‘I blamed myself’: GK Barry opens up about being r*ped by her boss at 17 in brave new podcast

TikToker GK Barry has bravely opened up about being sexually assaulted in her second year of college in her new book, and she has now recalled the story in an emotional podcast. Grace Keeling was raped by her boss when she was doing work experience at 17 years old, and didn’t tell anybody until a year after it happened. 

Speaking on the We Need To Talk podcast with Paul C Brunson, she recalled: “After school, at college, you had to do work experience to pass that specific course, right? I was like, ‘I’m doing media, so I’m just going to do something sort of related to that’. Anyway, I found one. And put in my CV, and the guy there, he was about 27, he was quite attractive, really friendly, and he was like, ‘Okay, give me your number’.”

“Now I’ve got work experience with him. I’m 17 at the time, so I’ve got a car, but I can’t drive it. My parents are both working, and he says, ‘I tell you what, why don’t I just pick you up?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. Whatever.’ So he picks me up, and we’ve also been texting a little bit prior to this. He’s being a little bit flirty, but he’s an older guy. So, for me, I was like, ‘Okay, this is probably normal. It’s quite cool that, you know, an older guy is taking interest in me’.”

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by We Need To Talk (@needtotalk)

She was on the way home from her first day when the man said they were going to stop off at the park, and she “immediately knew what he meant”. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, okay. And I was like trying to make excuses to be like, ‘Oh, you can just drop me home. It’s fine’.” He was like, ‘No, no, we’re going to go to the park.’ And I was like, ‘All right.’ And I remember on the journey, I was like, ‘Please let there be someone in the park’ because if there’s someone in there, he’ll probably just give up and be like, ‘Let’s go home’. But there was no one in the park. So anyway, I ended up having to do stuff to him in the park, and then he dropped me home,” she continued. 

She went back to work experience because she thought she wouldn’t get into university if she didn’t go, and was assaulted again on her final day there. 

“It got to the last day, and he didn’t pick me up or drop me off on that day. My mum did and went to the station. It was all fine. And it was only men that worked there. He went, ‘You guys can go’ to the other people. And I was like, ‘Oh god.’ Because at the place where I did it, you lock the door when you leave,” she said. 

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Grace (@gkbarry_)

“It’s never open. So I knew when they left, the door was locked, right? And I was like, ‘Okay, maybe this will be fine.’ And then he says, ‘This room’s got no cameras’. I was like, ‘Okay’. He was like, ‘Yeah, come in the room.” So I was like, ‘Right, okay’. And then basically he raped me in there. And then afterwards, I remember there was a toilet right next door, and I was like, ‘I’m just going to quickly go to the toilet’.

Most Read

He’s not in Death of the Pastor’s Wife, so where is Mica Miller’s first husband Jeremy Deas now?

All of the intense videos from Lily Phillips’ ‘gloryh*le’ stunt, including gross before-and-after

A month on, here’s the relationship status of every single Love Island 2026 couple

“I was wearing white jeans and a long grey coat, and I put on my coat, which was long, and I just wrapped it around me. And then my mum came and picked me up. So I was like, ‘Right, I’m just not going to say anything.’ I said, ‘Thank you for the work experience.’ And then I left, and then I put my trousers in the washing bin, and my mum was like, ‘What has happened to your trousers?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve just started my period’. Then I didn’t say anything.”

She didn’t tell anyone until a year later, when her tutor told her that another girl was going to do work experience at the same place, and she knew she needed to say something to stop the same thing from happening to her.

“I said to her, ‘Look, without going into detail, something inappropriate happened to me there’. She got the gist of it. Anyway, she said, ‘Right, well, because you’re under 18, we need to call the police, and you need to tell your mum’.” She sat in the canteen and told her mum what had happened for the first time. 

“And then I think about a week after, this woman came in from the police and said, ‘Do you want to sit in my unmarked car so we can just have a conversation?’ I was like, ‘Yep, cool’. And she just says, ‘Look, because it was so long ago, you didn’t report it, and you were honest and said you flirted with him at the start. There’s just no point reporting it. I think you’d just be best to leave it. It’s your choice, but I just if I was you, I wouldn’t.”

Credit: Instagram

“I was like, ‘Right, that’s fair. I won’t then.’ And I got out the car. And then I just didn’t speak to anyone about it for about five or six years. And I’ve never spoken to my mum about it again. I don’t know if my dad really knows.”

Grace said for years, she didn’t speak about it because she felt like it was her “fault” and she “blamed herself,” but she wants to share this with her followers so that anyone who’s been through something similar knows they didn’t do anything wrong. 

In her book, GKBarry wrote: “He was a good-looking guy with tattoos, and to start with, I thought it was flattering that he was giving me attention. So I blamed myself. But when we went to the park, I kept thinking, ‘I should have said no firmer’… I know now he had a position of power. He was significantly older than me. I have come to terms with the fact it was really f**ked up, and he shouldn’t have done it.”

To this day, she still finds it hard going back to the area where she grew up. “Sometimes I struggle with going home to Cambridge,” she said. “It feels heavy, but I avoid places where I might see him. I don’t even like driving past where I did my work experience. My biggest worry is randomly bumping into him, because I don’t know how I’d react if he tried to talk to me.”

For more, like The Tab on Facebook.

Featured image credit: Instagram