A Come Dine With Me winner who avoided jail for having sex with her friend’s 15-year-old boy has insisted she is not a paedophile.

Lucy Haughey, 38, said she was in ‘such a mess’ after escaping an abusive relationship that she lost her ‘sense of right or wrong’.

She dodged jail after the incident came to light in 2017, but she now claims the boy was ‘coached’ to portray herself as the abuser by his mother.

Lucy Haughey, 38, says she is ‘not a paedophile’

‘He was made a victim, not by me, but by his mother,’ she claimed.


‘She coached him to say certain things happened so that I seemed to be a perpetrator rather than an equal party.



‘In the statement, it said I removed his clothing. Believe me, he was throwing it off like a stripper.’

‘There were things that he did that a victim would not do.’

The mother-of-three, who won £1,000 on the Channel 4 show in 2017, claims ‘there was no victim’ to her crime.

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She said: ‘I’ve been portrayed as this fat, old predator rather than actually quite a sexy young lassie who had consensual sex with somebody one week from his 16th birthday.

‘It was illegal and it was wrong but there was no victim.

‘A victim means somebody has been harmed. I didn’t harm him. If I did, why did he contact me again?’

She added: ‘I’m not a paedophile. I had sex with a lad who was underage but he didn’t look like a child. That’s the whole point of paedophiles.

‘I was just an idiot after being alone and lost and a victim of abuse myself.’

Lucy Haughey appeared on Come Dine With Me in 2017 (Picture: Channel 4 / Come Dine With Me)

She said she realised she was having a ‘severe mental breakdown’ within days of sleeping with the boy.

‘On my medical records they are assessing me for PTSD as a result of the domestic abuse,’ she said.

‘A lot of people when they’re suffering from PTSD their decision making is gone.

‘You don’t have any sense of right or wrong. You don’t have a sense of morality.

‘I just went looking for affection, attention, love and acceptance. [The boy] was one of many men at the time. He wasn’t special, I didn’t groom him up. He was just another guy.

Lucy Haughey, 38, says she was beaten up in a ‘vicious attack’

‘It sounds awful, but I just wasn’t thinking.’

She said her ‘abusive’ ex made her believe that ‘sex is acceptance’, adding: ‘When you’re 38-years-old and already vulnerable and I made mistakes and I owned up to them. I pled guilty.’

Haughey claims there is a network of vigilante hunters in her local area and across the UK to find out what she’s wearing, what hair colour she has, so that she’s ‘recognisable wherever I go’.

In one alleged incident in July 2017, Haughey said she suffered a vicious attack at the hands of three women.



She has supplied metro.co.uk with a photo she claims she took after the alleged attack, showing her bruised and beaten face.

She said her attackers ripped off part of her scalp

In one photo, part of her scalp was ripped off.

One month before that, Haughey said two people started following her when she picked her three children up from school.

‘I turned round and she went “you’re a f***ing evil pervert paedophile”. She was so vicious she actually spat in my face while she was talking.

‘This was in front of 14-year-old boy, seven-year-old boy and my 12-year-old boy.’

She claims a woman started screaming and shouting ‘you’re a paedophile’ and handed her a card with Jesus on it.

Haughey told metro.co.uk that she was working in the charity sector for over a decade before entering into a relationship with her abuser in 2013, but that her criminal conviction is now stopping her doing the job she wants to do.

She has written a memoir to help other people spot potential abusers and avoid entering damaging relationships.

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