One text message, from a woman I didn’t even know, blew my life apart. ‘You don’t know me,’ it read.
‘I am the mother of two girls who were abused by your partner. You need to know that you and your children are not safe.’
I can tell you exactly what I was doing at the moment my phone pinged. I didn’t even look at it straight away – it was just a Facebook alert, to tell me someone had contacted me. And I was up to my elbows in hot soapy water, as it happened, eight months pregnant and washing up at the kitchen sink after supper.
My partner Alan* was reading to our four-year-old son, snuggled up together in a corner, giggling over Paddington Bear.
The opening words of that message were so shocking that I almost fainted.
I had to hold on to the edge of the worktop to keep my knees from buckling. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening to me.
My hands were shaking so much that I could hardly scroll through the whole of the message. The writer claimed she had been married to Alan’s stepbrother. She said Alan was not his real name – he’d changed it after he was released from prison in another country.
I had no idea he’d been to prison. I didn’t believe it was true. But I kept reading.
The woman described, in explicit detail, what my partner had done to her daughters when they were seven and nine years old.
After learning that Alan had a new partner, she’d decided to track me down online, to warn me that he had abused her daughters. She said he had been convicted abroad and served 18 months of a three-year sentence. Incredibly, he had then been released and had returned to England under his new name. I turned away from this long and detailed message, feeling as though I was standing on the brink of the abyss. The shock must have shown, because Alan came over to me, an expression of concern on his handsome face.
Somehow, I kept my voice calm. I didn’t want to scare our son, who was leafing through his book a few feet away.
But I showed Alan the message, and pleaded with him: ‘Tell me this isn’t true.’ With every fibre of my being, I wanted to hear him deny the horror I had just read about.
The denials came, fast and furious: of course none of this was true! The writer, he assured me, was a close friend of his ex-wife, with a grudge against him because of how his marriage ended. His ex must be complicit in these false allegations. How could I believe him capable of such a terrible crime?
He went further. There was something he’d never told me, he said: he was himself a victim of trauma and emotional neglect as a child.
I wanted to believe him. I told him I did. Yet in the back of my mind, vague suspicions stirred. Was this why his mother and other family members had nothing to do with him? He never spoke of his past. Was he a survivor, putting abuse behind him as he claimed? Or was he hiding a horrific secret?
With the birth of our second baby just weeks away, I made a conscious effort to trust him. His version of events simply had to be the true one – it was his word against a stranger’s.
But I couldn’t forget those allegations, and my partner could see it. Once our second son arrived, those dark fears I had pushed away in pregnancy came to the fore over the next few months.
I couldn’t bear to think of the man I loved being capable of such a horrific crime. What if… What if… the question began to fill my sleep and much of my waking time too.
Alan picked up on it. He offered to do whatever it took to reassure me, including to undertake therapy. He started to share details of his own childhood and the neglect he had suffered at the hands of his cruel parents. With my brains, my strength and my love, he insisted, I would help him overcome this tragic past. I wanted so much to believe him.
My own childhood had been a happy one. Raised to be ambitious by a psychiatrist father and psychologist mother who doted on their three children, I had always worked hard at school.
An internship at the New Statesman magazine followed my politics degree at Bristol University, and then an editing job at The Sunday Times. Aged 32, I was now not only a mother-of-two but the chief executive of Demos, the centre-Left think-tank, and feeling on top of the world.
Like so many of my friends, I had wanted it all – personal as well as professional success. And I thought I’d struck gold when friends introduced me to a charming, handsome, mature student at a London university. He was the life and soul of the party, immensely popular, and interested in everything and everyone.
Our mutual friends teased him for being a ‘trustafarian’ – living off the fund his wealthy grandparents had set up for him.
He had been married briefly, he told me – and that seemed to only confirm his status as a sophisticated man of the world.
We enjoyed a whirlwind romance, and I was soon pregnant. I felt loved, supported and totally at ease. My only disappointment was that, while my own parents were very much part of our lives, Alan’s parents were largely absent.
And then that single Facebook message came, and everything I took for granted in my life began to disintegrate.
After months of anxiety and obsessive worry, I contacted the Facebook messenger. She put me in touch with Alan’s ex-wife, who agreed to meet with me in person.
I’ll never forget how frightened she looked when we met, gripping her keys in her fist as if scared she might be attacked. Later she confessed that she had feared the whole meeting was a set-up proposed by her ex husband.
What she told me confirmed my worst nightmares: I was married to a perverted criminal.
I immediately contacted a lawyer. Incredibly, they advised me that my partner’s convictions – from 15 years earlier – would be seen as historical by the family courts and he would probably be granted joint custody of the boys.
Social services were also unconcerned and initially told me that I was over-reacting. I hired a nanny three days a week, and asked my parents to come in on the other days because I didn’t want Alan to be alone with the boys.
All the while I pretended everything was normal – but my partner sensed he’d lost my trust. The abuse started.
At first it was verbal. He screamed that I was naive, hysterical, spoilt, difficult, no better than his abusive ex-wife and the other women who had hurt him.
Within a few months he grew violent. He would punch walls, and once broke through the bathroom door while I was locked inside trying to avoid him, only to laugh at me for cowering from him.
The neighbours called the police – three times officers came to our house and issued warnings.
My partner began playing mind games. He claimed his therapist said I was the cruel and abusive one. He undermined my parenting – when I was giving our younger child a bath, Alan came running towards us, screaming, ‘You idiot! You almost dropped the baby!’
He accused me of not understanding our boys’ needs.
He was making me question my judgment. Incredibly, I could still function outside the home. I had continued to climb the professional ladder, and was now the CEO of a big family charity.
I would go to the office and bury myself in work.
I was too ashamed to tell my family about the hell I was living through. When I did finally confide in two girlfriends, their disbelief cut me to the quick: how could I, they asked, have picked this monster, when I was a clever and successful professional woman? And how could I stay in a relationship where I was being regularly hurt, mentally and physically?
These questions hound every victim of domestic abuse.
A victim is expected to take a criminal to court to see justice done and put the perpetrator behind bars. But the reality is, all too often in domestic abuse cases, the victim might still want the abuser in her life.
Few seem to understand just how manipulative abusers can be. The perpetrator convinces you that he alone understands you, he alone knows how to love you, how to keep you safe. It’s you and him against the world.
What they cannot abide is any show of rebellion.
When, one night, I finally confronted Alan with his manipulative behaviour, he slapped me in front of the children.
I saw the terrified look on their little faces and something snapped. This time, it was me who called the police.
Two Met officers came immediately. ‘This is escalating,’ the police officer warned me. ‘We have already been to your property three times, and we know that the next time he could kill you. You need to move.’
They took my partner away. Throughout, they were incredibly thoughtful in dealing with my sons, awarding them a bravery medal for staying so calm and later taking them to Legoland. They have kept in touch with the three of us over the years.
My ordeal, however, was not over. Alan claimed legal aid and took me to court 37 times over the next eight years demanding unaccompanied access to our children.
The lawyers, magistrates and judges seemed to look on me as a hysteric, whose claims of trauma were exaggerated.
The presumption of shared custody, despite all the evidence of my partner’s abuse and his conviction for paedophilia, was widespread. The courts were more worried about ‘parental alienation’ – that I should turn our sons against their father – than about two little boys being left alone with a paedophile.
Those harrowing days in the courtroom left me feeling utterly destroyed – and I was diagnosed with PTSD. It took years before I could rebuild my life.
Thank goodness for my family, who provided 24/7 support. We have always been close-knit, and my parents and twin brother became the rock upon which
I clung. They babysat when I needed to go to court, consoled me when I felt bereft, distracted me and the boys with trips to the zoo, the seaside, the countryside.
Thanks to their unstinting devotion, my little boys have grown into happy and loving adolescents. They have never seen their father again.
I have also found the chance to mentor other survivors helpful.
There are so many: one in six homicides in England and Wales is related to domestic abuse.
A Women’s Aid survey found that one in four women and one in ten men have suffered partner abuse. Despite the landmark Domestic Abuse Act of 2021, prosecution and conviction rates have reduced, year on year. Fewer than one in four victims will report their abuse.
I have now supported more than 80 women through the courts, knowing first-hand that traumatised and vulnerable victims of domestic abuse find the courts terrifying – often scared that the perpetrator (usually standing only a few feet away) could take vengeance by harming them or their children – and the judges and magistrates intimidating.
For the past 15 months I have been working with the journalist Cristina Odone, for whom I interned at the New Statesman 20 years ago, to improve the domestic abuse victim’s journey through the court room. We have set up a charity, Fair Hearing, to collaborate with legal professionals in the criminal and family courts.
This has proved instructive: judges, I have learnt, are struggling with the sheer volume of domestic abuse cases – which account for 60 per cent of all family court hearings – as well as their complexity. Often there is no objective evidence, such as recordings of threats or photographs of bruises. Funding and legal aid are in short supply, while the backlog of cases has grown to the extent that some cases take up to two years to come to court.
Working to improve the justice system for victims who have undergone the abuse I lived through has proved cathartic.
I have discovered a host of admirable men and women engaged in the same campaign, dedicated to righting this wrong.
My sons and I have emerged from our painful experience united and resilient, confident in the knowledge that although bad things do happen, we can overcome them. We have, after all, survived the unimaginable.
* Alan’s name has been changed.