Ranvir Singh fights back tears as she talks about being sexually assaulted aged 12

Ranvir Singh fought back tears as she spoke about the reason why she decided to speak out about being sexually assaulted aged 12 in ITV documentary Ghislaine, Prince Andrew and the Paedophile.

The Good Morning Britain presenter, 44, became emotional as she revealed she had only ever told two people in her life and had a ‘tug of war’ with herself if she wanted to go public with the harrowing ordeal.

Appearing on the show on Tuesday, Ranvir said she felt compelled to talk about her assault when trying to comfort survivor Lisa Phillips, now 45, who is one of the many underage girls targeted by the late Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Speaking to Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley, Ranvir said her revelation ‘came as a complete surprise to me actually, which I suppose speaks to some of the issues around the Ghislaine trial, about memory around incidents that happen in your life of that nature’.

The presenter went on to describe how she saw a distressed Lisa ‘retreat into that moment as she was recounting it’.

‘I think a lot of people who have crimes of that nature committed to them do feel a sense of guilt, of could I have done more? Should I have shouted, should I have screamed? A sort of survivor guilt I think,’ Ranvir said.

‘Often when we do this job people think we are just out to make people cry on telly, do you know what I mean, I’m being blunt about how people view journalists.’

Ranvir said because the interview was done over Zoom she couldn’t physically comfort Lisa, and so decided to confide her as feelings she had felt resurfaced when she was recounting her ordeal.

‘It was just an instant thing,’ she said. ‘I felt a really shocking kind of empathy with what she was describing.

‘I was acutely aware we were on camera but it’s a human to human experience when someone is telling you something so painful.

‘So I did say to her something happened to me when I was 12, and I understand you shouldn’t feel guilty about not’.

Ranvir bit her lip as she tried to steady herself from crying. She went on: ‘Sorry, do you know what? I’ve only ever told two people in my whole life, and in the last two weeks I’ve had to tell family members and so on.’

Susanna told her she didn’t need to tell anyone anything, but an emotional Ranvir went on to talk about the turmoil she felt as to whether to include her experience in the documentary.

She added: ‘It’s odd because it’s not something you generally talk about, but the point being even on the Friday it was very touch and go about whether I should leave it in the documentary, because it’s a big thing to say.’

The documentary airs on Tuesday evening and shows the mother-of-one admitting  she had experienced a similar trauma in her own childhood.

She said: ‘Speaking to Lisa brought up something that happened to me when I was 12.

‘It happened once — and that person is dead — and so I have an understanding of what it’s like and why you would never want to speak of it again.’

Former model Phillips, who now lives in Los Angeles, claimed she first met Epstein after a photoshoot in the Caribbean more than 20 years ago, where he invited her and another friend to his island, Little St James.

She told Singh: ‘I went along with it. You’re not going to kick and scream and fight and yell when you’re on an island.’

Phillips had previously claimed that Epstein introduced her to Prince Andrew, who was stripped of his military titles this week while facing a civil suit in the United States for the alleged assault of Virginia Giuffre.

Speaking in 2020, she told The Sun: ‘I found Jeffrey very charming and he seemed really nice. I had mentioned I had lived in England and he said, “Oh, would you like to meet a prince?”

‘This man walked up and I recognised him as Prince Andrew. He was very nice. It was very brief.’

Giuffre said she was 17 when she was introduced to the Queen’s second son in London, and described him as an ‘abuser’ and ‘not the prince from the fairy tale stories you read’.

Giuffre, who says she was trafficked by Epstein, alleges the Duke had sex with her on three separate occasions, including when she was 17, still a minor under US law.

Epstein committed suicide at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center while awaiting trial for sex trafficking in 2019.

Close friend Maxwell, the Oxford-educated daughter of the late British press baron Robert Maxwell, will be sentenced in June after being found guilty of assisting him in the procurement of young girls.