the times | Monday May 23 2022 3
times2
Guess what? Gisele feels better
in her forties than she did in
her twenties.
The supermodel? How do you know?She told British Vogue. She is on its
June cover.
Oh, right. Why is that, then — am
I about to hear some fluff about
spiritual growth?Nah. Just about how she changed
what she has for breakfast.
How riveting. She doesn’t strike me
as a Weetabix kind of gal. What did
it used to be?A mocha frappuccino with
whipped cream and three
cigarettes.
Same, Gisele, same. How did we end
up looking so different?Genetics, I hazard.
Thanks for the reminder.Want to know what she greets the
day with now?
A snort of collagen?Mm, no. A 5am meditation and
a workout.
That’s what I like to hear. Pleasingly
unrelatable. My kind of cover girl.She also spoke about drinking too
much and weaning herself off
sugar. But back to the frappuccino
— and in time, in fact, to the
Noughties.
Yes! I used to love those creamy
sugar slurps. And cigarettes. Now,
I can’t remember the last time either
crossed my lips.No, quite. It was the era of
peak Starbucks, before everyone
got obsessed with
their health — and
good coffee.
Yes, and veganism
was for hippies and
the only green
thing we drank
was absinthe.And models
were thin
despite what
they ate, not
because of
what they
ate. You’d
never
catch a
supermodel
carting that
kind of bev
around now.
No, more
likely a
vitamin
IV drip.
Actually, I’m
not surprised
she feels
better.
Hannah
RogersThe lowdown
Gisele’s
breakfast
think, ‘He is prepared to go to these
lengths to keep our relationship going,’
and it is quite flattering.”
The first signs of what was to come
happened within weeks of courtship,
Dodsworth says. “It was the first time
my parents were going to meet him.
He was angry over money and he
absolutely screamed at his sister to her
face. I was really horrified. This sister
adores him. It wasn’t long of course
before he spoke to me like that.”
Wignall blocked her from meeting
certain of his friends, saying he was
worried she might start an affair with
them. Then she found he had gone
into her phone and deleted male
contacts. “The phone became a real
thing for him, as it was my link to the
outside world.”
She wanted to make things work,
and rationalised his strange behaviour
as stemming from his time at boarding
school and bad luck in previous
relationships. She remembers joking to
friends that he was her “project”.
Then he started hitting her. “There’s
an element of shock about it the first
few times. Then come the flowers and
the apology, and you think, ‘Well, he
won’t do it again.’ Then after a while
there are no apologies and it just
becomes part of the relationship.”
During his trial, the court heard how
family members witnessed Wignall
pushing Dodsworth, causing her to
fracture a rib.
Her victim personal statement, given
during the trial, described her feeling
that she had been robbed of what
should have been the happiest times of
her life. “The birth of our children,
family gatherings, achievements in my
career, and associations with friends
have been tainted,” she wrote.
Looking back, she tells me now,
there was only one way the
relationship was going: “It would have
ended in him killing me.”
The criminology expert Dr Jane
Monckton Smith, author of In Control:
Dangerous Relationships and How
They End in Murder, describes an
eight-stage “homicide timeline” in
abusive relationships. They begin with
love bombing, escalate when the
perpetrator senses they are losing
control — such as when a victim tries
to leave — and end in the victim’s
death. Dodsworth says her experience
fits the pattern.
“I was on that final step and in a way
I still am,” she says.
She is now happily remarried, to
someone she knew at work whom
she has said her family and children
adore. He had been one of the few
people she had mentioned her ex-
husband’s behaviour to.
“I was really upset and let something
slip,” she says. “He was the one who
pointed out to me it was really wrong
and told me to call the police.”
However, she fears Wignall will be
released from prison later this year.
“There is a lifetime restraining order,
but I fear this is a man who has been
behind bars getting angrier and
angrier,” she says.
She cannot afford to move house as
Wignall wiped out her savings, and
says that when he is released she will
have to rely on precautions like
putting extra locks on doors and
removing large stones from her garden
that could be used as weapons. Her
house is “target marked”, which means
any calls to police will be taken
particularly seriously.
“I have dared to go on without him
and be happy. That is not something
he will walk away from lightly.”him. That’s what he did. That’s what Ruth Dodsworth
he said.’ ”
A failure to fully grasp what is
happening to them is a key symptom
of victims of coercive control: a
pattern of intimidation that experts
compare to taking someone hostage.
In fact it is part of the point of the
abuse. To make it difficult to leave,
perpetrators strip victims not only
of support and financial resources,
but mental resources too — their
self-esteem is crushed and they are
made to doubt themselves. Assault,
threats and humiliation are designed
to create so much fear and confusion
that eventually victims are unable to
take action to get free.
Dodsworth’s daughter Grace, 18, has
since spoken of their lives with
Wignall, telling the ITV programme
Controlled by My Partner? The Hidden
Abuse: “This was our reality, this was
our lives, it was normal for us.”
However, Dodsworth fears people
won’t understand why she didn’t
recognise the problem earlier. “If I
had been able to compare notes with
someone else going through this I
might not have felt it was my fault,”
she says. And perhaps there was an
element of denial too, motivated by
fear. “I didn’t admit to myself I was
in an abusive household. It got
easier to pretend it wasn’t happening
because the other option is to
get into another argument,
another fight.
“I’m sure people will read this and
think, ‘Why didn’t you do something?’
You can’t — you just can’t do
anything to rock the boat. You just
want to get through the night and
wake up the next morning alive,” she
says. That fear was not without
foundation; abusive relationships are
well known to reach their most
dangerous point when victims attempt
to leave.
Even after the police got involved,
Wignall’s manipulative behaviour
continued. “Once he was arrested he
couldn’t contact me but continued to
contact my children. He’d ring my
daughter and say, ‘I’m going to hang
myself.’ ” When on bail he also sent
them an old picture of Dodsworth in
hospital, which he had taken earlier
that year at a standard check-up, with
the message: “This is what it looks like
when you don’t want your children
any more.”
Coercive control is common. Since it
was recognised as a crime in 2015,
police forces in England and Wales
have received more than 60,000
reports. Nor can victims be easily
stereotyped. Dodsworth says that she
had a happy childhood and that before
this relationship she was highly
confident.
In fact, part of the insidiousness of
this brand of abuse is that it happens
gradually, in the grey areas between
couples. “You try and adapt to
someone in the early stages of getting
together,” Dodsworth says. “You know
you do have to put the work in, it’s not
going to be all roses. So you put up
with one thing, and then another.”
Dodsworth was 26 when she met
Wignall and 27 when they married. In
those early days she was subject to
“love bombing”: excessive
demonstrations of affection designed
to make victims lower their
boundaries, and another red flag for
abusive relationships. “Very quickly we
were talking about moving in together
and marriage,” Dodsworth says. In
that context, controlling or jealous
behaviour that might otherwise be
recognised as alarming can seem like
the actions of a passionate lover. “YouYou just
want to get
through
the night
and wake
up the next
morning
alive
MARK LEWIS