By Lara Feigel
Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for theGuardianand contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Most recently, Feigel appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC 1 cultural history of the interwar years, Art that Made Us, and she wrote and presented a programme about Doris Lessing for the Radio 4 prestigious Archive Hourslot.
PART TWO
‘There is nothing wrong with attempting to correct a disobedient wife when you have tried verbally and you have tried in every way possible.’
The father
The weather turns – it’s drizzly now – and Sebastian, the father, enters the witness box. He has to make a convincing case that all his talk of violence doesn’t amount to an admission of physical violence. And from the start, he’s impressive – it does seem as if he might well manage this. He’s calm, sad, regretful. He is glowing in his praise of a woman who can’t find a single positive word to say about him. When they met again in their twenties, his self-esteem was low because he’d just come to the devastating end of a previous relationship. He was astonished to find himself with this intelligent, cultured woman – ‘more British than me in many ways’ – and to feel that nothing could stop them as they made money and travelled the world. ‘I had the best partner I thought I could ever have in life.’
All this is why he stayed in the marriage for so long, he explains, even when Layla was apparently abusive towards him. Because this is his argument. She owned the property they lived in and chose their holidays. She was the self-confident one. He wasn’t in a position to exert control. In fact she controlled him, and engaged in periods of ‘cyclical abuse’ where she undermined and insulted him.
Questioned about his daughter, Sebastian’s deep love for her is evident. He knows her, mood by mood, as the mother does, and it’s sad to think that he hasn’t had her overnight for so long.
Frost, the barrister acting on behalf of the mother, begins his questioning, and the father makes a point of acknowledging some of his mistakes. This is always constructive in a court case like this one. Parents who engage in self-recrimination are more likely to be described as having ‘insight’ by guardians and judges. And perhaps parents who are capable of controlling their emotions and giving institutionally acceptable versions of them on demand are indeed more likely to be able to control their emotions with their children. Sebastian says that he can see now that he shouldn’t have filmed the mother at every handover; he can see that he shouldn’t have sent shoes as presents to Chloe at her mother’s house when there was a non-molestation order in place.
There’s a long debate about Sebastian’s failure to move out of the marital home after they’d agreed to separate. It took almost a year for him to move, though the mother had offered to rent him an alternative flat and to co-parent. At first, he threatened her with his immediate departure. He was going to get a job abroad and disappear out of their lives. But then he started refusing to go, even after she issued the divorce petition hoping it would make it happen. ‘I won’t leave Chloe under any circumstances.’
His explanations are contradictory. This was 2020 and he claims that he couldn’t move out, because it was impossible to rent anywhere in lockdown. It took until the autumn to find a flat where the landlord was prepared to take a single, self-employed man and a child, and then they had the builders in for a few months so he still needed to spend the nights in the marital home. But he also claims that he stayed because at one point Layla said that she was cancelling the divorce petition and wanted to try again. He circles back and forth, saying that he didn’t go because he needed to protect his daughter, and then that he couldn’t rent anywhere anyway because he had no money. Frost points out that there were hundreds of thousands in their joint account. He says that he didn’t believe it was his.
‘Mr Frost is saying you had the money to move out,’ the judge says. ‘I’m trying to understand why you didn’t have access to at least fifty percent of the joint account.’
‘Objectively speaking I did,’ he admits. ‘I had the passwords. But at the time I didn’t believe I was allowed to.’
It’s hard to make this add up with the fact that not long after this, he unilaterally emptied the joint account.
Frost moves on to discuss the continual altercations about school choices and handovers. Sebastian didn’t want Chloe to attend nursery on a daily basis and Layla claims that this was part of a general attempt to control her, making it hard for her to work. He thought she was weaning Chloe too quickly, by sending her for full days when she was almost three. ‘It’s fucking sad,’ he texted Layla, when she said that Chloe had been cuddling her nursery teacher more after increasing her hours. There were disputes, week after week, about how much she should be at nursery and which nursery she should attend; about which school she could attend and even whether she could go to school at all – Sebastian wanted to hold her back a year. Sebastian claims that Layla acted unilaterally by making nursery and school applications. Layla claims that Sebastian forced her into this by blocking every suggestion she made. For two and a half years, he resisted Chloe starting full time education; at one point Layla lost her job, and had to begin again.
It’s time now for Frost to address the allegations of physical abuse, and he asks about Sebastian’s statement that there’s nothing wrong in using physical force to correct a disobedient wife. Sebastian claims that he was paraphrasing a phrase from Islamic law that Layla used to mock. He says that his tone was facetious. I haven’t heard the recording, so can’t hear the tone, but I share Frost’s disbelief on this. The dialogue is all there, in black and white, in the papers.
‘I owe you nothing,’ Sebastian says. ‘You should be grateful for what you have received.’
‘For all these bruises and broken glasses and stomping on toes?’ Layla responds.
‘Shut up, you’re talking about the last two weeks,’ he says, and in Frost’s case this is an admission that there were indeed bruises and stomping prior to the past fortnight.
‘Since I’ve been pregnant I’ve been putting up with this,’ Layla insists.
‘You’re talking about the last two weeks,’ he says again, and then reminds her that their child is in the background, as she has been in the background of all the fights where he may or may not have caused the bruises. ‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk loudly. There is nothing wrong with attempting to correct a disobedient wife when you have tried verbally and you have tried in every way possible.’
‘No, it is not ok.’
‘There is no alternative.’
There it is. It may well be a quote. But surely it’s quoted approvingly, whatever the larger context of the quote in their relationship. And this is the same recording where the father forces the mother to listen to him reading the dictionary definition of ‘cunt’, applying it to her.
Frost continues to take him through the recordings and the allegations of abuse. One of the most serious altercations occurred when Layla was sitting breastfeeding on the floor and Chloe had just fallen asleep on her chest. In her account, Sebastian was anxious about money, and was taking it out on her. She says that she tried to reassure him that they had enough money for now, and could rely on her income, but this made him so angry that he leaned over and struck her throat with his palm, causing her to be thrown backwards against the sofa and to splutter and cough from the obstruction on her throat.
The father’s account is, inevitably, very different. He says that Layla had been whispering abuse at him from where she was sitting. He was worried that she was so worked up that she might be about to drop their daughter, so he moved across to her, placed an open palm on her chest, and moved her upright until her back made contact with the sofa. His barrister has argued throughout that his case is supported by text messages sent that night by the mother, addressing him as ‘Darling’ and telling him that Chloe was asleep and to come to bed when he was ready – ‘don’t sleep on the sofa. xx’ In the previous judgment by Recorder Searle, there was ‘considerable force’ in the submission of the father’s barrister, Ms Strachan, that if the mother had been assaulted earlier in the day, she would have been too traumatised to want him to enter the bedroom. Frost has submitted that Layla’s response was a common one in situations where a victim is forced to cohabit with her abuser; ‘fawn or freeze’ is a well-documented response to trauma.
A few months after this, Layla left Chloe alone in a park with one of her closest friends for a few minutes while she went to the toilet. Afterwards, Sebastian was angry as he didn’t like the friend in question. In her account, he grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her onto the bed, sat on her, grabbed her arms and shook and punched her arms while straddling her. As he did so, he apparently shouted ‘If you put our child in danger again, I will kill you and put you in hospital’. She claims this was all done in front of Chloe, which was why she didn’t shout or fight back. In her telling, he then grabbed her neck and held her against the wall while blocking her throat.
In Sebastian’s account, Layla had been following him around the house whispering tirades against him while he played a chasing game with Chloe. He guided Chloe into the sitting room and turned to Layla, extending an arm towards her to place a palm on her chest. He then walked her down the corridor and told her to stop insulting him.
There’s a recording, made a couple of months later, where Layla accuses him of pushing her against the bed, kicking and punching her.
‘I didn’t punch you,’ Sebastian responds – and in Frost’s submission he’s implicitly accepting the pushing and kicking.
‘You picked me up by the scruff of the neck and you shoved me against the wall. If that’s not beating up I don’t know what is,’ she retorts. An argument then begins about exactly how he touched her neck – but there seems little doubt in what follows that they both agree that he touched it, and that this can’t be confused with placing a palm on her chest.
‘I didn’t pick you up by the scruff of the neck because you didn’t have… you weren’t wearing anything at the scruff of the neck.’
‘You picked me up, you put your hands around my neck.’
‘I didn’t, I placed my hands on your collarbone and pushed you against the wall.’
‘What kind of a fucked up father does that? I don’t know, and you think that it’s justified.’
‘The sort of fucked-up father that knows what you are, who you are, and what you’re doing.’
Is this an admission of guilt? In the previous judgment, Recorder Searle found in her judgment that though she had listened several times to the recording, she had heard ‘the Father saying he did not ‘place his hands on your collar bone. And, ‘in the absence of any direct evidence of bruising to the Mother’s neck or to her collarbone, I do not find this part of the allegation proved.’ Frost knows that this recording, where Sebastian directly contradicts the findings of the judge, is strong evidence, and he goes in on it hard, and on Sebastian’s threat a little later in the recording that ‘if you leave Chloe with a fucking Muslim again I’ll break your arm’. ‘I’ll break your fucking arm’, he says, ‘and put you in hospital’.
Sebastian’s defence is that Layla’s friend was not a safe person to look after his daughter; indeed, he claims that Layla had said in the past that she believed this friend to be a threat. But even if this was the case – and even if his reasoning for her perniciousness on the recording was not as racist as it seems – this can hardly excuse the threat of breaking her arm. HHJ O’Donovan is fully aware of this, and intervenes to ask his own questions.
‘The context is, is it appropriate to threaten serious physical injury to protect your child? Not something I should be worried about?’
The father gives the rather confusing explanation that she had once told him he was going to break her arm, and he was now quoting this back to her sarcastically.
‘Do you believe that there are times when it’s justified to threaten the mother of your child with a broken fucking arm?’ the judge asks, and the courtroom briefly becomes a kind of theatre – the judge joining in with the father’s swearing and putting him on the spot as he does so.
‘No.’
‘So why did you say it?’
‘I’m not threatening to break her arm here, I’m repeating to her what she’s said. I’m quoting her allegation of what she’s said I’ve said back to her.’
Frost seems to be winning, and he knows it, as he goes on to ask Sebastian about another fight. This time they were driving home from a weekend away. They’d agreed to split up but Layla was still breastfeeding, so she’d accompanied Sebastian and Chloe on a weekend trip to the countryside. On the way home they fought and Layla recorded the argument. She claims that she’d just asked him to turn the music down and he erupted in rage; he claims that she’d been trying to wind him up by insulting him, and had pushed him, causing him to swerve out of the lane while driving at 80 miles per hour on the fast lane of the motorway. He doesn’t mention any pushing on the recording itself. Over the course of the argument, the father calls her (with her daughter within enforced earshot in the back seat) a ‘devil worshipper’, a ‘fucking gypsy’, a ‘spiteful vindictive cunt’ and repeats the phrase ‘It’s not for you to think’ five times.
Frost takes him through the argument, and then takes him through another one where he says ‘This is why you get hit’ to Layla. Cross-questioned now, Sebastian again claims again that he was saying this sarcastically, repeating the mother’s words back to her. And he insists that Layla gave as good as she got – that he was the one who needed protecting.
‘It sounds very level playing field,’ Frost observes, clearly enraged. Meanwhile the judge is himself becoming increasingly incensed by Frost, with his obvious hatred of Sebastian.
‘You’re here to cross-examine the witness,’ he reprimands him. ‘Some of your comments are comments I wouldn’t expect of a legal professional. You respond. You enter into conversation. You make comments. Some of them are verging on the sarcastic.’
It’s true. Frost’s contempt for this man goes beyond professional scepticism about his evidence. He cannot bear him. It’s moving to witness this rage in a man fighting on behalf of a victim of domestic abuse, and it brings an unusual degree of openness to the courtroom. We are far from the legal games so often played by barristers. But it’s a high-risk strategy.
Now Frost defends himself by saying that Sebastian and his barrister are attempting to turn this into a mutually toxic relationship, rather than an abusive one, and that he needs to keep drawing attention to this. It’s true. All Frost’s suggestions that Sebastian is engaging in DARVO (which stands for Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender) seem to have gone unheard by previous judges. But this judge makes it clear that he’s inclined to share the father’s barrister’s view.
‘Something was going very wrong in that relationship,’ the Judge says. ‘The way she spoke to him was really problematic, just as the way he spoke to her was really problematic… These aren’t the assertions of a woman who loves him and is blind to his faults. She’s constantly pointing them out – calling him fat and ugly.’ He adds that if Chloe saw any of this, it’s shocking. ‘They have failed as parents’. Poor Chloe had to grow up in this ‘toxic’ relationship and in the meantime the two most important people in her world were busy attacking each other and pointing fingers.
It’s true that both parents are on the attack in court. But aren’t court cases at heart vehicles for two parents to attack each other? And if Layla was indeed hit by Sebastian, then what else should she do now, except point fingers and hope for justice?
They break for lunch and then the father sits in the witness box, waiting for the afternoon to resume, wringing his hands. I have never seen anyone wringing their hands before but this does seem to be what he is doing now. It’s a reminder of quite how intense the pressure is in a hearing like this. He is fighting for his life, as Layla is. He has spent the last few hours trapped in his own threats, tortuously trying to explain language that can only look bad for him. And he’s just had an isolated lunchbreak, because witnesses who are in the middle of their evidence are not allowed to talk about the court case while they’re sworn in. He must be exhausted. And it’s exhausting watching as the afternoon rolls on and Frost questions him about one allegation and then another, and then another day begins and, even now, Frost is still questioning Sebastian. It feels to me, as it must feel to him, that this is going to go on forever: we are all somehow destined to be trapped in a small flat with a shouting man whose most demeaning and most desperate remarks are repeated on an endless loop. Why did Sebastian film Layla at every handover for over a year? Why was he still following his previous ex-wife on Facebook – what did he mean by saying he needed to ‘protect’ his family from her – why is it always him in need of protection? What did he mean by threatening suicide, fantasising about escaping to a little fishing cottage and giving up on his life. ‘When the money runs out, the money runs out, game over. Or, Severn Bridge. Right? That’s it.’
He didn’t really mean it, Sebastian says yet again. But what does he mean by this then, the judge asks. And if he didn’t mean what he said, does he accept that the mother didn’t mean what she said either?
‘The point is that I’m being asked to either make findings or reject findings based on things you said in the recordings. You have literally said, she told me she was going to ruin my life and she has ruined my life. She said to me she was going to fuck my life up and she has fucked my life up.’
Sebastian joins the judge in questioning whether anything either of them have said was true.
‘I struggle with it myself. I don’t know now what was true and what wasn’t. This whole revisionist history. I don’t know if Layla genuinely believes I sexually abused Chloe, for example. I don’t know whether that was something she made up.’
At the heart of this case, it seems there is an existential doubt about the meaning of speech itself. Do we mean what we say? Do we commit ourselves to action when we make a statement of intent? And if we don’t mean what we say in a recorded argument, do we mean what we say in a courtroom, sworn under oath? The stakes are high now, because there has to be truth in language for the whole court process to function.
It’s time for Frost to address the time that Sebastian kept Chloe at his house for three weeks over Christmas when she was a toddler, though the parents were meant to have alternate weeks. Chloe had arrived with a scratch on her ankle, which he claimed she’d said was the result of an altercation with her mother’s new boyfriend. So he went to the GP to investigate the scratch and reported his concerns to social services, saying that Chloe was frightened to go back to Layla’s house. This was the incident that the mother is blamed for seeing as ‘kidnapping’, though she’s justified the term in her evidence. Sebastian had recently emptied the joint bank account, and he had Chloe’s passport, so now when he was out on two separate days when the authorities tried to deliver the newly-acquired non-molestation order, she immediately feared the worst, worrying that he’d taken Chloe abroad. Her fears were excessive, in retrospect, but so were the father’s, and it was him who acted on them, keeping Chloe away from her mother.
There’s a ten-minute recording of a video call between the mother and Chloe, made two weeks into Chloe’s stay with Sebastian, that the mother’s barrister asks to play now. Chloe hadn’t talked to her mother the whole time she was with her father – the longest period she’d ever been separated from her mother. And now she was upset by this first contact between them. Frost presses play and we crane in to hear the little girl in this moment of profound distress – a group of assorted adults, most of whom have never met and will never meet Chloe.
It’s a shock, hearing the screams of the child as they flood the courtroom. This is the pain this court case is somehow meant to mitigate, played out before us desperate and untrammelled.
‘I don’t want to talk to Mummy,’ she screams.
The mother assures the daughter of her love. What else can she do?
‘I love you so much my baby.’
Sebastian props the phone beside her. ‘I’m just going to hold the phone here so you can hear.’ The child continues to scream.
‘I love you so much,’ Layla says again.
‘I don’t want to speak to Mummy,’ Chloe screams.
‘I love you so much, I love you so much,’ Layla said, making a kind of song of it.
‘Daddy’s just going to walk away, and you can talk to Mummy,’ Sebastian says. ‘You can ask Mummy if it’s been snowing there.’
‘I’ll call you later on, at bedtime,’ Layla says, trying to bring the call to the end. But these parents are so caught up in litigation that they’re both anxious to stick to the arrangement. Neither of them hangs up.
‘This is quite upsetting her, she doesn’t want to talk,’ Sebastian says.
‘Ok, I’m going to say bye, I love you.’
‘I don’t want her to say I love you,’ Chloe pleads.
And then, at last, the call is over, and Sebastian pacifies her with play doh. They begin to make a cow together. That evening, we’re told, they tried again, and this time Chloe was so glad to talk to her mother that she went to bed cuddling the phone in her mother’s absence.
The father took from this conversation that Chloe was frightened of her mother. The mother took from it that Chloe was traumatised while in her father’s care – alienated by him against the mother. The judge suggests now that it may be neither. ‘It shows a two and a half year old in absolute meltdown. How can I decide that it isn’t a temper tantrum? By the time she calmed down, she had a lovely chat with her mother.’
It’s true. This is a toddler in a rage. We might call it a temper tantrum. But we might also see it as the desperation of a child passed between parents and missing the mother she now can’t bear to hear say ‘I love you’. It’s surely no accident that it was a tantrum triggered by her mother’s appearance on a screen.
The father’s excuse for taking Chloe to the GP and calling social services is that Chloe seemed to have regressed by the time she arrived with him: she clung to him and wanted to be carried. After Chloe returned home, the mother took her to the GP herself as well, saying that she’d regressed further by the time she arrived with her: she wanted to start breast-feeding again and to be carried. Chloe’s distress and regression may have simply been the result of the life she suddenly found herself in, moving between her parents for a week at a time when she was only two, after months of listening to them fight. This is a child who had no choice but to pick up on their desperation, their uncertainty about where and how they could live and what kind of future they could envisage for their daughter. There’s love for her mother in that conversation, in her desperate denial of her. And there’s love for her father, in her trusting willingness to return to her play-doh at the end. It must be possible for there to be a world where those loves can coexist, but it isn’t the world of that video call and it isn’t the world of this courtroom.
Published on 23rd February 2026.
Lara Feigel’s Custody: The Secret History of Mothers is published by William Collins on 26 Feb. Preorder it here:
https://www.waterstones.com/
See Lara Feigel in conversation with Charlotte Proudman at Hatchards on 17 February
https://www.hatchards.co.uk/