Why you should NEVER let your children go to sleepovers… by the ‘badass’ former bodyguard to THREE American presidents

On my way to meet Evy Poumpouras, 47, the elite agent turned self-help guru, I am, frankly, a little nervous. She sounds like the most badass person, let alone woman, I’ve ever encountered. A former US Secret Service operative who guarded three serving US presidents – Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr and Barack Obama – she’s also worked undercover posing as a sex-trafficking victim and coaxed confessions out of child abusers. I thought I was pretty tough, but she is basically granite.

She speaks Greek, French, Italian and Spanish and learned Arabic to work in the Service’s elite polygraph unit, where she interrogated criminals, terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. She won the Secret Service’s highest honour, the Valor Award, for rescuing civilians from the wreckage of 9/11. She says she can spot a liar just by zeroing in on someone’s body language (telltale signs include hair twirling, picking off imaginary lint and smoothing wrinkles on clothing).

She has also successfully made the transition from White House bodyguard to life coach, writing a self-help book, Becoming Bulletproof, which teaches softies to toughen up in the face of everyone from colleagues to killers. She is also delivering an online course on BBC Maestro, a paid-for subscription service where, for £120 a year, you can listen to anything from Trinny Woodall informing you about what she’s learnt from the business world, to Isabel Allende on how to make storytelling magical or Brian Cox giving an acting masterclass.

I really want to impress Poumpouras. Another of her Secret Service maxims is:

‘If you’re on time, you’re late.’ Consequently, I’m half an hour early to her London hotel. She’s flown in from New York, where she

lives with her two-year-old daughter and recently retired agent husband Desmond O’Neill, 52. ‘That was professional of you,’ nods Poumpouras, who’s a dainty 5ft 2in, with long blonde hair and angelic features.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Raised on a New York public housing estate, the daughter of a Greek immigrant builder father and hairdresser mother, her parents wanted her to follow a traditional path – doctor, lawyer. When she applied to the police academy ‘because I wanted meaningful work’, they were horrified. While she was training (and living with them), they refused to talk to her, although later, when they could tell friends their daughter worked at the White House, they came round. ‘I’m grateful I was steady enough not to give in to them.’ She left the Service 12 years ago and is now a professor of criminology at the City University of New York. She’s also a TV pundit and appeared on NBC news in July to discuss the assassination attempt on Donald Trump by 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, who was shot and killed by agents.

So how can I be as girl boss as Poumpouras? First, she stresses, control your emotions – just like the world leaders she witnessed making seismic decisions. ‘They never raised their voices, they listened and were rational. Tough people don’t overexpose their emotions. They say less. Some of the smartest and most lethal people I know are also the quietest.’

In contrast, some of these leaders’ entourages were extremely aggressive. At one G20 summit she had to prevent a Chinese official entering the room where Obama was talking to Chinese President Xi Jinping. ‘He tried to shove me out of the way and it turned into a bit of a brawl.’ Which she won? ‘Yes.’

At work she advises, ‘Don’t try to be tough outwardly, flexing your muscles, as it were, because that just shows insecurity. If you’re tough, you know internally who you are; you don’t need to wave that flag saying, “You need to respect me”; it’s about how you carry yourself, and that will emanate from you.’

What about personal safety? Recently, a clip went viral of actress Saoirse Ronan on Graham Norton’s TV show listening to her fellow male guests, Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington, laughing scornfully at Eddie Redmayne describing how he learned to use a phone for self-defence while preparing for his role in Sky Atlantic’s The Day of the Jackal. ‘That’s what girls have to think about all the time,’ Ronan said, silencing the embarrassed men. Poumpouras nods approvingly.

Evy on duty protecting President Obama, 2012

‘Everything’s a weapon. Your phone. A beer mug. Women need whatever edge they can find.’ She always carries a metal pencil in her pocket. ‘It’s super-thin and it can go straight into the throat, into the eye.’

She doesn’t let her daughter have sleepovers (‘I’ve worked enough child abuse cases… the world is filled with all sorts of people. And not all of them have the same moral compass as you’). Nor can she stand people who identify as victims and claim their lack of success is down to race, gender or class. (‘If you are easily offended, you are easily manipulated.’)

Her tips are terrifying: never use public wifi (criminals could access your details); don’t disclose your holiday plans to the taxi driver (they could tip off burglars or moonlight as one); have a ‘go-bag’ to grab in an emergency.

Being tough sounds exhausting. As an agent, Poumpouras was working up to 16 hours daily on ‘high alert’, knowing, if necessary, she’d ‘take a bullet’ for her bosses. How did she cope with the constant adrenaline?

‘Agents have a neutrality mindset as when you’re emotional you don’t make good decisions. You don’t have high highs, therefore you don’t over-celebrate things, and you don’t have low lows, so you don’t plummet. That way, if something goes boom, you don’t panic, you say, “OK, something went boom, how do I handle it?”’

If you are attacked, her advice is, ‘Drop all your inhibitions and be savage. Claw, fight, scratch – then run. They may still win but at least they’ll be limping back.’ If it’s too late to run, she advises, ‘Shield. Think how boxers always cover their faces. I’d rather take a knife blow to my arm than my face. If you’re lying on the ground use your thigh.’ Ideally, we’d all practise a sport such as boxing – or, in Poumpouras’s case, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. ‘The first time you get hit should never be on the street where someone is intending to hurt you. If you’re used to being hit you can think better if it happens unexpectedly.’

I leave Poumpouras vowing to sign up for boxing classes and to buy a sharp pencil. Most of all, I’ve taken on her final advice: scare myself more.