SITTING on the clean and crisp cream settee in what was once her pristine living room, house-proud Nikia Marshall apologises for the smashed screen on the huge flat screen TV hanging on the wall.
Around her there’s a scene of carnage, the aftermath of a rampage in broad daylight by a gang of armed men in balaclavas who trashed her home from top to bottom.
Her windows are boarded up, the driveway littered with glass, and the once immaculate kitchen is unrecognisable.
The hob is smashed, there’s huge holes in the kitchen cupboard doors and the glass-fronted cabinets.
Upstairs, there’s more boards covering her bedroom windows which have also been put through.
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Nikia, 24, is married to Mike Marshall, 37, whose cousin, Paris Fury, is the wife of heavyweight boxing champion, Tyson.
She claims she was hit and threatened during the violent raid and in an exclusive interview, a plea to catch those responsible, she says: “I’ve got haters, they’re jealous, and that could be a motive. These people are cowards and I want them to be caught.
“They’ve cost at least £100,000 worth of damage - How dare they do that? Who do they think they are coming into my house and doing that to me?”
The terrifying ordeal began when five men with crowbars surrounded her home in Doncaster, South Yorks, as she slept on the same sofa that she talks from now.
Shocking CCTV footage shows them hurling what appears to be bricks at the upstairs windows before making their way inside, leaving chaos in their wake.
From the outside, the house is an eyesore and the boarded up windows give the impression it has been abandoned.
But the former glamour model and TikTok influencer, who says she was ‘punched in the face’ by one man wielding a gun and now has panic buttons in every room, is adamant she won’t be driven out of her once immaculate white interior home - which she says will cost six figures to get it back to how it was.
“I’m a stubborn woman, I’m not leaving,” Nikia says. “I do feel on edge, I feel like I’m always on the lookout and that I’ve got to be prepared. It’s not a great way to live but I’m not leaving.
“They’ve disrespected me and I feel angry. I want to do anything to catch them.
“We know they’re English Gypsies, we’ve watched the CCTV footage back, you can hear them talking in Romanes language.
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“I am accepting of all races and communities, I don’t want a fight, I want to live peacefully.
“They’re not driving me out of my house and I won’t change who I am.”
We’ve suffered so much prejudice on both sides because Nikia isn’t a gypsy but she is so accepting of my culture
Mike Marshall
Nikia has a 300,000 TikTok fanbase @mikeandnikia, and sprang to fame in 2021 when she fronted a six-part YouTube series called ‘I married a traveller’ with her roofer husband, who wasn’t at home at the time of the attack on Monday, May 20, at around 5.30pm.
The series gave a no-holds barred insight into every aspect of their lives from sex and dating rituals to their family rows and home life.
Nikia, who isn’t from a Romani Gypsy family like Mike, has said previously how she’s felt like an ‘outsider’.
Nikia revealed: “A lot of traveller girls call me a wannabe and other not nice names, such as prostitute and home wrecker.
“When I was living on a caravan site, I didn’t feel accepted,” and she added, “I didn’t want to be the same as them. I just was myself and a lot of people didn’t like it.”
And talking about her current work, she says: “I’m well-known for being an influencer online and I used to post controversial videos about what it’s like to be married to a gypsy but it was all tongue-in-cheek.
“It was three years ago and just a laugh - I don’t do that anymore.
“I think the community feel Michael ought to have married ‘his own’ and that I shouldn’t ‘try’ to be a gypsy.”
Referring to the perpetrators - who are still at large - in the recent incident, she adds: “If they came back, I wouldn’t be frightened – I’d be ready to protect myself this time and call 999.”
Nikia, who works on content during the night, says she was catching up on sleep when the onslaught happened.
She says: “I do live-streams on TikTok – similar to QVC – and my main audiences are mums or women who are on their phones at night so that’s when I work.
“I was sleeping before a night shift when the attack started and all I heard was, ‘bang, bang, bang’, like a popping sound and smashing.
The punch was so powerful; it was nothing like I’ve ever experienced before
Nikia Marshall
“I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
“The noise was all around me – they were smashing windows at the front, the side and the back at the same time.
“I had glass and brick all over me.
“It happened so quickly but I was really frightened – I had no idea who they were or whether they were going to kill me.”
Speaking about the moment she felt the blow to her head as she tried to escape, Nikia, who runs the fashion store Red Hot Ltd on TikTok, recalls: “The punch was so powerful; it was nothing like I’ve ever experienced before.”
“I can’t describe the pain – it was something else.
I can’t even explain the fear at this point. I’m a mouthy girl but I was just completely speechless
Nikia Marshall
While Nikia tried to flee upstairs with her two eight-year-old chihuahuas, Bella and Princess, the men started smashing glass cabinet doors, ornaments, the TV, the cooker top, the toaster and anything else they could lay their hands on.
Nikia says one was armed with a crowbar and the other had a gun.
“I can’t even explain the fear at this point. I’m a mouthy girl but I was just completely speechless. I couldn’t say a thing,” she adds.
“They were smashing everything. I had glass and brick all over me.
“I was in bare feet and my feet were cut to shreds on the glass but I didn’t feel anything – it must have been the adrenaline.
“I just ran upstairs to get away – I knew I stood no chance against them.”
Once in the bedroom, Nikia opened the window with the plan of jumping out if the intruders followed her.
She says: “When I opened the window, I saw there were still four of them down there.
“I think they believed the house was empty because I heard one of them say, ‘f***, she’s in’. Then they started speaking to me and said, ‘that’s what happens when you try to be a big man’, and one looked up at me and said, ‘I’m going to come back and finish the job - and I’m going to shoot you.’”
The Furys, as well as former boxer Mike, who Nikia married a month after meeting at a professional fight four years ago where she was a ring girl, are well-known members of the gypsy community.
The couple feel some in the community aren’t accepting of Nikia, which Mike, who says he is now living a ‘settled way of life’, doesn’t understand.
He says: “We’ve suffered so much prejudice on both sides because Nikia isn’t a gypsy but she is so accepting of my culture.
“I can’t understand why people who don’t know us care about what we do so much.”
Nikia says the incident, which lasted just three minutes, felt like it ‘went on for an hour’.
Refusing to leave
“The first thing I did after they left was call Michael at 5:33pm and he was home by 5:35pm because he was just up the road on a roofing job,” she says.
And now the initial shock has worn off, Nikia says she feels incredibly angry: “I was scared, but now I’m angry,” she says.
“I feel disrespected. I work hard for my money – nothing I have is on finance, I pay for everything and I bought at least 98 per cent of everything they’ve smashed up in this house.
“A fight is the last thing I want.”
The couple, who moved from London to South Yorkshire a few months ago, are working closely with police and as well as installing panic buttons, they have 24-hour CCTV - while Michael is refusing to leave his wife’s side.
They’re determined the incident is not going to change the way they live and Nikia is refusing to leave her hometown.
“I’ll never leave,” she adds. “I’m not going anywhere.”
A spokesperson for South Yorkshire Police said last night: “Enquiries are ongoing and we have no updates at this time.”
