Football pundit Alex Scott has revealed how she was almost kidnapped by a rogue Uber driver in Russia who told her: ”Girls like you, I kill.”
The 38-year-old said the terrifying ordeal happened while she was working for the BBC at the World Cup in Moscow in 2018.
She only managed to escape after convincing the “sicko” she was a friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin, having met him that morning.
In her memoir How (Not) To Be Strong, Alex says the BBC usually insisted that staff use official, pre-booked cars while on work trips.
But after she met a friend for a drink, Alex opted to get an Uber for the 15-minute journey back to her hotel.
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A few moments into the trip, the driver – “a stacked bald man, stocky, and wearing a grin on his face” – suddenly turned.
Alex at the 2018 World Cup in Russia (pixel8000)She says in her book: “He looked at me and said – in English – ‘Tell them they will never see you again.’
“‘I don’t understand,’ I stammered.
“My Uber driver picked up his phone and spoke into it, waiting for me to see the words as they appeared via Google Translate. ‘Tonight I am not taking you home,’ [it] read. ‘You come with me.’”
Alex said her “body went numb”.
She describes how, through Google Translate and his broken English, he began telling her “horrible, terrible things: how he takes girls like me, how they never make it home.”
Alex's visit to a Kremlin meeting with Vladimir Putin helped save her (ALEXEI DRUZHININ/SPUTNIK/KRE/POOL/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)With the car doors locked, she messaged her agent and “told him if I wasn’t back in 15 minutes to send a search party.”
But the driver’s next chilling message delivered via his phone was: “Girls like you, I kill.”
Alex recalls: “‘Oh my God,’ was my first thought... ‘I’m never going to see Mum again.’”
Then the former Lioness, who made 140 appearances for England, says she had a brainwave after spotting the Kremlin. “Putin! I had been with Putin that morning! ‘You can’t kill me,’ I said. ‘I have to see Putin tomorrow.’
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Alex details how she was nearly kidnapped, in her book How (Not) To Be Strong (Rowan Griffiths)“He started laughing. ‘No one sees Putin’. I was scrambling now, pulling up photos from the morning’s visit to the Kremlin that had made newspaper headlines. His laughter died and I could see the cogs whirring as he tried to process what I was showing him. ‘If I don’t see Putin tomorrow, he will find you.’”
Within seconds they were heading back to her hotel. As they pulled up, the driver tried to touch her legs and kiss her before she scrambled out.
“I knew then what a near-miss I’d had but, rather than confront it, I just... brushed aside the incident like it had never happened,” she says.
“I didn’t want people to worry about me or think I couldn’t handle myself – just like when I was young.”
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