A Labour MP who experienced grooming as a teenager has launched a fierce defence of Jess Phillips after Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch branded her "the worst safeguarding minister we have ever had".Natalie Fleet expressed fury at Badenoch's criticism, revealing that Phillips had been instrumental in helping her overcome her traumatic past and enter Parliament.Last July shortly after being elected, Fleet revealed that she became pregnant at the age of 15 after being groomed and raped by an older man.Labour's Natalie Fleet told GB News she has "weekly nightmares" about what she said happened to her 23 years ago.
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00:00Kemi Badenot there, you just overheard as you came into the studio, has been very critical of your colleague Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, calling her the worst safeguarding minister ever. What's your response to that?
00:12I'm angry. I'm really, really angry and that's why I am here today. So as somebody who has been groomed, I didn't think that I should ever be in Parliament. The reason that I am in Parliament is because of people like Jess Phillips.
00:27Jess has not only told me that I am not responsible for my experience, she said that Parliament would benefit people like me being in it.
00:36And I look at Kia and I think that we've got people that take it really seriously. The stuff he did around Rochdale, the stuff Jess did in 20 years for women's aid.
00:47The first person that reached out to me in my constituency was somebody who had been raped and waited four years and five months from rape to prosecution.
00:55The Home Secretary came to meet that woman. This is a government that is absolutely committed to halving violence against women and girls.
01:04And then we've got a leader of the opposition that for point scoring reasons dares to send an email out to conservative members saying that they have won.
01:15How has anybody won in this absolutely abhorrent situation that we are in?
01:22As a teenage girl, I was told, like many girls up and down the country, whether in Bradford, whether in Rotherham, this is your fault.
01:33This is your doing. And this is going to impact you for the rest of your life.
01:36You have let yourself down. You've let your family down. And if, like me, you have children, you've let them down too.
01:40You know, when Kemi Badenoch was the Minister for Women and Equalities, she never met one grooming victim.
01:49She didn't speak about it in Parliament. Last Parliament, we spoke about football more often than we spoke about rape.
01:56We now, thank God, have a government that is treating violence against women and girls as the national emergency that it is.
02:04We have a government that is implementing recommendations from the J-Report that is getting an expert in Baroness Casey to look into what's happened.
02:15And then when she says, you know, this is really dodgy and we need to be doing something about it, we are absolutely doing something about it.
02:21And then you've got a leader of the opposition that comes out and says to people like me,
02:27we won because she's done some cheap point scoring in the chamber or on the media round.
02:33She has no idea. I do not know how she dare.