Rita Ora has a new interview with The Sun where she talks about how her first boyfriend kind of messed her up. Rita dated a 26-year-old man when she was 14, which is horrific to hear, but it happens more than one would suspect. The mindset of a guy who would think this was okay is pretty scary. Rita was in theater school in London, and she was (naturally) flattered that an adult male would pay attention to her. We talk about this issue a lot with respect to Kylie Jenner and Tyga’s romance and how the press thought they were so cute when Kylie was 17. Yet the age gap that Rita refers to is even more blatant. Here’s what Rita had to say about how she finally realized that the guy was doing the wrong thing:

Her first boyfriend: “I was 14 when I had my first relationship with a guy. I would say (he was) about 26, and you have to remember I hadn’t had a relationship before then at all. I was very new to the whole world of a man and a female. … It’s child abuse really, isn’t it?”

How she felt: “I can’t begin to tell you how confident I felt when a man was interested in me. I felt like I was sexy, I felt like I had a form of respect, I felt like he listened to me. Now I know he listened to me because he obviously wanted to have sex with me. I felt good that men fancied me.”

[From The Sun]

Well, I can believe it was easy for Rita to fall under a man’s spell when she was only a teenager. And barely a teenager at that! When I was 18, a 26-year-old guy mopped the floor with me because I was such an impressionable romantic at the time. Guys who prey on barely legal teenagers are banking on that level of ignorance, but when they go much younger, there’s something seriously wrong, and there’s a reason why statutory rape laws exist. Rita is correct — it is child abuse. Where were her parents?

Photos courtesy of WENN

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