Andy Carroll has revealed that he was sexually assaulted in 2021, disclosing the attack publicly for the first time in his new autobiography, Owning It, released on September 24. The former Newcastle, Liverpool, and England striker, now 37 and co-owner and player at National League South club Dagenham and Redbridge, wrote that the incident happened at his home hours after he’d played a match for Newcastle. He described the attacker as a “celebrity mate” of his former partner, Billi Mucklow, who had invited himself over to watch a boxing match. Carroll wrote he’d felt uneasy around the man even before that night, sensing “there’s something odd about him.”
After a few drinks, Carroll went to bed early, later writing that he wondered, “Has he slipped me something?” He woke to find the man attempting to perform oral sex on him under the bedsheets. Carroll threw the man out of the house. When the attacker tried to force his way back in, Carroll punched him, knocking him unconscious, before calling the police. He described sobbing in his children’s nanny’s arms afterward.
The attacker denied the assault but was charged and stood trial. Carroll testified in court, a process he called “humiliating and embarrassing and absolutely horrendous.” A jury found the man guilty of sexual offences. He was sentenced to three years in prison, placed on the National Sex Offender Register, and banned from entering the village where Carroll lives. Despite the conviction, Carroll has not publicly named his attacker anywhere in the book or in any interviews since.
“What happened to me affected every facet of my life,” Carroll wrote. “I’d think about it every day, making it difficult to focus on anything else, including football… The trauma of what happened to me hasn’t gone away.”
He revealed he nearly left the chapter out of the book entirely, only deciding to include it after discussing it with his current girlfriend, Lou Teasdale. “I was sexually assaulted, there I said it,” he wrote. “Scary to talk about but it’s made the person I am today as much as any of the good stuff. And if me talking about it helps just one person then good, it will have been worth it.”
The disclosure drew a wide range of reactions online. Many focused on how difficult a decision it must have been to share. One post read simply, “Brave for speaking out @AndyTCarroll,” while another wrote, “Good on Andy Carroll for speaking out, I’m sure it must have been hard to do.”
Others pointed to the wider issue his story touches on. “I believe this is common. Rape is common. Many men don’t speak out because they still want to appeal to the men,” one person wrote. “They are more worried about the treatment from other men when they come forward. To speak out in a patriarchal society takes courage.”
Some addressed why Carroll chose not to name his attacker, despite the conviction being a matter of public record. “A lot of abuse victims don’t want to say the name of their abuser because it’s a trigger,” one person explained. “I’m sure someone will uncover it but it’s not surprising Andy doesn’t want to.”
Not every reaction treated the disclosure with the same seriousness. Several replies turned the story into a punchline, joking about the details or questioning why it was newsworthy at all.
That response drew its own backlash. “Everyone who jokes about him being sexually assaulted is a scumbag,” one person wrote. “You’re discouraging other men from talking about what happened to them, and helping rapists. So many survivors live silently with PTSD, fearing people like you.”
For most people making jokes online, sexual assault is an abstraction, something that happens to other people, in other stories, far away from their own lives. That distance makes it easy to treat someone else’s trauma as a punchline rather than a real, lived experience. Some even go a step further, quietly assuming the victim must share some blame for what happened. Carroll spent years carrying what happened to him mostly in silence, describing daily intrusive thoughts and a toll that reportedly affected even his ability to focus on football. People who haven’t lived through something like that are rarely equipped to understand what it costs to speak about it at all, let alone to joke about it so casually once someone finally does.
