Former Blues midfielder and current academy coach Kieron Dyer has revealed he was sexually abused by a great-uncle as a child.
Dyer was aged 11 or 12 when the incident took place after he was left alone with his great-uncle Kenny when staying at his grandmother’s house in Ipswich.
"Kenny had slipped his hand down my trousers while I was asleep and he was fondling me,” Dyer told MailOnline. "I froze. I was petrified. I didn't know what to do. Kenny must have sensed that I'd woken up because he started shushing me and trying to reassure me.
"He kept asking me to let him finish what he was doing. It was like he was in a trance. He said he'd buy me loads of chocolate. He pulled my trousers all the way down to my ankles. I knew he was doing something terribly wrong but I was frozen. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't do anything.”
Dyer, who speaks candidly and in depth in the interview which can be found in full here, says the incident has had an impact on his entire life.
"I don't want to use what happened to me as an excuse for the mistakes I made. In my life and football career, I made monumental errors. But I had a choice. I knew what was right and wrong and you can pick what's right and what's wrong.
"But with the abuse, it's probably the only thing where I didn't have a choice. There was nothing I could do about that one moment in time and it formed my life.”
Dyer’s autobiography Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late, written with journalist Oliver Holt, which is available for pre-order here, is published on February 22nd and is being serialised in the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.
The former England international, who now coaches Town’s U16s, is staging a launch party at Portman Road a week on Friday - which is sold out - in aid of local child abuse charity Fresh Start, New Beginnings.