The Psychopath: A True Story(12)

Getting the publishing deal helped me enormously, not just because it meant I would have a focus for writing it all down but it also gave me something to work towards and deadlines to achieve. It offered a future career and a chance to earn back some money, something I was desperately short of as I was still in incredible debt with the ￡56,000 owing on my credit cards.

It felt like an insurmountable sum and the debt collectors had been calling since April 2006. They were relentless. Every day I would get calls from various people asking for payment. Each time I would explain that I had been conned and had nothing to give. I was on incapacity benefits by now and barely making ends meet. In Scotland, you cannot declare bankruptcy – one of your creditors has to take you to court and make you bankrupt. I would ask them to take me to court so the nightmare round of daily calls would stop, but they could see there was no point wasting more of their money on a court case so would just tell me they would call again tomorrow.

It was soul-destroying. Every phone call opened wounds and rubbed in the salt. It was a catch-22 situation that seemed impossible to escape. Day after day I had to answer the calls. There seemed no end to it.

Before she died, my mother had found out about the Protected Trust Deed situation in Scotland where you put all your assets in a fund and then offer a small percentage of the debt (such as 15p for each ￡1) to the creditors straight away. Alternatively they can accept getting the full amount of the debt repaid monthly but in the form of pennies each month for the next fifty years. The Deed seemed like the only option I had to dig myself out of the financial hole I was in. However, I would need some capital to put into the fund to make it attractive enough for my creditors to accept.

Selling my story to the Daily Mail in November 2006 was not a highpoint of my life but due to the media interest around the trial I felt it would give me a chance to put some money towards the Protected Trust Deed. A friend who was a television presenter for Sky News put me in touch with a trustworthy independent journalist called Marcello Mega and we arranged to meet at the café in the Chamber Street Museum in Edinburgh. I didn’t even give him my name at first because I was so nervous about him just running with the story without my permission. However, Cello turned out to be brilliant. He was sympathetic to my situation and we worked on the outline story together. He also knew who to talk to and managed to negotiate a good deal for me with the newspaper.

The article was pretty good except that the editor added a final comment at the end which rather missed the whole point of coercive control and gaslighting. He wrote, ‘If ever there was a story to prove the age-old adage that love is blind, this is surely it.’ The paper also insisted that I wore a dress for the photo shoot which simply is not me! They actually brought the dress with them and told me to wear it. I didn’t refuse because they were paying me but it felt like I was selling a part of myself that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with.

When the Daily Mail article came out, I experienced my first online trolling attacks. People commented under the online article about how ‘desperate’ I must have been and how ‘unattractive’ and ‘needy’ I was. More than anything, the comments noted how ‘stupid’ I must have been to have fallen for Will Jordan’s lies and believed that he loved me, that it should have been obvious he was conning me from the very start. It is extraordinary how cruel people can be when they can hide behind an anonymous computer keyboard.

It hurt. I felt judged and humiliated. I had been the victim of a crime and a systematic abuse of my psychological, emotional and financial state. I questioned whether I should have gone public and the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty threatened to sweep over me again. It felt like I was being victimised all over again. I wondered whether I shouldn’t have spoken out, should maybe have stayed silent. That word again. Silent. Voiceless, hidden, small, insignificant, nothing. The first rule of any abuser is to keep their victim silent. Ensure they are isolated and alone, that they don’t speak out or articulate (and thereby make sense of) what is happening to them.

Then I had a revelation. If my children in later life came to me with a problem like this – if they said they had been bullied, or people had said nasty things about them – would I have told them to stay silent, to hide away and hang their heads in shame? Certainly not! I wanted my children to know they should never feel ashamed of being a victim of a crime and to do that I needed to show them by example.

So I pulled myself up with a snap. The trolls were providing another type of abuse, and I was not going to be kept silent any more.

I realised that ‘victim shaming’ is a form of self-preservation. If these people can blame the victim then they themselves are safe. Because they won’t be as foolish, or gullible, unattractive or just plain unlucky. I realised that just like in the past when rape victims were ostracised, it would take someone standing up and talking about it to change societal views. Someone had to stand up and be counted, open up the conversation and show that it is never the victim’s fault. No one should ever feel ashamed of having been a victim of a crime. One of those ‘someones’ was going to be me.

The trolls actually fuelled my commitment to talk publicly about the subject and help other victims know they can speak up too.

Having been signed off on incapacity benefits I had an income of about ￡90 per week but received government help with the rent as well. So I had time to gather myself and recover. It was not a glamorous existence but I managed to make ends meet and was already very good at surviving on a budget towards the end of my relationship with Will Jordan.