Fifty-Three Women
After he was arrested, I was angry.
Actually, angry doesn't really cover it.
Months of accusations.
Months of being watched.
Months of having to prove where I was, who I was with, what I was doing and why a fucking dot on Life360 had moved somewhere it shouldn't have.
Months of being accused of cheating.
Months of photographs.
Videos.
FaceTimes.
Questions.
Interrogations.
Violence.
Being made to admit to things I hadn't done just to try to make it stop.
And now he was sitting in a police cell.
I had spent so long being frightened of what would happen if I spoke that suddenly?
I wanted people to know who he really was.
So I went onto TikTok.
And I was fucking raging.
I Put His Real Name Everywhere
I went through his TikTok.
Picture after picture.
And I commented.
I gave his real name.
I said what he'd done to me.
And I told people to Google his real name and look at his previous arrest.
I'd spent months being silenced.
Now?
I wasn't interested in protecting him.
I wanted anybody looking at that profile to know that the man they thought they knew wasn't necessarily the man I'd been living with.
At that point, I thought I was exposing him.
I had absolutely no idea what I was about to expose to myself.
Because then?
A woman messaged me.
Then another.
And another.
And suddenly my phone started filling with women.
They Had Receipts
These weren't random people saying:
Oh, I think he messaged me once.
They had screenshots.
Messages.
Pictures.
They told me about phone calls they'd had with him.
Things he'd said.
Things he'd promised.
Stories he'd told them.
And the more I read?
The sicker I felt.
Because according to him?
He was single.
That seemed to be a fairly important detail of his life that he'd forgotten to mention to me.
The woman he was actually living with.
Some women had been told different versions.
One had been told that I'd cheated on him.
Another had been told I was his ex and he was only living with me until he found somewhere else to live.
Which was interesting.
Because while I was apparently his ex in conversations with other women, back at home I was being interrogated over whether I was being unfaithful to him.
And his location seemed to change depending on who he was talking to as well.
He was physically in Scotland.
But some women were being told he was in Sheffield.
Others were being told he was in Ireland.
Apparently the man had developed the ability to travel around the UK without ever leaving my fucking house.
Then there were the businesses.
According to the stories he was telling women?
He had four businesses.
Very successful.
Very busy.
Which was apparently why he couldn't always talk.
Why he couldn't answer his phone.
Why he wasn't always available.
Four businesses.
Who knew?
Certainly not the woman living with him.
Then I Looked at My Own TikTok
Not every woman found me through the comments.
Some?
I found in my own blocked list.
Women who had viewed my profile.
Women I hadn't blocked myself.
And one in particular absolutely stopped me in my tracks.
Because she hadn't just looked at my profile.
She had tried to add me.
She had been trying to tell me what was going on.
And somehow?
She was blocked.
Think about that.
A woman had apparently tried to reach me to tell me something about the man I was living with...
and from my side?
She'd simply disappeared.
I hadn't known she was there.
I hadn't known she'd tried.
And now I was looking through blocked accounts wondering:
How many women had tried to get close enough to tell me something?
How many times had I nearly found out?
How many things had been happening right under my nose while I was too busy defending myself against things I wasn't even doing?
Then There Was Her
And then one of the women brought me straight back to something I'd already seen with my own eyes.
The woman from the video.
The one I'd heard him talking to.
The woman he'd told me was a childhood friend.
Remember that?
I'd heard a conversation where he appeared to have two reasons to go to Manchester.
One was to see family.
And the other?
To see her.
And make love to her.
When I confronted him?
No.
I'd misunderstood.
She was a childhood friend.
They were having a laugh.
There was nothing going on.
Then came the shower call.
A week later, I'd caught him on video masturbating while talking to her.
Saying her name.
Telling her what to do.
When I questioned him about that?
Apparently I'd heard that wrong too.
It was his mate and his mate's girlfriend.
He was talking in code.
Of course.
Because apparently nothing says completely innocent conversation like having to invent fucking code.
I'd sent him the video.
And he deleted my entire chat history to get rid of it.
At the time, I knew what I'd heard.
But he'd denied it so completely that once again I was left questioning myself.
Now?
I was finding out the truth.
It Wasn't One Call
This wasn't some random woman he'd spoken to once.
It wasn't one stupid sexual call.
It wasn't an innocent childhood friend I'd misunderstood.
From what I learned afterwards?
That had been going on for around a month and a half.
A month and a half.
Calls.
Contact.
A relationship of sorts happening behind my back.
And that's when this stopped simply being about discovering women.
Because I started thinking about when these things had happened.
And suddenly?
I felt physically sick.
The Shower Call
That shower video already had another meaning for me.
A much darker one.
Because around that same incident came the first time he put me in the bath.
The first time he put a towel in my mouth.
The first time he put the shower in my face.
That memory had absolutely nothing sexual or exciting about it for me.
It was terror.
And now I was discovering that while this man was secretly involved in calls and sexual conversations with another woman?
I was the one being accused.
I was the one being punished.
I was the one having to prove myself.
I was the one being hurt.
And it wasn't the only time.
The Night He Went for Batteries
There was another night I remembered very clearly.
He went out for batteries.
Then came home.
That became the night he strangled me.
The night I ended up in that bath for the second time.
One of the nights that would stay in my head long after it was over.
And what did I discover afterwards?
He'd been on calls with women that night too.
That was the point where the screenshots stopped feeling like evidence of cheating.
They became something much more disturbing.
Because I could look at dates.
And I could remember what was happening to me.
The Dates Matched
These women hadn't only been around at some convenient period when our relationship was ending.
The messages went through our relationship.
And when I started looking at dates?
Things began clicking into place.
There were dates when he was talking to women...
and coming home and accusing me of cheating.
Dates when he was having phone calls with other women...
while demanding explanations from me.
Dates connected to times when I was being beaten.
Strangled.
Interrogated.
Made to prove myself.
And suddenly I started recognising something else.
The things he said.
Not because I'd seen his messages before.
Because I'd heard versions of them already.
Only they'd been coming out of his mouth as accusations against me.
Was He Accusing Me of What He Was Doing?
For months, I'd been trying to answer the same question.
Why does this man think I'm cheating?
What was I doing wrong?
Was I too friendly?
Had I said something?
Had somebody messaged me?
Had Life360 glitched?
Was there something on my phone I hadn't noticed?
Why couldn't I make him believe me?
Why wasn't any amount of proof enough?
Now I was reading screenshots from women and starting to wonder whether I'd been asking the wrong fucking question.
Because some of the things he had accused me of doing?
He was doing.
Secret conversations.
Calls.
Pictures.
Promises.
Different stories for different people.
Lying about where he was.
Lying about his relationship status.
Keeping people separate so one didn't know about the other.
And then coming home and acting as though I was the person who couldn't be trusted.
Suddenly, his obsession with cheating looked very different.
Even Life360 Came Back
Then there was the fucking Life360.
Because of course there was.
At one point during our relationship, Life360 had shown my car parked at an address for around four hours while I was at work.
That sort of thing in our relationship wasn't a small technical glitch.
A dot on a map could become an interrogation.
It could become an accusation.
It could become hours of trying to prove where I'd actually been.
Since then?
I've spoken to the woman connected to that address.
She told me he wasn't there.
But he'd told me he had been there.
According to him, he'd gone there and fallen asleep on her chair.
So even now, I can't tell you exactly what happened there.
I can only tell you what each person told me.
But that's almost the point.
By then there were so many stories.
So many versions.
So many lies.
So many things I had been expected to accept as truth while my own truth was questioned constantly.
And the irony of Life360 wasn't lost on me.
I'd been terrorised over where that app claimed I had been.
Meanwhile, this man couldn't even seem to keep track of which fucking part of the country he was supposedly in.
Scotland.
Sheffield.
Ireland.
Depends which woman you asked.
He Was Single Everywhere Except at Home
That was another thing that got me.
To these women?
He was single.
Or practically single.
Or living with an ex.
Or stuck temporarily in some inconvenient situation until he could move out.
There was always a story.
There was always an explanation.
There was always a reason he couldn't answer.
Couldn't meet.
Couldn't speak freely.
Couldn't do whatever he'd promised.
And reading those messages made me realise something else.
I'd heard explanations too.
Different explanations.
But the same pattern.
There was always a reason.
Always a story.
Always something that made what I'd seen with my own eyes somehow not mean what I thought it meant.
The childhood friend wasn't what I thought.
The shower call wasn't what I thought.
The conversation wasn't what I thought.
The words weren't what I thought.
The woman wasn't what I thought.
Apparently I had spent an extraordinary amount of my relationship hearing and seeing things incorrectly.
Except now?
Other women had screenshots.
One Woman Had Been Told I'd Cheated
That one really got me.
Because while I had been living through months of being accused of cheating...
he was telling another woman that I'd cheated on him.
There it was.
His explanation.
He wasn't the bad guy.
He was the wounded one.
The betrayed one.
The man stuck living with his ex.
Meanwhile, back in reality?
I was desperately trying to convince him I hadn't slept with people who didn't fucking exist.
I had been forced to confess to cheating I hadn't done.
I'd been punished for imaginary affairs.
And somewhere out there?
A woman was being told that I was the cheat.
You couldn't make it up.
Except apparently he could.
And They Kept Coming
The messages didn't all arrive in one dramatic flood.
They came over days.
Another woman.
Another screenshot.
Another story.
Another:
I thought you should know...
Some I found myself.
Some found me.
Some had apparently been closer to reaching me before than I'd ever realised.
And eventually?
The number reached fifty-three.
Fifty-three women connected in one way or another to this man during the period I was trying to understand.
Not fifty-three women I was going to blame.
Because here's the thing.
A lot of them had been lied to as well.
If a man tells you he's single?
How are you supposed to know there's a woman sitting at home being told something completely different?
If he tells you the woman he lives with is his ex?
You don't know that's bullshit.
If he tells you he's in Sheffield when he's actually sitting in Scotland?
Why would you automatically assume he's lying?
He had different stories for different women.
I knew that because now?
The women were comparing notes.
And I was standing in the middle of it all.
I Felt Sick
People might imagine finding out something like that would make you feel vindicated.
Like:
Ha! I knew something wasn't right.
There was some of that.
Things finally made sense.
But mostly?
I felt sick.
Because I wasn't just discovering that he'd lied.
I was having to revisit my own abuse through a completely different lens.
I could look at a date on a screenshot and remember what had happened in my house.
What mood he'd been in.
What I'd been accused of.
Whether I'd been frightened.
Whether he'd hurt me.
And there were moments when I realised:
While I was being punished for cheating, he was talking to other women.
That's difficult to explain.
Because the cheating almost becomes the least important part.
Was I angry he'd been talking to women?
Of course.
But what made me feel sick was remembering what he'd done to me because of things he claimed I was doing.
He hadn't simply been jealous.
He hadn't simply been insecure.
He had subjected me to months of accusations and violence over behaviour that, as the screenshots started showing me...
looked frighteningly similar to his own.
Maybe It Was Never About Me
That was one of the biggest realisations.
I'd spent so long looking at myself.
Trying to change myself.
Trying to reassure him.
Trying to behave in whatever way would finally make him feel secure.
Trying to remove every possible reason for him to doubt me.
But what if there had never been anything I could do?
What if no amount of proof would ever have been enough?
Because maybe the accusations weren't coming from anything I'd done.
Maybe they were coming from what he knew could be done.
He knew you could have secret conversations.
Because he did.
He knew you could tell different people different stories.
Because he did.
He knew you could hide calls.
Because he did.
He knew you could lie about where you were.
Because he did.
He knew you could present yourself as single while living with somebody.
Because he did.
And suddenly?
So much clicked into place.
Not everything.
I don't think I'll ever understand everything.
But enough.
Enough for me to stop looking at myself and asking:
What did I do to make him think I was cheating?
And start asking:
How much of what he accused me of was really about him?
Fifty-Three
I still struggle with that number.
Fifty-three.
Not because I think every woman had the same relationship with him.
They didn't.
Some were messages.
Some were calls.
Some involved pictures.
Some involved promises.
Some went on longer than others.
Some had stories I was only beginning to understand.
But together?
They showed me a version of the man I'd been living with that I hadn't known existed.
And perhaps the cruelest part?
While he was creating all those different versions of himself for other women...
he had been slowly destroying my version of myself.
By the time he was arrested, I barely trusted my own memory.
My own eyes.
My own ears.
My own body.
My own fucking location.
Then fifty-three women appeared with screenshots and stories.
And little by little?
They started giving me something back.
Confirmation.
The shower call happened.
I hadn't heard it wrong.
The conversations existed.
I hadn't imagined them.
The lies existed.
I wasn't paranoid.
And for perhaps the first time in that entire relationship?
I wasn't the person standing there desperately trying to prove the truth.
The truth was arriving in my inbox all by itself.
And that was only the beginning.
Because while I was discovering just how much he'd hidden from me...
I was also beginning to discover what had been happening in the life I'd left behind.
With my children.
My grandchildren.
My family.
My ex-husband.
And the woman I'd once called my friend.
I'd spent months trapped in one nightmare.
Now I was out.
And I was about to find out exactly what it had cost me.
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