Katherine Jenkins was punched and almost raped

The Welsh opera singer Katherine Jenkins has revealed that she was almost raped in a "terrifying" ordeal. In an interview with Piers Morgan, Jenkins told how she was punched and thrown against a wall as she struggled to escape from the man on a night out in London when she was a student at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1990s.

Jenkins, 29, became separated from friends near Paddington station after a night out, she told Morgan in a pre-recorded TV interview. Her attacker tried to drag her down a station gangway and punched her. "The police believe that he was trying to rape me," she said. "I remember him grunting at me and the weirdest think about it was that he looked so normal, he looked like he had just come out of the pub and had a normal office job, you know like a guy in his 30s."

The singer - who has a new album coming out on Monday - also told how she tried to fight back, saying: "I wanted to kill him, I was so angry about it." There was no CCTV footage and the man was never caught.

Jenkins is not the first guest on Piers Morgan's Life Stories to tearfully describe her past. In March Katie Price broke down after telling Morgan, the former tabloid editor, that she was sexually abused when she was aged six. Earlier this month Cilla Black also cried on the show, when she talked about losing her baby daughter in 1975, two hours after she was born.

Jenkins, the singer who has been dubbed the new Forces' Sweetheart, also talked to Morgan about her experimentation with drugs including cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy. She had previously lied to Morgan in an interview with GQ magazine, saying she had never taken them, before later coming clean about it. The interview will be broadcast on ITV1 on Saturday. ·