Entertainment
Coleen Nolan ‘felt disgusted with herself’ after feeling dad ‘didn’t love her because he abused sister instead’
Coleen Nolan admitted she felt ‘revolted by herself’ after years of believing her father didn’t love her – because he was her sister Anne instead of her.
Tommy Nolan, who died in 1998, sexually assaulted older sister when she was just a child, as part of a long-held campaign of abuse against the family as a whole.
Anne, who is 17 years older than Coleen, kept the abuse she suffered a secret from her family until 2001, when she finally spoke out – though her mother died never knowing what was going on.
In a no-holds-barred interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Coleen spoke about her sister opening up, and said: ‘Of all the sides I saw of my dad, I saw the aggression, I saw the drunk in him, but I never, ever, ever experienced that side, or even felt awkward on that side of things.
‘So it’s really hard for me, and that makes it difficult for me to go “Oh I loved my dad”, and then I’d feel guilty again, because I think well I shouldn’t, because he did that to my sister.’
‘This will probably shock people that after the news sank in, I actually cried because there was an element of thinking “did he not love me?”
‘That made me sad, because it made me think that’s what children feel, that it’s to do with love, and it’s nothing to do with love.’
‘I thought he must have loved Anne more and I felt revolted by myself,’ she concluded.
Anne, 70, who is now battling cancer, had previously spoken about her life as a young girl and the treatment she suffered at the hands of her father – saying she ‘knew to keep it a secret’ as it carried on.
‘I trusted him. Maybe this was something dads did with their daughters. My overwhelming reaction was one of puzzlement,’ she wrote in her book.
‘I remember thinking to myself: ‘Why is Dad doing this?’
‘Then, a couple of days later, it happened again and then the day after that. I wasn’t yet feeling something as strong as revulsion because I was ignorant about what was happening, but somewhere deep in my subconscious was the realisation that something was wrong.
‘Why otherwise did I instinctively know to keep it a secret?’
Anne only found the strength to talk about what happened after Tommy had died.
Piers Morgan’s Life Stories continues Thursdays at 9pm on ITV.
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