BECAUSE she was raped when a young woman, actress Kate O’Mara, who sadly died this week, always claimed to feel worthless. “I always felt I had nothing to offer anyone,” she once said.

Because of that, she said in her autobiography: “I’ve turned down most of the few really nice men I’ve encountered in my life, and have gone unerringly for the dysfunctional, maladjusted, insecure ones every time.”

Because of this, perhaps, she had a son, Dickon, following a one-night stand with an actor who ‘took no further notice’ of her.

Because of this – she was an out-of-work actress and single mum – she said she felt forced to give up her second son for adoption and struggled to make a relationship with him when they did meet, 19 years later.

Because Dickon was said to feel rejected by his biological father he fell into drug-taking and then suffered brain-damage after being hit by a car.

Because this made him difficult to live with, his mother reluctantly asked him to leave the home they shared together.

Dickon then hanged himself in his mother’s garage.

Because Kate was ill with double pneumonia and in hospital, no one found his body for three weeks.

And because of all of the above it sounds very much as if poor Kate O’Mara died of a broken heart, as much as of the cancer she is reported to have been suffering, on Mother’s Day.

There are some people who will dismiss the above as a litany of coincidence. It may be, these things are hard to prove. But I’m guessing that those sort of people are the same kind who subscribe to the latest liberalist ploy – so-called restorative justice – where, in some circumstances, if you say sorry you can even get off a sexual assault charge.

However there are other people – and I’m one of them – who believe that the reason we should come down hard on men who violate others for their own obscene ends, is because the damage can last for many lifetimes, as this tragic story may reveal.

RIP Kate and Dickon; I hope you find the peace together in another life that you never found in this one.