The 31-year-old British woman who jumped off a hotel balcony in Agra to escape an alleged sexual assault has vowed to return to India to give evidence against her attackers but said she will never travel alone again.
Jessica Davies, a dental hygienist from Greenwich, was speaking of her ordeal for the first time since her return to Britain after she cut short her back-packing tour of Asia.
“I will go back if I have to in order to give evidence,” said Davies, who sustained leg injuries while jumping out of a second-floor hotel room’s balcony in Agra last week. But she added that she is “never going to travel alone again”.
Davies said she wanted to talk about her experience “because the shame of sexual assault makes many people too scared to speak out.” She condemned the behaviour of fellow hotel guests as “disgusting”, as no one came to help her while she was screaming for help for over an hour.
The manager of the hotel, Sachin Chauhan, and a guard face charges of sexual harassment. The two claimed they had knocked on Davies’s door for a wake-up call. She denied it, saying she had set her phone alarm for 4.30 am to catch a taxi for a train to Jaipur. She said, she had opened the door to find the hotel manager asking if she wanted to take a shower and offering a massage. “He was showing me this oil he had,” she told BBC.
“I held my key in the lock and I could feel them turning it from the other side,” she said, adding that she used furniture to barricade her room door. “By hook or by crook this person — or persons — were going to get into my room. I’m 100 per cent certain. And there was only one way out, to jump two floors,” said Davies.
——PTI