Coronation Street actor Bill Roache raped a 15-year-old girl in "a cold and calculating manner" at his own home when she came to see his newborn daughter, a court has heard .
The woman, now 63, claims the rape happened when she visited Roache's house in Haslingden, Lancashire, shortly after his eldest daughter Vanya was born in April 1967.
The woman, who cannot be named, is one of five who claim the Corrie star sexually assaulted them in the 1960s and early 1970s. Two of them are sisters, but the others do not know each other, the jury at Preston crown court has been told.
All five women only came forward to the police last year. The alleged rape victim was the first to report Roache, having resolved to do so following a discussion with her son about other celebrities accused of historic sex abuse, including Jimmy Savile, the court heard.
Her son expressed surprise that victims would wait decades to report the abuse, she said, in a police video interview shown to the jury. She explained it was entirely understandable because "in those days you didn't talk about things like that".
She said: 'These kids would not have been believed. I said, 'I know things like this happen because I have been in a position like this.'"
Asked why she had decided to make a complaint, she replied: "It has eaten away at me. It is on the media all the time. I now realise what happened to me was not an isolated incident. I thought it had to be my fault ... I was ashamed, frightened and disgusted, to be quite honest. I realise now it was not just one person. I thought it was just him. And now it is coming out all over the place that people are doing it."
The court heard she was enraged after watching an interview Roache gave to the former Mirror editor, Piers Morgan, on his Life Stories TV show.
"He was talking about the number of women in his life," she said. "He was quite amused by it all. It made my skin crawl to be honest. It was just the way he laughed it all off."
The woman claimed Roache invited her in to his bungalow in the village of Haslingden near Rossendale in east Lancashire at some point between April and October 1967, when she visited to see baby Vanya. "I hoped I might be able to help feed her or something," the woman said.
She claimed Roache showed her into a bedroom, where he pushed her on to the bed and raped her. She said he didn't kiss her or talk to her or take any clothes off – hers or his own – but simply pushed her underwear to one side and penetrated her.
It was her first sexual experience and she said she didn't understand why he was "huffing and puffing" on top of her. But she remembered him using a condom and vividly recalls the smell of rubber on his fingers. She described the alleged rape as "cold and calculated".
The woman, who also gave live evidence on Thursday via video link, said the rape happened out of the blue: "There was no warning to anything that would have happened. There was nothing to suggest that anything improper was going to happen. It happened before I realised it. I didn't know what to do. I was panicking. I didn't have to fight him. He was not aggressive in any way."
By the time of the alleged rape, Roache was already a celebrity, having played Ken Barlow in Coronation Street since the show began in 1960.
The woman said she thought Roache was a "nice man" and once even asked him if he could get her a part as an extra on Coronation Street. She insisted she didn't "fancy" him but that he perhaps "fancied himself". She claimed he used to stand on his front lawn practising his golf swing when fans stood at the fence watching.
On Wednesday the jury heard evidence from two women who claim he indecently assaulted them in the toilets at Granada Studios in Manchester, where the soap was filmed.
In the video interview played in court on Thursday, the alleged rape victim claimed that Roache raped her on a second occasion in 1967, in another cottage he owned in Haslingden. There, she claims, he shoved her up against a wall and raped her, again just pushing her underwear aside.
The woman said she didn't tell anyone because she thought it was her fault, particularly on the second occasion when she said she was "gullible" enough to enter Roache's property again.
She told a police officer in the video interview: "All these years I have never brought it to anyone's attention. I chose not to say anything. I thought I was to blame, especially the second time. I was gullible ... I was a kid. I would never have repeated it to anyone."
But by last year she said it started to bother her "because there might be other people that this has happened to". She continued: "It started where I can't sleep, it is there at the back of my mind all the time."
The complainant said she did not see Roache again until years later when she was a young mother, entering her daughter in a bonny baby competition at a carnival. She said she was horrified to find Roache was a judge. She claimed that as he walked down the line talking to the contestants, Roache said simply: "Oh hello, I know you don't I?"
The woman was shown recent video footage taken inside one of the properties where she was allegedly raped. She said she could recognise almost nothing because the house had been so extensively renovated since 1967.
She admitted having problems with her memory since suffering two strokes, and said she couldn't remember parts of her children's childhood. But she insisted she could remember the rapes and was not lying.
Roache denies all of the charges against him, claiming he does not even recognise the five complainants. The case continues.
