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 One: West London Case
‘I don’t know how many times a woman needs to tell a man no, and to gaslight me, and gaslight the court’
July 2025. A small girl sings along in the car on the way to her holiday club with her mother. Let’s call her Chloe. She’s happy to be going there – looking forward to the drawing and dancing. They park and Chloe takes out her bag with her packed lunch and snacks: sandwiches with the crusts cut off, mini cucumbers, cookies. She says goodbye to her mother: just an ordinary hug – she’ll see her tonight. She has no idea that her life is about to transform.
There’s no warning, no preparation – no chance to pack favourite teddies or blankets or outfits. It’s Chloe’s father, not her mother, who picks her up; a father she hasn’t spent a night with for two years and who has just been found in court to have hit her mother.
He comes, smartly dressed, rushing from the courtroom where her fate has been decided while she danced with her friends. He’s spent over a month waiting for this verdict, over two years waiting for this case to come to a conclusion. We can’t know how he feels about winning: what combination of self-righteousness and sadness and optimism and fear. We can be confident that he’s as pleased to see the little girl as she is to see him – they love each other, after all. And for now his task is to channel all the tumult of the day in court into ordinary jollity as he tells his daughter that there’s been a change of plan. She’s going home with him, to his house in the countryside, taking nothing from her mother’s house. What does he tell her when she asks, as she will ask, that day and in the days that follow, when she’ll next see the mother she’s seen every day for the past two years? He doesn’t know, and it can seem to the mother in the weeks that follow that he and his lawyers are determined to make it as long a gap as possible. It will be five weeks before she sees her mother again, in a strange contact centre, far from either of her homes.
The mother
Sitting through the court case – a fact-finding and final hearing rolled into one on four days in the warmest June on record in England – I see the inexorable logic unfold. I’ve been in enough court hearings to know how it’s likely to go. A mother has accused a father of sexual abuse and no findings have been made. It becomes clear over the days in court that she’s unrepentant – and in the terms of the court system, a lack of contrition is often equated with a lack of insight. Later in the summer she’ll tell me that she’s not the ideal victim the courts can accept. And she’s right. She’s angry and self-righteous; she’s recorded herself shouting, as well as her husband; she’s insulted him, she’s belittled him, and she makes no attempt to hide her contempt for him now. But I am still too far outside the system to accept that all this justifies the removal of a child from a loving mother who no one is finding fault with except in her attitude towards the father. And already, that is what Chloe’s so-called ‘Guardian’ from NYAS is proposing should happen, unless findings of coercive control are made against the father.
The court case is in West London and I attend online initially, so the people in the cramped courtroom are primarily a set of voices for me. It’s the judge I hear first: HHJ O’Donovan. He’s impressively down to earth: brisk in his dismissal of the father’s demand that I shouldn’t have access to the position statements for the hearing. Indeed, he goes further, granting me the documentation from the previous hearings for this case, and I read through it all, trying to understand what’s going on.
These parents – let’s call them Sebastian and Layla – met as teenagers and then connected again a decade later. They had years together before having a child: years when they moved between London and the Middle East, where the mother was from, and together accumulated substantial wealth; years of trying to get pregnant. And then the marriage began to break down soon after the baby was born. The parents were trapped at home together during lockdown and its aftermath. There were fights and reconciliations; as their life became more claustrophobic and more embittered, the mother claims that the fights became increasingly abusive and the father began to hit her. She’s recorded arguments where the father makes what on the face of it can certainly seem admissions of violence. ‘There is nothing wrong with attempting to correct a disobedient wife when you have tried verbally and you have tried in every way possible.’ ‘I’ll break your fucking arm and put you in hospital’. He used racially derogatory terms, calling her a ‘raghead’, ‘gypsy’ and ‘devil worshipper’. She did play her part in the recorded arguments in inciting his rage. ‘You are a shit husband.’ ‘A fucking overweight guy that can’t even quit vaping.’
The court case began a few years ago. Sebastian had moved to the countryside, 60 miles from Layla, and she was applying for Chloe to start full-time nursery and then school locally, seeing her father every weekend and half the holidays. She also wanted permission to go on holiday with Chloe to see her family abroad. Since then it’s escalated, as cases like this so often do. There have been over 30 hearings; the mother has a diagnosis of Complex PTSD, brought on by the court process. It was diagnosed when her whole left hand side seized up and the doctors initially thought she’d had a strike. there have been child arrangements orders and a non-molestation order and then it all came to a climax in a fact finding hearing a year ago with Recorder Searle. The hearing we’re attending today is both an appeal of that fact finding, and a final hearing. In that fact finding, a year ago, Layla was alleging that the father was physically, verbally and sexually abusive throughout the marriage and that he displayed coercive and controlling behaviour; she was also alleging that he had sexually abused their daughter. Sebastian made his own allegations too, claiming that the sexual abuse allegations were malicious and that the mother was attempting to destroy his relationship with Chloe.
Recorder Searle only found evidence for one of the mother’s allegations, the verbal abuse, though even here he mitigated it, saying that the mother was also verbally abusive to the father. Searle found in the father’s favour that the mother had attempted to undermine supervised contact with him. And he found no evidence of physical abuse or coercive control, agreeing with the father’s barrister’s submission that ‘the Mother is a powerful personality, articulate and willing to fight her corner vigorously’ and that a woman who was ‘terrified’ of her husband wouldn’t have gone on holiday with him after they’d agreed to separate. Additionally, he found no evidence of sexual abuse, and went further, stating that she’d coached her daughter to make the allegations, and involved her then partner in the process. Since then this mother has been in a dangerous position, but she’s been granted an appeal on the questions of physical abuse and coercive control, which could turn things around if she’s successful.
The day begins with the mother’s evidence. She’s been criticised in previous judgments for being too confident. ‘She was quite firm, sometimes dogmatic,’ Recorder Browne said two years ago, asked to decide whether the mother was allowed to take her daughter to see her family abroad. He even found evidence of hostility in Layla’s unwillingness to refer to Sebastian by name, calling him ‘Chloe’s father’ or ‘your client’ instead. ‘I saw and heard in this hearing exactly what Recorder Browne saw and heard,’ District Judge Searle reported in his judgment a year later. Judges quote other judges to help future judges keep track, but to an outsider, it can feel as if they are closing in, establishing solidarity.
Much was made then of her insistence that Sebastian ‘kidnapped’ Chloe when he kept her for three and a half weeks over the Christmas holiday as a toddler, though he was meant to return her after a week. ‘In my view that was unnecessarily dramatic,’ Searle quoted Browne as saying. Searle too ‘found the Mother prone to exaggeration, overreaction and embellishment,’ though he also agreed with Searle that ‘the Father is capable of being facetious, despite the heat of the courtroom’ and that he shared a tendency to ‘overreaction.’
The mother’s barrister, Jeremy Frost, is acting for her pro bono, and it will emerge over the next few days how passionately invested he is in this case – so much so that the judge will chastise him for his far from neutral tone. Now he begins by asking her about how she’s encouraged and enabled Chloe to enjoy her times with her father, and Layla explains how she prepares her daughter all week. ‘Let’s keep this to show Daddy on Saturday,’ she’ll say, when Chloe does a drawing or makes something. There have been times when Chloe doesn’t want to go. Contact with him hasn’t been supervised since the last fact finding hearing, but she still doesn’t do overnight stays with him, and it’s a long drive to go there and back in a day, when she’s tired after a week at school. Layla insists that she tries to encourage her nonetheless; she buys nausea bands and sweets to ward off carsickness; she talks about the toys Chloe is looking forward to seeing. Frost is trying to help Layla show that she supports contact because Searle found that ‘the Mother has not supported supervised contact and has done her utmost to undermine it’. This was on the basis of complaints that Layla sent to the contact centre, saying that their reports were biased towards the father because they failed to note that he was late for contact, and complaining that they’d let him take Chloe out in a car shortly after he’d been arrested for suspected abuse. The mother’s claim is that just because she raised these concerns with the centre, it didn’t mean she was telling her daughter that her father was unsafe. Indeed, the fact that almost every report about the contact itself has been positive may be a testament to her helping Chloe look forward to it, even as their collective rhythms became less stable.
Frost asks about Layla’s impressions of the Guardian. Why does she think the court should distrust her recommendation that Chloe should move to her father’s house? Layla says that the Guardian has hardly seen her and Chloe together. This doesn’t surprise me: Guardians recommending a change of residence are rarely very interested in the actual daily parenting the child is currently getting. Layla says that Chloe is doing amazingly at school; she does ballet and kickboxing, and has been moved up in her reading band at every opportunity. She’s staggered that none of this has been recognised in the Guardian’s report. But the point that so many parents understandably find it hard to comprehend is that the mother could be absolutely exemplary in every minute she spends with Chloe, and this would make no difference. If she’s been undermining the relationship with the father, this is seen as a source of harm that in the court’s view tends to make the triumphs of daily life irrelevant.
After lunch, the father’s barrister, Elaine Strachan, takes over. Her task is to undermine the mother’s credibility, and she is helped in this by the previous judgments. The problem for Layla is that she’s made such weighty allegations in the past, and not been believed, and two of Searle’s key findings – on the rape allegation and the sexual abuse allegation – are not open to challenge. Strachan raises these now in an attempt to remind the judge that he can’t trust this witness.
Layla has alleged throughout that Sebastian raped her six weeks after she gave birth to Chloe, the day after her post-partum check. According to her, this rape took place in a context of years of coercion. In the Searle hearing, Layla told the judge that Sebastian used to threaten to tell her father exactly how many men she’d had sex with if she didn’t have sex when and how he wanted. She reported that during their years of struggling with fertility, Sebastian insisted that she couldn’t climax during sex, because he wanted to have a female child and believed the odd 1960s theory that this would make it more likely. After the birth, when she was torn and bleeding, he wanted to begin having sex again, and she attempted to placate him by buying lubricant and investigating post-partum contraception in preparation. She still wasn’t ready actually to try having sex, but she told Searle, as she told the police, that he forced himself on her, only to withdraw before climaxing, professing himself disgusted by her dishevelled genitalia. In the last fact finding hearing, Strachan insisted that Layla’s agreement to buy the lubricant and collaborative texts about contraception were evidence that she was ready to have sex, right then, when he wanted it. And so Searle opined that ‘in my judgment, there is considerable force in Ms Strachan’s submission that the Whatsapp messages…‘demonstrate that M did participate in voluntary sexual activity with F, after the birth’.
This is the kind of bizarre statement that a judge and a barrister can end up making in a custody case, required to assess a case of marital rape without the forensic evidence that would be amassed in a criminal court. It makes shocking reading for me. Simply owning lubricant and contraception apparently vitiates the question of consent; simply consenting to have sex with someone one day apparently prevents them from raping you the next. The problem is in part that in the 191 minute conversation the mother later recorded about their sex life, she engaged in what Searle describes as a ‘highly destructive and deliberate criticism of the Father’s sexual performance’. And it’s true. She did indeed belittle him. ‘I’m with a husband that only wants to wank and not have sex.’ ‘You’re so fucking lazy. You just want me to get on top and tell you a dirty story. I’m done.’ Rightly or wrongly, a woman who says these things is not a woman the courts can see easily as a victim.
Strachan’s strongest weapon in this hearing is going to be the allegations of sexual abuse. Over the course of several months when Chloe was a toddler, the mother recorded conversations where Chloe told her about her father massaging, tickling and touching her inappropriately. Chloe also reported that they wash each other’s genitals in the shower. There were 14 such conversations. In them, the mother tells her daughter about privacy and about how she shouldn’t let anyone touch her vagina, even if they’re part of her family. Chloe begs the mother to touch her and the mother refuses; the refusal is accepted and the conversation meanders on its way.
It’s hard to know what to make of these conversations. Many of us have known toddlers who love to talk about bottoms. Chloe talks about pooing on her own head as well as her father’s; she’s fascinated by breasts, by stomachs, by where babies are made and how they emerge. She likes running around naked, and is allowed to do this at her father’s house but not her mother’s. According to the father, this was a phase when Chloe frequently wanted to talk about and touch genitalia. ‘She asked if she could hold my penis whilst I was peeing in the Tesco toilets… Even at the contact centre she refuses to pull up her panties and says look at my bum bum,’ he said in the Searle hearing.
The mother knew all this, but she was terrified by her daughter asking to be touched inappropriately. And Chloe had recently become clingy and regressive, asking to breastfeed again and to be carried, so Layla’s own therapist had already made a referral to social services suggesting something was wrong. Layla says that she felt she had to go to the police to protect her daughter. Indeed, she worried that if she failed to report what Chloe had said, she’d be failing in her duty of care
The police dropped the case, because Chloe hadn’t disclosed anything in their direct interviews with her, ‘I can understand that you are disappointed and it is one of the most frustrating things about my job but unfortunately the evidential threshold for a criminal charge is really high,’ the police wrote, suggesting that Layla should keep a diary to keep track of ‘any further things Chloe may say to you.’ At this point Layla’s questions on the recordings became more insistent. ‘I want to know about this showering situation.’ ‘You know you can tell me anything and everything, right?’ ‘Do you want to tell me why you said you showed your bum-bum to daddy every day?’
All this becomes the focus of the cross-questioning of the mother. If the father’s barrister can convince the court that the mother has fabricated evidence to make the father seem heinous, it will be hard for a judge to see her as a fit parent for her daughter. Part of the problem for Layla is that she had texted her boyfriend, Aran, a couple of months before she made her first recording, saying that Chloe had asked to touch her inappropriately. He forwarded this message back to her when her therapist first raised concerns about Chloe’s signs of regression. It was a day later that the first recording with Chloe was made – after her first, apparently spontaneous disclosure. Sebastian’s lawyers have suggested that this is more than a coincidence and the spontaneity was contrived. Searle found it likely that Layla was colluding with Aran to frame Sebastian and had asked Chloe leading questions about how her father touched her before making the recording. Layla made her own case worse by denying that Aran was a boyfriend, saying he was just a running partner and friend. She wasn’t actually lying – by the time that she was raising these concerns, he had indeed gone back from being a boyfriend to being a running partner and friend – but it made her evidence seem more suspect. And so Searle came to the ‘firm conclusion that the Mother has prompted and influenced Chloe. She has been tenacious and determined in her attempts to build a case against the Father, in my judgment.’
What should we make of all this? It makes sense that the police didn’t feel they had enough evidence to prosecute Sebastian. We have to hope – as is entirely plausible – that Sebastian was an innocent father, whose daughter just happened to be going through a phase of wanting to talk about and touch genitalia. But surely it’s just as reasonable to hope that Layla was an innocent mother who responded to her daughter’s requests for inappropriate touching with fears that turned out to be unfounded. One of the most frightening aspects of divorce and shared custody is that we suddenly have no idea what our child is doing when they are in the other home. This is a source of anxiety for so many parents, and Layla surely isn’t the only one to forget how suggestible children can be, or how random they can be in the things they say. She was frightened of the father: quite how much cause she had for this fear will become clear in the days that follow. Was she misguided or malevolent when she acted on these fears? This is the question that is going to exercise the judge. In the meantime Sebastian’s lawyer focuses on getting her to say that she doesn’t agree with Searle’s judgment on this. If Layla still thinks that Sebastian is a sexual predator, it could make it risky to leave Chloe with her, in case she exaggerates (or, in Strachan’s argument, incites) subsequent mentions of inappropriate touch.
‘Do you still believe that he abused Chloe?’ the barrister asks.
‘I don’t believe that my daughter has lied,’ the mother responds.
Strachan asks her about the father’s alleged physical violence towards Layla, suggesting that her behaviour doesn’t make sense if he was physically abusing her. Why did she continue to live with him, to go on holiday with him, to send him text messages from her bedroom asking him to come to bed, rather than sleeping on the sofa? Why did she issue him with the divorce petition in the evening at home, if she was as scared of him as she claims?
‘Not everything that a victim of domestic abuse does makes sense on the outside,’ Layla says, adding simply that she presented him with the petition because she wanted him to move out. He’d said that he was going to move out months earlier, and hadn’t done so, and now she wanted to create a legal reality that impelled him to go.
‘I don’t know how many times a woman needs to tell a man no, and to gaslight me, and gaslight the court,’ she says.
The judge intervenes.
‘This is not an opportunity for you to repeat again and again your version. I know what your case is,’ he admonishes.
She’s crying now. He’s right; she’s not answering all the questions directly. But judgment after judgment has seemed to leave out her point of view. It’s always seemed simple to her: the relationship broke down; she asked him to leave; he promised to leave, but didn’t leave. Yet Searle concluded that she was vacillating as much as he was, so she feels compelled to make her case yet again.
There is a script in custody cases that parents are required to follow. Unless serious, ongoing domestic abuse is proved, parents need to see the other parent as a force for good in their children’s lives. Otherwise, they will risk alienating their children from the other parent and causing emotional harm. In both this and the previous fact finding hearing, Layla seems to have been sure that she doesn’t have to follow the script because she has evidence of Sebastian abusing her. And so in the Searle hearing she said that Sebastian was capable of killing her. ‘A little accident… He knows what to do.’ And she said that Chloe should be kept away from him. ‘He is not a safe parent to be in her life… he is a hundred percent detrimental to Chloe.’
Now between them, the father’s barrister and the judge press her on these points.
‘Do you think he’s capable of killing you?’ the judge asks.
‘Yes I do,’ she responds. ‘I think he’s capable of doing anything… My life is at risk and so is Chloe’s.’
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/
Posted 10th February 2025