Sophie, not her real name, said she met Lynch through some modelling work, and he asked her if she wanted to audition for a show.

“I got one of the main parts… and then he got in contact with my mum to talk about a different audition to raise awareness for teacher-student relationships.

“He said you’d get paid £100… £100 is quite a lot when you don’t have a job and you’re at a school still.

“He went through all this stuff with my mum saying there’s going to be a bit of ‘physical intervention’ and my mum said, ‘What sort of physical intervention?’. He said, ‘Oh, just a hug’.

“I was quite a friendly, bubbly [teenager] so I was like, a hug’s fine. I hug my family. I hug my friends.”

Sophie took a friend to the audition but Lynch did not allow them in, which “in a way did raise alarm bells”.

“I was quite stuck between, ‘Oh, this is a bit strange’, but, ‘I know this is a big breakthrough if I get picked’,” she said.

Sophie said Lynch gave her scenarios which centred around teacher-student relationships of either “the innocent student” or the “bad girl”.

She said during the first of those scenarios “he came up behind me and he was that close I could feel his breath on my neck and he groped me”.

“I was stuck. I just froze. I didn’t know what to do. So obviously I just stood there. I couldn’t move. I literally had tears streaming down my face. I was shaking.

“Afterwards, and I’ll always remember this, he turned round and said: ‘That was really good, you’re a natural, you’re a natural performer’ and that’s when I felt sick to my stomach.”

She walked out of the room before performing the second scenario as “I wanted to get out of there” and said she “just pushed it to the back of my mind and tried to get on with life”.

It was not until a few months later, when a friend told her they had a similar experience with Lynch, that the police were notified of the attack on Sophie.

Sophie has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. When asked what the experience did to her dream of acting, she said it had “completely shattered it”.

“I haven’t acted at all since,” she said. “It’ll take a lot of courage if I want to go and audition for something again.”

Another victim had a similar experience of Lynch playing the teacher and her playing the student.

Taylor, not her real name, said she had been messaged beforehand and told there would be a kiss involved, but thought it would be a “peck or something little”.

In the audition, she said she “had to try to persuade him to let me put my homework in late and then that’s when all the kissing started and the touching”.

She recalled the kiss.

“Once we started he proper got into it”, she said.

“I was scared at the time… but it wasn’t until afterwards, when I was receiving all his messages saying basically, he wanted be sexual with me and stuff like that, that I was like: ‘This isn’t right’. I spoke to the teacher at school and they reported it to the police.”