For the past seven years, Lily Allen has been fighting a battle. What started with a tweet by a stranger called Alex Gray, who threatened Lily’s life and undermined her confidence, has ended with him in her bedroom while she slept.

His intention? To stick a knife through her face.

After popping up on a social media account in 2009, claiming to having written her hit song The Fear, Grey (using the handle @lilyallenRIP) has threatened Lily continuously:

Then came letters, abusive rants, accusations and suicide threats. “He would drop off these letters at my record company, my management offices, my sister’s shop, my flat,” she said. “It was freaking me out a bit and I’m not easily scared, so the fact I went to the police with the letters shows how serious I felt it was. Alarm bells were ringing. But I felt comforted by the fact that I was telling the police, I was keeping a record,” she said.

The man approached Allen’s assistant and other colleagues, who described him as “frightening”. “They just said, ‘He looks like Phil Mitchell [the EastEnders character],’ so I’d be looking at scruffy blokes on every street corner. Then I was on stage and someone holds up a banner saying, ‘I wrote The Fear’.” Allen finished her song, then called police. They lent her a panic alarm for a few months before asking for it back. Things went quiet for a while, and then she had a call from the police. “They just said, ‘Alex Gray is active again.’ I had no idea what that meant. I did all my own digging, got my own lawyer, put measures in place to protect my family. I didn’t even know what he looked like.”

Allen again approached police, begging to see a picture of Gray. At first she was refused, then finally officers came and showed her a photo, which they took away afterwards. “I felt very alone. I have some trust issues now, not least with the police. Who can you trust if you cannot trust institutions like the police?”

Then, last year someone walked into Lily’s flat:

In October last year, Allen burned her dinner. “I had had all sorts of metal shutters and locks on the doors, but I’d been cooking and burned a pan and opened the back door. I closed it but forgot to lock it when I went to bed.” Asleep with her friend, her children in their room across the hall, Allen was awoken in the early hours by a terrific banging on the wall. “I sat up and looked and the doorhandle was twisting round. This guy came steaming in and I didn’t know who he was. I recoiled and he ripped the duvet off, calling me a ‘fucking bitch’ and yelling about where his dad is.”

The man had an object stuffed inside his jacket that Allen is convinced was a knife. She believes he was caught off guard when he found she was not alone, and her friend was able to shove the man out of the house as she ran to check that her children were safe. “There was this second outside my kids’ room when I was terrified to go in, in case of what I might find.”

However, police refused to connect the dots. When she realised her handbag was missing, it was easily dismissed as a burglary. However, over in Scotland, Gray’s sister had reported him missing.

Allen believes she was – and remains – his target. In his pocket Gray carried a photograph of the singer dressed in hospital scrubs at a Halloween party. He was convinced the costume was a message to him, as were sleeve notes on her album.

Although Gray was charged, the police refuse to relate previous accounts with the current and Lily doesn’t understand their lack of compliance. Read her full account HERE.

[source: theguardian]