‘I called the police 169 times during my eight years of abuse hell’
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When Katy Longhurst jumped in the car late one evening to pick her boyfriend Jack* up from a club, she had no idea of how quickly the night would unravel. At the venue, she struggled to find her other half so approached a male bouncer to describe what he looked like. Jack then appeared and charged towards her.
‘Jack saw me talking to another man,’ Katy tells Metro over Zoom. ‘He flipped out, said I was having an affair and head-butted me three times. My face was completely busted. I had a broken tooth, busted lip and two black eyes. The police showed me the CCTV so I could see Jack’s expression before he attacked me. But I refused to press charges. I told myself, “I spoke to another man. This was my fault.”’.
Katy couldn’t admit the truth about the 2013 attack because she was trapped in an abusive relationship. When they had first met three years earlier, Jack was ‘a charmer’ who took a keen interest in her IT engineer job. But after a few months, Katy saw his true colours. Jack would control where she went and who she spoke to and would physically attack her if she put a toe out of line. At work, Katy used a scarf to cover strangulation marks on her neck and said bruises on her face had been caused by ‘bumping into things.’.
‘Jack made me feel fat, ugly and worthless,’ Katy recalls. ‘He said I was lucky to have someone like him. I became a social recluse because I thought if I stayed indoors where he could monitor everything, then I could minimise the damage. My next door neighbour used to call 999 when he heard him shouting. But when police came round, Jack would make me lie and say he wasn’t in. He would then go down and hide in the basement and listen to my conversations.
