![]() ![]() Because there was a chance of damaging his reputation, I couldn’t share the extreme levels of physical and emotional damage he had caused my mother and me, even if he was not named even if identifiable characteristics were removed. Libel is “ a published false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation”. Because the police had found no “evidence”, the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t take the case, and there was never even the possibility that he might be found guilty of two decades of crimes. I would, they said, be potentially libelling him, and he could sue. I could not call the man in my home what he was. ![]() But then my publisher said I needed to remove the phrase “domestic abuser”. My book, I figured, was my moment to provide the evidence, to counter the suffocating and silencing narrative that had been forced upon us. I wrote that when my mother reported him to the police, she was told there was not enough “evidence” and it felt like my whole existence had been denied, our lives collapsed into nothing bruises, scars and agony wiped clean off the slate of history. I confessed in my book that I had grown up in a house with a violent and psychological domestic abuser. Despite the thousands of words I’ve published to date, this was one story I have kept secret, a wound less painful if not exposed to light or air. And so I decided it was time to tell my own story in the pages of a book. ![]()
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