In his autobiography Owning It, Carroll revealed that he was sexually assaulted in 2021 by a man who was subsequently jailed for three years, in what is a devastating admission from the 37-year-old.
"Other things I'd quite like to forget but can't," the striker wrote. "Something happened to me a few years ago that was so traumatic I only decided to include it in this book at the very last minute.
"I was sexually assaulted, there I said it. Scary to even think about and only a few people knew about it before now. Me and Lou spent a lot of time discussing whether to mention it in this book or not. I avoided my publisher for so long that they probably suspected I got cold feet."
"Scary to talk about but it's made the person I am today as much as any of the good stuff. And if me talking about it helps just one person then good it will have been worth it."
I smacked him as hard as I can
Carroll recalled how his attacker, an unnamed “celebrity mate” of his former partner, invited himself round to watch a boxing match but that he had always felt “there’s something odd about him”.
He then stated that he woke to discover the man attempting to perform oral sex on him under the bedsheets and added that he tossed the attacker out of the house only for him to try to re-enter.
Carroll wrote that he then “smack(ed) him as hard as I can”, knocking him unconscious, before calling the police and “sobbing in (his children’s) nanny’s arms”
"I grab hold of his feet and drag him out on the driveway. I go back inside, lock the door and call the police and the nanny. And then it suddenly occurs to me, what if I killed him?"
Carroll seeks to control the incident
To publicly admit that such a situation occurred will have been incredibly hard for Carroll, who stated that in publishing it, he wishes to come to terms with it.
"The trauma of what happened to me hasn't gone away; I'm still coping with it every day," Carroll added. "If you keep something hidden for years, you obviously don't want people to know about it; but then I started thinking about the incident in relation to the title of this book.
"By owning what happened to me rather than trying to bury it, perhaps I can have some control over it, rather than it controlling me."