Katherine Ryan speaks out after 14-year-old daughter is 'sexually harassed' on London trip
Katherine Ryan has said that her 14-year-old daughter was 'sexually harassed by grown men' while on a trip to London.
The Canadian comedian has three children, two with partner Bobby Kootstra, while her eldest was from a previous relationship.
Her second child, a son, was born in 2021 and the couple welcomed a daughter in December 2022 after Ryan and Kootstra reunited after dating as teenagers.
They ended up getting back together after she returned to her hometown for an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?
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Ryan's eldest child is daughter Violet and she recently recounted a disturbing series of encounters that the 14-year-old went through on a trip to London.
She said her daughter had been 'sexually harassed', and that it had happened 'everywhere they go' and 'every day' of the trip.
The comedian was speaking to the Telling Everybody Everything podcast when she said she was 'p***ed off' about what her daughter went through.
She said: "I’m p***ed off this week because Violet and her cousin Lily have been out in London.
"They’ve been out in the day; they’ve been out on the train just doing very wholesome activities. Shopping, going to a theme park, doing this and that.
"And everywhere they go, every day, they have been sexually harassed by grown men."
"Violet is 14, her cousin is 16, but the 16-year-old doesn’t look 25. She looks 16, 17. There’s no mistaking Violet’s age. "She’s 14, she has braces on her teeth. Anyone looking at these girls, no one is mistaking them for being adult women."
Ryan said that if people were harassing her teenage daughter and her cousin then they were 'a sick freak and you shouldn’t be chatting to teenage girls the way you are'.
She didn't 'go into all the incidents' as she said her daughter was 'entitled to privacy' but spoke about the ones Violet had posted about, describing an incident on the Underground where a man on the tube 'got his phone out and started filming these girls sat opposite'.
Back in 2020, Ryan and her daughter had gone for a lockdown picnic in a car park together when they caught a man masturbating in his vehicle next to them.
She posted a video to Instagram of herself and her daughter in the car discussing it, which was captioned: "Took my daughter for an enchanting parking lot picnic. The man in the car next to us was jerking off."
Joe Harker