Original subtitles

There was this instant spark.

There was this exciting, charismatic man who was interested in me.

He was seeing other people.

He is openly sitting there saying that he's messaging other women.

It was dishonest and manipulative.

That is one of the biggest red flags of them all.

I had swelling and bruising behind my ear where he punched me.

The police have said that usually

they saw bruises that bad on dead people.

I mean, that is horrifying. Absolutely horrifying.

Then he started to strangle me.

Abby was in the most dangerous moment of her life.

He covered my mouth so that I couldn't breathe.

He is rage-fuelled.

I just thought...

"..I'm just going to be another dead woman on the news tomorrow."

Being back here brings back a lot of bad memories.

This is the estate that David lived on.

So much of the worst that's ever happened

to me in my life happened in his house on this estate.

Even just being back makes me feel...

..scared and anxious like I used to feel when I was with him.

I don't think I'll ever be the person I was before I met David.

I genuinely thought he would kill me.

I was really excited when I first started to get to know David.

When I saw his profile, he looked attractive.

I think actually I sent him the first message

and just introduced myself.

Abby had just come out of a fairly long-term relationship

that had kind of got, I think, a little bit serious,

a little bit intense, and probably wasn't the right fit.

She wanted to make sure that the next relationship was the right one.

It was fun. He was a bit cheeky, and he was very complimentary of me,

of my profile photos, and that was nice.

I was also in a position where I knew I was likely to be made redundant

from my job. I was on a contract and it was coming to an end,

so I felt like things were slipping away from me.

And I made the decision to start dating again to try

and put myself back in the driver's seat of my life

and to find something positive. And I think, because

I was in a bit of a fragile state, it was reassuring and comforting

to be talking to somebody who had that self-assurance

and had that confidence. We realised that we actually had quite

a lot of shared history. We had both been to the same school foundation.

And he was very local to me, which was obviously convenient. SHE CHUCKLES

He just seemed perfect, really.

When people start off in a new relationship,

what we're actually looking for is things we have in common.

And if you're attracted to someone and you find out

you've got similar friends, you went to the same school,

your parents do similar things, there's a sense

of psychological safety about that. And you immediately breathe

a huge sigh of relief going, "Ah! We're coming from

"similar places. This is going to be great."

So, this is the bar where David brought me for our first date.

I was absolutely petrified coming here.

Spent hours after work getting ready cos I was so excited.

When I got there, I saw him at the far end of the bar,

and we just started talking and really hit it off.

There was this instant spark. He was intelligent, articulate.

He was very charming, really charismatic.

So, I just thought, "Well, he seems like the kind of ambitious

"and well put together person that I really want to have a life with."

We did kiss on the first date.

It had just been a really great evening

and we both just seemed to get on so well,

and I was excited to arrange to see him again.

He did seem frustrated that I wouldn't sleep with him on

the first date. But I just didn't think anything of it at the time.

I was just elated and kind of walking on air

cos I'd had such a good first date.

PHONE DINGS I don't think I played it very cool.

I text him as soon as I got home.

I remember just feeling really happy and excited

and really optimistic about what was coming next.

It was strange. He would just go off the grid for days at a time.

And I would think, "Oh, OK. Well, he's not interested in me any more."

So I would send him a couple of messages and I'd see he's read them,

and he just would not talk to me.

And it made me feel horrible about myself because I just thought,

"Why doesn't he want to talk to me?"

And then, after three or four days of radio silence,

he would pop back up on my phone and be really keen,

like nothing had happened. But it became a real pattern

in that he would want my undivided attention

and then he would just disappear again and withdraw.

When he was nice, he was very, very nice,

and there'd be flowers and gifts

and showers of affection.

And then nothing. I always felt like she was

a bit on tenterhooks, waiting for him to contact her.

It felt like I didn't know whether I was coming or going.

In cases like this, ghosting comes up quite a bit.

They ghost for a while. That is the key difference.

They don't ghost and disappear.

They ghost and come back. And he is expecting Abby

to just sit there and wait for him. All the time this is playing on

her mind. She's thinking more and more that it's about her

because she has started from such a vulnerable position that all

this is doing is playing on her own insecurities, and he knows that.

Well, for me, that is a red flag.

I did start to ask if...if I was his girlfriend,

and he would respond, "Oh, well, you're definitely in the top five.

"Keep working hard and maybe you'll make it to number one."

I mean, I'm not sure who this guy thinks he is, to be honest.

He actually made a joke at one point about how he had to decide

whether I was worth his premium Friday-night time.

He's refusing to see her on Fridays and Saturdays

because he's too busy doing something else.

What that might do to her is make her redouble her efforts

to become the prime-time catch.

It made me feel very insecure, and I worried

that he was maybe seeing other people.

He's starting to say, "I am top dog and you're going to fit in

"with whatever I want you to do."

Who is this guy and...and why does he think he's

so much more important than everyone else? This... It's bizarre.

About four weeks into our relationship, his father passed away.

Suddenly, I just felt incredibly sorry for him.

Quite protective of him as well. So I think I cut him a lot of slack that

I would not have done if he hadn't had that bereavement.

I think she felt very sorry for him and his mum,

who were kind of on their own.

There was a brother who didn't live with them, wasn't close,

and wanted to try and do what she could to plug that gap.

His behaviours just became so much more extreme.

He became a lot more short-tempered.

He would start to get angry with me, fly off the handle.

His behaviour definitely changed.

This is the local pub where David and I would come

probably once or twice a week.

It was only maybe a couple of months into our relationship

and he started to get really angry because I'd made

some throwaway comment about...

..how we hadn't slept together on the first date.

He looked so mad and like I'd really offended him.

He said outright that women who don't have sex with men on

the first date are somehow playing games or trying to be in control

of a situation that really they have no right to control.

And that was really scary. His behaviour just completely changed.

I stopped feeling at ease with him because I knew that, at any moment,

with no warning, he could be really angry with me.

And he did that fairly frequently.

All that meant was I never knew when it was going to kick off.

I never knew if I was safe.

Any relationship that makes you question yourself

and feel like you're walking on eggshells is not

a healthy relationship.

And that is one of the biggest red flags of them all.

Anything that is changing who you are as a person

you need to run away from.

David's behaviour is so unpredictable,

she cannot stop or prevent it happening

because she doesn't know what's going to set him off.

So how do you protect yourself from that?

It really bothered me, the longer we were dating,

that he wouldn't call me his girlfriend.

And I just... I couldn't understand why

because he was treating me like his girlfriend in every other respect.

And I could see, when he was sitting next to me on his phone,

I could see that he had Tinder and Bumble

and eHarmony and Click, and I just... Why? Why have you still got

all of those on your phone?

I was thinking, "Who you talking to?"

I was absolutely gutted. I was so upset.

So, about three months in, I'd had enough.

I said to him, "I need to know what's going on."

It transpired that he didn't believe in monogamy,

and that was just devastating.

There had been no indication up until that point that we

wouldn't be in a monogamous relationship.

And it felt really manipulative because he deliberately waited

until we had been seeing each other for a few months

and until I felt really invested in him and had fallen for him.

I don't know why, but I decided to accept it.

I didn't like it. It upset me for the duration of the relationship.

It drove me a bit crazy, actually, because, every time I didn't hear

from him, I was thinking, "Oh, well, he's out with somebody else, then."

I did find things in his room that suggested

that other girls had been there.

Women's hairpins in the bed.

There was a bracelet that got left on the side.

It became increasingly obvious to me that he was seeing other people,

and that was...that was heartbreaking.

And I just thought, "Well, maybe, as time goes on, he'll change his mind.

"Maybe..." This is really sad, but I thought, "Maybe I'll prove myself

"to be worth him wanting just me."

Um...

Yeah, it was... It was horrible.

David was very possessive and did not allow me

to have even male friends.

It was impossible to even speak to another man.

If I so much as spoke to a work colleague, he'd fly off the handle.

So the idea that he was even

suggesting that he would be OK

with me seeing other men...

It was just ridiculous.

So the idea that we would somehow have this elevated relationship

where we would be deeply in love with each other

and yet seeing other people was just nonsense.

And quite aside from it not being something I wanted,

it was dishonest and manipulative.

It didn't take him long to force me

to block people that I'd known for years.

He forced me to block my ex-partner,

who I'd had the very long-term relationship with previously.

And I just stopped socialising with anybody who wasn't a woman

because it just wasn't worth the grief.

This is a screaming red flag, to be honest.

The level of unwarranted jealousy is extreme here.

Not only is he making her feel so bad

and isolating her from anyone... any other male in her life,

he is openly sitting there saying that he's messaging other women.

He is not a very nice person. He is extremely misogynistic

and, really, Abby needs to run.

My relationships with my family really suffered

because he completely isolated me. So I just...stopped seeing them.

Over the period of the relationship, I saw her less and less.

I felt that she was constantly on her phone, waiting

to see if he'd message if he hadn't been talking to her because,

you know, he might message her and

she'd have to jump straight on it.

Or sometimes because if... I felt

that, if he messaged and she didn't

get back to him very quickly,

he would be very cross about it.

So there was that constant tension.

I just stopped having any contact with anybody.

I had this permanent feeling of butterflies in my tummy

all the time. I stopped sleeping, I stopped eating.

I started to suppress this huge part of me

and very quickly just became... a real shadow, I suppose,

of who I was before I met him.

It was... It was horrible.

She is now, in my mind, anyway, in survival mode...

..where it's, "How do I pacify him? How do I de-escalate him?"

And when you're in that kind of survival fight-or-flight mode,

it is incredibly difficult to step back and go,

"Hell, no. This relationship is a mess.

"I need to look after myself. I need to protect myself."

And that is a very difficult place to be.

We'd planned a night out in Leamington,

and we ended up in a bar.

By this point, we were about six months into the relationship,

and I'd come to recognise when his mood changed.

And on this occasion, it was like this big black cloud came over him.

He demanded to see my phone.

I didn't have anything to hide, so I gave it to him.

He found a text message that I had sent to a work colleague,

just saying, "Happy birthday," from a couple of months earlier.

And he got really angry.

I think he said something like, "So, whilst I was grieving for my dad,

"you were messaging other men."

And he...stood up,

threw his drink in my face.

It stung like nothing I'd ever felt before.

And he just turned and he stormed out.

We came out onto the street, and we went down here,

and I realised that he was getting really,

really angry and he just turned around and squared up to me.

And so I started walking away from him cos I thought,

"There's something... Something's going to go wrong here."

He just punched me in the back of my head.

I just went down like a ton of bricks.

It was just so violent, and it didn't fit with how I felt

about him and our relationship. I was in shock.

He'd hit me very hard behind my left ear.

A couple of guys out saw what he did and came over to check on me.

They called the police. David knew that he was in trouble

because somebody had seen him hurt me,

so he just started walking off in the other direction.

And then the police turned up, and I denied everything...

..because I knew from experience with him over the last few months

that, actually, yes, he would have these flashes of anger

and then he'd be completely calm and it would all be OK.

So I just told the police, "No, nothing's happened."

We see this time and time again in cases like this where

the victims will lie and say that everything's fine.

Because I think deep down they want it to be,

and they think that police involvement is

going to make it worse. So a lot of this is fear.

And the position that they then are in as a result of that

is just ten times worse.

After the police finished talking to us and left,

David started storming off to the other side of town

and I followed him.

I just kept thinking everything would calm down and...

..all the bad things would just stop.

By the time we got here, he was just pacing around outside the church.

And then, just out of nowhere...

..he turned around and he spat in my face.

Couldn't believe it. And I was just in shock.

It was like he was trying to degrade me.

It was like he was really showing me what he thought of me.

And...when you're in a relationship with somebody,

when you're in love with somebody, if they do something

like that to you, just... it's really gut-wrenching.

It's upsetting on such a deep level.

SHE SCOFFS And then he called a cab,

and I went with him.

We went back to his house where he lived with his mother.

I was just cold, I was stressed and I was frightened.

The whole way back to his, I was just thinking,

"Well, what's going to happen next?"

Just before we went inside, he stopped,

and he had a cigarette outside.

And, right at the end of the cigarette,

he very calmly and very deliberately reached out with it...

..and touched the tip to my face.

I was so shocked.

The expression in his face,

it was so calm and deliberate, and considered.

It was scary, how calmly he did that to me.

I thought, "Is he now going to hit me again?"

Whenever David had been horrible to me in the past, picked a fight,

just been mean to me...

..every other time, he'd sleep on it,

wake up in the morning,

and it would be OK again.

And I just wanted to get to that point.

I mean, I'd been assaulted multiple times in one night that...

..I just wanted to go to bed.

What he has subjected her to is horrific.

Any form of assault in any way, shape, or form

is not OK in a relationship.

You cannot justify it,

and you shouldn't have to put up with it.

She just wants the evening over with.

And she thinks, by submitting to that,

that this ordeal will be over - when in fact,

she is putting herself in an extremely dangerous situation.

I'd had such a traumatic night,

I thought, "If we go to sleep, like he's done in the past,

"he might wake up in the morning and...

"..and be OK with me,

"and then, it's all over."

So, I went to bed.

David came up very shortly afterwards.

And, just as I was falling asleep,

he, without warning,

shoved me really hard in my back.

I ended up flying out of the bed

and crashing to the floor.

My face smashed against the bedside furniture on the way down.

That was just the last straw for me.

I just broke, burst into tears -

and he just didn't say anything,

rolled over and went to sleep.

It was like nothing had happened.

I just lay on the floor for a couple of minutes,

waiting to make sure that he wasn't going to have another go at me.

And then, I...went downstairs.

He had hidden my phone.

And I found it in a drawer in the kitchen.

So, I took it into the bathroom downstairs

and took some photos and some videos of my injuries.

I had some swelling and bruising behind my ear

where he'd punched me.

My knee was swollen and red from where I had fallen.

I had bruises all over my legs.

Fortunately, because it had been pouring down with rain

and I'd been crying hard,

the cigarette didn't leave a lasting mark.

I had little grazes and red marks all over my face

where I'd hit my face when he'd pushed me out of bed.

That whole time, I was hiding in the downstairs loo

with the doors locked, because I was petrified he would find that

I had taken photos of these injuries,

and he'd hurt me again to punish me for it.

I just kept thinking,

"I can't report him

"because I still want the relationship."

But I also thought, "What if he does it again?

"What if I decide I need to tell somebody that he's done this,

"and nobody believes me?"

So, I created a fake email account

and sent the photos to that email,

so that he couldn't trace them.

Just so that I had them as evidence.

What Abby does now is she,

despite being abused all evening,

she still remembers to take photos.

That is so important.

You need to gather that evidence.

There is actually an app that you can get on your phone

that is disguised as a weather app called Bright Sky,

which is for exactly this reason.

You can document diary entries, photographs, things like that,

that can be disguised from the perpetrator.

All right, Abby hasn't got that -

but she's very switched on, which means he has not won yet.

She's still got that little bit of control.

I hoped at the time that it would be a one-off.

I dunno, maybe he'd just had a really bad time of it,

because he'd gone through a really bad bereavement of

a close family member,

or maybe I have been particularly annoying that night, erm...

..and therefore, maybe he wouldn't do it again in the future.

I was really in love with him,

and I just thought, "Well, maybe...

"Maybe as time goes on, he'll change."

I hid my phone in my bag.

And then, eventually, I persuaded myself to go back upstairs.

And then, I passed out in bed.

The next day, he woke up,

and he was all smiles.

When he saw my injuries,

he genuinely looked horrified

and sort of said, "Oh, God,

"I just can't drink like that, I can't have alcohol.

"Because sometimes, I just have these blackouts where I just behave

"in ways that aren't me."

And he was really apologetic.

I was incredibly depressed.

I mean, I'd been depressed since about six months

into the relationship, because of how difficult it was.

I was petrified of everything.

I struggled to go out on my own,

so I was in and out of therapy.

She withdrew.

She was tense and jumpy if I did see her.

She lost a lot of weight.

She had odd bruises that she'd have odd excuses for.

When I raised these concerns, gosh,

I think she would be quite defensive,

or she would divert the conversation somewhere else,

so I gently probed it with her.

But she was very insistent that she'd been at this this club,

and she'd fallen down.

And she went to the doctor's a few days later, and the doctor

said she was concussed - and she was concussed because

he'd knocked her down in the street.

But she didn't tell me that bit.

David and I were invited by one of his oldest friends

to his 30th birthday party.

At this point, I was so scared of him all the time.

I knew I couldn't cope for much longer.

I was sleep deprived.

I was permanently agitated and unhappy.

I'd lost so much weight that I had to get new clothes,

because my clothes no longer fit me.

When this invitation came to go to this party,

all I could think was, whenever we have socialised before

and I've dared to have a good time,

that's when he gets violent,

or that's when he is particularly horrible to me.

And I just didn't have any resilience left for it.

This party was a long way away from anybody I knew.

If something did happen,

I was too far away to just be able to call one of my friends and say,

"Can you come and get me?"

So, I spent weeks getting more and more stressed about this night,

because I knew it was likely to go badly

and I didn't feel safe with him any more.

I'd actually had a really good night.

A load of the party guests were going out to have a cigarette.

And I said to David, "Ooh, maybe we could just have one?"

And I think the thing that particularly annoyed him

was the fact that some of his friends overheard.

He felt like it looked like I was pushing him around,

and that embarrassed him because he didn't want it

to look like I was in charge in any way.

I saw that...

..that black cloud descend that I'd seen so many times before,

which I just knew meant trouble.

And he was so angry, and he just went,

"The night's over for you.

"I'm taking you back up to the hotel room."

And then, I let him take me upstairs -

I mean, he dragged me upstairs.

And, as soon as we got into that hotel room...

..I knew something bad was going to happen.

I called the police, and I told them who I was,

I told them where I was,

I told them who David was.

And I said, "He is going to hurt me."

He just looked shocked,

like he couldn't believe that I was daring to ask for help

or to defy him.

He pulled the phone away from me...

..and that's when he started beating me up.

He-He slapped me across the face repeatedly

whilst he was holding me by my throat.

He covered my mouth... so that I couldn't breathe.

And then, he started to strangle me.

I genuinely thought I was going to die.

I must've blacked out at some point,

because there's a bit of a gap in my memory.

But I woke up on the floor...

..and he was just pacing up and down the room.

It was like he just couldn't figure out what to do next.

I thought, "I have to get out of here.

"I am going to die, he is going to kill me."

I said to him,

"Can I use the bathroom??

The bathroom door was next to the door coming into the hotel room.

So, I thought, "If I can get to the bathroom door,

"I can probably get out of the hotel room

"without him being out to stop me."

But he realised what I was going to do,

and he pulled me back...

..threw me on the ground,

and started stamping on me, and kicking me.

And then, eventually he just stopped.

I managed to get myself up onto a chair.

And suddenly, the police arrived.

I screamed so loud and so desperately, and said,

"He's going to kill me.

"Please come and save me."

And I just remember him looking at me like absolutely horrified.

And he said,

"You're going to ruin my life."

And even though I was completely...

..battered and shaking, and terrified,

I remember thinking,

"How can you have done this to me,

"and then, tell me that I'm going to ruin your life?"

I'm just so grateful that the police arrived as quickly as they did,

because I had a moment when I was lying on the floor,

when he was stamping on me,

where I just thought,

"I'm just going to be another dead woman on the news tomorrow.

"And my parents are never going to know what's been going on,

"I haven't told anybody.

"And I'm just going to be another dead woman."

Thank God the police arrive at this point,

because Abby was in the most

dangerous moment of her life.

She has been subjected to 25 minutes of abuse and assault.

She is so lucky.

She is so lucky to be alive,

because we have seen cases like this end very, very differently.

I had such horrendous bruising around my mouth

that it took about six weeks for the bruising to go down.

I ended up with... horrendous bruises all over

the left side of my body,

because whilst I was on the ground,

I was just thinking,

"I can't let him stamp my stomach or my chest.

"He will kill me."

So, I protected my body with my leg and my arm.

It was very shocking.

The police photographer who took photos of her said that

usually they saw bruises that bad on dead people,

erm, totally shocking.

She'd absolutely decided there was no going back,

and she would pursue this and pursue him,

and make sure she would protect other women.

The trial was postponed on five occasions.

There was an approximately eight-month waiting list

for a Crown Court trial.

But then, about one or two weeks after he was charged,

COVID happened.

It took me to bits, it really did,

and my life couldn't move forwards without it,

because it was constantly this spectre in the background.

And there were times where I just thought,

"I don't know if I can keep going with this."

The trial took two-and-a-half weeks.

I was on the stand for nearly four days.

It was utterly exhausting.

I sat in the viewing gallery while she gave evidence,

and that was incredibly difficult to witness.

Answering questions about the most intimate parts of my life,

sometimes for hours at a time.

I have never felt so stressed that I thought,

"I might actually have a heart attack and die" -

but I felt like that every day for-for weeks.

I just thought, "Thank God it's over.

"It's over. And nobody can ever say to me that I was lying."

He can never say to anybody that he didn't do it now.

Abby has come through an incredible ordeal,

and it's going to take her quite a lot of time

to trust anyone else again,

and to fully move on with her life.

I get really angry about

the fact that I've lived here my whole life -

and I just feel like there are so many places I either can't go to,

or things I can't do any more.

What if he's there?

Having to constantly look over my shoulder everywhere I go.

Even now, years later...

..I check every single car that drives past me.

And, as soon as my car door is shut,

I lock the car to make sure that if he's waiting nearby,

he can't get in the car with me.

And it's not fair.

It's not fair that he did all of those things to me -

and yet, I feel I'm the one that's having to, even now,

change my behaviour so that I can try to feel safe.

I'm so proud. So proud.

It's such a traumatic thing to have happened to her.

And I think the strength of character to keep it going

and to keep a job, and she bought a house,

and she found a new relationship,

and then, be fighting for justice is incredibly inspirational.

What it's made it realise is that I am a heck of a lot more resilient

than I ever thought I was.

I don't think I'll find anything...

..anywhere near as difficult ever again.

And that gives me...

..a little bit of that confidence that I lost when I was with David.

I've come through to the other side, so...

..really, what else can happen to me that's going to be

anywhere near as bad as that?

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