Dame Helen reveals she was raped

Dame Helen Mirren (pictured) has told GQ magazine that women who are date-raped should not necessarily expect to take those who have violated them to court, and that she herself had been locked in a room and sexually abused. The 63-year-old actress also claims in the interview with former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan that the Nazi henchman Klaus Barbie was the reason she stopped taking cocaine in the 1980s.

Dame Helen’s own rape experiences came in her late teens and twenties when she moved to London. "I was, yes. A couple of times. Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will." However, she insisted that those who date-rape should not necessarily be considered rapists in a criminal sense. Referring to the boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted of raping a Miss Black America contestant in a hotel room in 1992, Mirren said: "It's such a tricky area isn't it? Especially if there is no violence. I mean, look at Mike Tyson. I don't think he was a rapist."

She said that she believed that if a woman voluntarily ended up in a man’s bedroom and engaged in sexual activity, she still had the right to say 'no' and that if a man ignored that request it should be considered rape. But she added: "I don’t think she can have that man into court under those circumstances. I guess it is one of the subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them."

Needless to say, her comments drew an angry response from women's groups and anti-rape campaigners. Jasvinder Sanghera, who runs the Karma Nirvana charity, said yesterday: "Dame Helen’s comments ... help reinforce the whole ‘She’s asking for it’ mentality."

Mirren, who recently won an Oscar for her portrayal of the Queen, also admitted using cocaine during the 1980s, but that she stopped when she discovered that the former Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'The Butcher of Lyon', was making money from the class-A drug. She said: "I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties. But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, in the early Eighties. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.

"I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this horrible man in South America."