, heal them.”
When she signed up to the dating agency, she deliberately picked a bad picture of herself.
She says it was “in my lounge, in broad daylight with no make-up, with all the wrinkles showing”, and adds: “I just thought, ‘If anything is coming from this, I want it to be honest and truthful and I don’t want it to be about, ‘Oh, that’s that ex-model’, because I was 27 back then.
“Who wants to be dated for who they were back then?
“It’s not easy to meet people, especially when you get older, it becomes more challenging.”
Melinda does still get chatted up online by men who are half her age.
Laughing, she says: “If I’m honest, it baffles me, especially when it’s some young guy in his mid-twenties.
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“I’m like, ‘Seriously, dude, I’m 51. I could be your mother. What are you thinking?’
“I chuckle to myself and think, ‘You’ve got a mother complex going on here. You need to go and work on that’.”