I’d like to say that before I met Connor Dawkins I was a happy, vivacious person without a care in the world but that would not be true. The fact is that I was a victim before I ever met this man. In 1996, my mum, Penny Adams, suffered a brain haemorrhage while driving home from the shops. She died instantly. And when she died she took a little bit of me, and my sister, and my dad, with her. We would never be the same again. Before that day in July 1996, I had been a happy child with a loving family and a secure home, and I would spend my early adult life looking for a replacement.

It was my search for that feeling of home, for the love and security and warmth that come with it, that put me in the path of Connor Dawkins. When he rushed me into making our relationship official, telling friends, moving in together within a couple of months, I took that as a sign that he loved me and that I had finally found someone to build a life with, a home, a family. I had trusted Connor Dawkins completely but that trust had been misplaced. When he met me for a drink on our first date, he hadn’t seen a potential life partner, a woman he could love and marry and start a family with. He saw another victim. And in my vulnerable state I was an easy target. To the outside world, our relationship looked blissful. But behind his dazzling smile lay a toxic trail of lies, deceit and mind games, which Connor Dawkins hid so skilfully he managed to fool not only me but his family, his friends and his colleagues. ‘A good man,’ was how most of the people who came into his orbit would describe him. ‘A charming man, a team player, one of the lads.’ And I had thought the same of him, even when he was gaslighting me, telling me that I didn’t know my own mind, that I was imagining things, that my suspicions were those of a crazy person, a ‘psycho’ – which is the term he used to describe his exes. And because I was a trusting person, because I desperately wanted to see the good in him and our relationship, I made the mistake of letting Connor Dawkins control my mind to such an extent that I no longer knew what was real and what was just in my head.

I continued to do that right up until the morning of 29th May 2018, when I woke up to find that Connor Dawkins had raped me. Yet, even then, I let him try to tell me that it was all in my head, that I was the bad person for accusing a loving boyfriend of committing such a heinous crime. I knew, instinctively, what had happened, but I tried to block it out by losing myself in other people’s lives. My short-lived coping mechanism was to view expensive houses using various aliases, which the defence has used to paint me as a dangerous fantasist, a mentally unstable woman who doesn’t know her own mind, who lives in a dream world, and who would be quite capable of inventing a story accusing an innocent man of a terrible crime. But during my lost months of trying on other people’s lives, I made a discovery. No one, not your mother, not your father, not your lover, has the right to violate you, to control you, to ‘take’ your life from you and twist it to shape their own ends.

Because what I didn’t know when I fell under the spell of Geoffrey Rivers and his books, as a traumatized ten-year-old, and again when I fell under Connor Dawkins’s spell all these years later, is that for some people, love means power, it means ownership and control. These people would have you believe that you have no voice, no right over your own life. They chip away at your self-esteem, at your judgement, at your very essence, until there is so little left you might as well be a ghost. Yet Connor Dawkins didn’t break me fully. With the support of my family I summoned the courage to go to the police, knowing that he would very likely deny the charges and therefore put me through the ordeal of being cross-examined in court. Most victims would lose their nerve at this point and drop the charges. I very nearly did. To anyone in this position, I would like to say I am with you and I understand your fears, but your silence makes it possible for people like Connor Dawkins to carry on destroying lives. If you can find it in you to come forward then you might help other people like you, like me.

Someone told me recently that the ‘good will out’, that truth and honesty and fairness will always prevail. It will take me a long time to believe that, to trust people again, to let someone else into my heart. But I hope one day to recover from the ordeal this man put me through and to rebuild the life he tried to destroy.