I suffered a year-long abusive relationship in which I was emotionally manipulated and physically assaulted multiple times by my former partner, a fellow Cambridge PhD student. This ended when he was arrested and charged for an incident in February 2017. Following the subsequent trial in September 2017, my photographs were featured in national newspapers alongside headlines declaring that I had been on a vendetta and made up the whole thing.
Having declined to comment at the time, I later decided to share my story, in the hope that it might help others to understand domestic abuse better and to recognise the signs – which can be very subtle at first – both in their own relationships and those of others. My experience made me painfully aware of how little domestic abuse is understood by many people. As one in four women are estimated to suffer at least one abusive relationship in their lives I believe raising awareness of this topic to be incredibly important.
In this blog I cover the relationship up to the incident which led to the trial. It is written as a full account of what happened, including my own behaviour, even when I was not proud of my actions. I kept a journal towards the end of the relationship, trying to understand what was happening, and spent a lot of time afterwards writing everything down in order to try to come to terms with it. Therefore, although I was surely unable to remember everything, my memory when writing this was fairly clear and I was able to reproduce many of the events in detail. The blog also includes a voice recording (Post 7) which is quite demonstrative of what emotional abuse can sound like.
Writing this blog was a struggle and reading any part of it has remained very difficult for me mentally, especially as I suffered PTSD from the events detailed. Releasing this was terrifying, but I have always believed it to be the right thing to do. I hope it is of help to others.
My Posts
Post 1 – The beginning of the relationship and initial development of emotional abuse
Post 2 – The use of self-harm and further confusion
Post 3 – Further development of emotional abuse
Post 4 – The first assault on me
Post 6 – The third assault on me
Post 8 – Involvement of his parents
(Published November 2017)
Victims Can Be Strong 