Who can you trust if you cannot trust institutions like the police?” I have some trust issues now, not least with the police. At first she was refused, then finally officers came and showed her a photo, which they took away afterwards. I didn’t even know what he looked like.”Īllen again approached police, begging to see a picture of Gray. I did all my own digging, got my own lawyer, put measures in place to protect my family. “They just said, ‘Alex Gray is active again.’ I had no idea what that meant. Things went quiet for a while, and then she had a call from the police. They lent her a panic alarm for a few months before asking for it back. Then I was on stage and someone holds up a banner saying, ‘I wrote The Fear’.” Allen finished her song, then called police. “They just said, ‘He looks like Phil Mitchell ,’ so I’d be looking at scruffy blokes on every street corner. The man approached Allen’s assistant and other colleagues, who described him as “frightening”. But I felt comforted by the fact that I was telling the police, I was keeping a record,” 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. “He would drop off these letters at my record company, my management offices, my sister’s shop, my flat,” she said. Gray steadily undermined her confidence and security after popping up on a social media account in 2009, claiming to having written her hit song, The Fear, and using the handle came letters, abusive rants, accusations and suicide threats. In an exclusive interview with the Observer, Allen says she remains in limbo awaiting the sentencing of Alex Gray, the stranger who threatened her life. It ended with a stranger breaking into her bedroom as she slept, intending, he told police later, to stick a knife through her face.Ī seven-year ordeal, which has left Lily Allen “a changed person”, feeling isolated from friends and family and let down by the police, this month saw a man convicted of harassment and breaking into the singer’s London flat when she was at home with her friend and two young children.