Bargain Hunt star Charles Hanson begged his wife for forgiveness and promised to ‘never lay a finger on her again’ after she told him she wanted to separate, a court heard.
Hanson, 46, sent a series of messages to Rebecca, 42, telling her he was sorry and would ‘have to walk’ if he touched her again.
He promised to ‘change’ and attend an anger management court and pleaded with her to give their 13-year marriage a chance, messages read to a court revealed.
The TV star, who runs an auction house in Etwall, Derbyshire, and is a regular on daytime shows Bargain Hunt, Antiques Road Trip and Flog It!, is on trial accused of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, assault by beating and controlling or coercive behaviour between December 2015 and June 2023. The auctioneer has denied the charges.
In the messages read out to the court on Tuesday, from May 2023, Hanson told his wife: ‘I love you and I will change I promise.’
In another he told her ‘I love you and I feel so sad’. She replied: ‘I don’t think you can love someone who you hurt. I think you have just realised I do absolutely everything and without me you are going to struggle.’ He wrote back: ‘I just don’t want you to hate me so much…last night I could do nothing right.’
In a later message he said: ‘I will change just give me a chance… I’m determined to make it work.’
On May 27 he suggested they go on a holiday with her parents. Ms Hanson replied: ‘I won’t be booking any more holidays with you, stop thinking things are fine.’
He replied: ‘I am not thinking things are fine, give me a chance to prove myself to you that I’m a good man and husband’ to which she replied: ‘If you think your behaviour is a good man you are wrong’.
On June 3 he wrote: ‘I’m sorry Becky, I love you so much…I clearly have a bad temper…I have let myself down.’
He added: ‘If I can have one more chance and go on a course I will’. Later he wrote: ‘I miss your smile and I’m so determined to try to make it work’.
Later that night he said: ‘I really want to give you a hug. I do love you so much I was quite tearful this morning’.
In another message he said: ‘Please don’t say you are done it’s a knife to my heart I promise I will change’.
He went on: ‘Let me have one more chance and let me show you what a good…husband I can be. I’m really really sorry’.
Ms Hanson replied: ‘Fed up with this you will never change’.
In another message he said to her: ‘Lets give each other one more chance I really really want this to work and I promise I will never lay a finger on you … again. We have done so much in 15 years please lets just give it a go’.
On June 7 he wrote: ‘I love you, what will be will be but I’m determined I will change and I mean it…if I do anything with laying hands on you again I will have to walk.’
Ms Hanson replied later: ‘I am past that point I am afraid’.
On June 11 he told her: ‘I have enjoyed so much of my life with you’ to which Ms Hanson replied: ‘You have pushed me too far I’m past the line now’.
On June 13, Ms Hanson, who met her husband in 2008 when she was 25 and married him two years later, told him she wanted to separate and for him to move out.
Later, the court heard from Ms Hanson’s mother, Jaqueline Ludlam who said that initially, after they were married in 2010 their relationship seemed ‘normal’ and they lived a ‘normal lifestyle’.
But she said she noticed a ‘gradual change’.
She told jurors Hanson was working a lot leaving his wife to manage the household alone. She said: ‘I think that because of the business lifestyle, he was very dedicated to the business, it was obvious that always came first.’
Mrs Ludlam said Hanson hadn’t changed any of his ‘working practices’ after getting married.
She said: ‘In the early days, she was always able to know where he was with this very busy lifestyle, with the filming and the evening engagements, auctions in the day… out and about visiting clients looking at things for valuation, perhaps probate.
‘[But] around three of four years ago she wasn’t allowed to look at his phone any more, she wasn’t allowed to touch the phone.’
She told how her daughter told her ‘the outbursts were happening more frequently as well’.
Mrs Ludlam said a ‘sort of controlling coercive situation happened’.
She told how she once told him she was ‘poked off’ with him, which he spoke to her about afterwards. She told jurors: ‘He has a way of turning it around so it makes it seem like you are at fault.’
Hanson was arrested at their home in Quarndon, near Derby, in June 2023. During a police interview he accepted that at times he raised his voice but denied ever putting his wife into a headlock and said he had never caused her any injury.
Jurors were told that the offence of ‘coercive control’ only came into force in December 2015.
Sasha Wass KC, defending, put it to Mrs Ludlam that her daughter was ‘really upset’ by her husband’s work and being absent from home and often late.
She said him being ‘out working late all hours’ caused ‘tension in a marriage’. ‘That is what happened to them isn’t it?,’ she said. Ms Wass also asked why Mrs Ludlam and her husband had invited Hanson for lunch four days after he was arrested.
Mrs Ludlam said she couldn’t remember. She said the couple were in the middle of a ‘very unpleasant’ divorce and all of the information she had come from her daughter.
Ms Wass said: ‘Never once have you see him use physical force against Rebecca?’ Mrs Ludlam replied ‘no’.
The trial continues.