The Sunday Times Magazine • 13Right: Caroline,
far right, on holiday
in St Tropez c 1995
with her twin sister,
Jody, left, and
her mother, centre[The Met’s lawyers] kept saying they would
show the video. She would have rather died.”
And, days after being told that the criminal
case was going ahead, she did. “The charge
shouldn’t have happened,” Christine adds,
“none of this should have happened.”
Today the Independent Office for Police
Conduct (IOPC) is investigating the
Metropolitan Police’s decision to pursue
the case, looking into whether Caroline was
charged because of her celebrity status.
Bateman, the senior officer, denied that she
was treated differently because of her fame.
“All I want is for the Met to say ‘it wasn’t
domestic abuse, we shouldn’t have pursued
it’,” Christine says. She believes it was a
“trophy” arrest for them, an assertion of
power over a high-profile figure.
Public confidence in the Metropolitan
Police has fallen sharply in recent years
after a spate of controversies. In the wake
of Sarah Everard’s brutal killing by a
serving policeman, female protesters weremanhandled and arrested. When the sisters
Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were
murdered, two police officers took
selfie-style images with their bodies. More
recently, officers were roundly condemned
for the strip-search of a 15-year-old girl
at her school in Hackney. Christine
describes the Met’s treatment of her
daughter in the midst of a mental health
crisis as “horrendous”.
“The police have got worse than when I
was younger,” she says. We are sitting in her
living room in Norwich, Caroline’s Strictly
glitterball trophy in the corner, a Bafta
certificate for Love Island on the wall, her
cat, Waffle, now Christine’s, sprawled on
the carpet. “To keep her in that cell for over
24 hours and leave her after she’d tried to ...”
While Caroline was held in the police
station with her arms bandaged up, her
twin sister, Jody, waited outside for a day
and a night, unable to see her. Once she
was released, Caroline spent the followingweek hiding at Jody’s house in west
London. “She was hounded out of her
home [by the media],” Christine says. “She
couldn’t go outside her door, she couldn’t
do anything.” Christine and two of her
friends went back to Caroline’s flat to clear
up the blood, once the police had pulled out
of the scene. “And we were followed across
London by paparazzi. Three 70-year-olds
— we couldn’t believe it.”
“Within 24 hours my whole world and
future was swept from under my feet and all
the walls that I had taken so long to build
around me collapsed,” Caroline wrote at the
time, published posthumously by her family
in the Eastern Daily Press. “I have always
taken responsibility for what happened that
night. Even on the night. But the truth is ...
it was an accident. I’ve been having some
sort of emotional breakdown for a very long
time. But I am NOT a domestic abuser.”
Then a photo appeared in the press.
It was shocking, taken the night of the
incident and showing bright blood across
Caroline’s bed sheets. At this point no one
knew about her self-harm, so the public
assumed the blood was Burton’s and that
Caroline was indeed an abuser. “But the
blood was all hers because she had cut
herself so badly,” Christine says, looking
out of her window, tears in her eyes.
On December 23, 2019, Caroline pleaded
not guilty to assault by beating at Highbury
Corner magistrates’ court. “[Burton] said he
had been asleep and was hit over the head
by Caroline with a lamp,” said the CPS
prosecutor Kate Weiss at the hearing. After
Burton’s initial phone call to the police, in
which he said he thought he’d been hit with
a lamp, it was continually reported as
having been used as a weapon. Christine
vehemently denies the lamp was used,
saying that the lamp did not even exist. At
the time of the hearing, Burton himself said
on Instagram: “Bullshit this blood isn’t
mine and I didn’t get hit over the head with
a lamp, can everyone stop now.”While Caroline was held in the police station,
her sister waited outside for a day and a night
Bottom left: with
her dancing partner
Pasha Kovalev,
with whom she
won the 12th series
of Strictly in 2014COURTESY OF CHRISTINE FLACK, BBC ➤