Despite suffering from serious physical, emotional, and financial mistreatment, Katy B did not see herself as a victim of domestic abuse. Her experiences show just how difficult it can be for victim-survivors to rebuild their lives, and how vital the role of employers is in signposting and helping their workforce understand and identify situations of abuse. Trigger warning: this story contains graphic accounts of extreme physical abuse.
Katy B knows she is lucky to be alive. She suffered years of extreme physical and emotional mistreatment at the hands of her perpetrator. Yet to her, her situation was so normalised that she didn’t recognise that she was a victim of domestic abuse.
“It was only when I got away that I thought, ‘wow, how did I put up with this for so long?’ I realised that one of the reasons that some people don’t speak out is because they don’t recognise what is happening to them. Others are afraid of shutting their eyes and jumping over a cliff edge into a new life. Towards the end of my relationship, I knew I had to make a change, but I really didn’t know how,” she says.
Katy met her perpetrator ten years ago. A successful businesswoman, she has over 40 years’ experience as a banking regulator, and then a managing director at one of the largest banks in the world, before going on to launch her own consultancy. A smart, educated, and confident woman, she has travelled and worked all over the world. She would never have imagined herself at risk of domestic abuse.
Her perpetrator was tall, handsome, and charming, and Katy says she fell deeply in love. Friends thought they were the perfect couple. “He put me on a pedestal and swept me off my feet,” she says. Ten months into the relationship, he asked Katy to marry him, and she accepted.
Escalation of Abuse
The abuse began six months after they got married, when, after an argument, her perpetrator attacked Katy for the first time. He picked her up off the floor by her neck, squeezing until she couldn’t breathe, and then threw her out of the house in the middle of the night. Katy was terrified and ran down the gravel drive barefoot and called the police from a neighbour’s home.
She subsequently dropped all charges against him, rationalising that it was a one-off situation, a silly argument that had got out of control. “That was a big mistake. Over the years it got steadily worse. He loved to intimidate me by throwing things around, smashing up televisions, punching holes into the walls and doors and smashing up my phones. I am an absolute expert in setting up iPhones because I had to set up about ten.”
Her perpetrator also isolated her from her loved ones, including her children from a previous marriage. Her daughter was made to leave the family home and move into a caravan. “I was just so distraught. My son didn’t want anything to do with him very quickly. He saw right through him. I had ten years of my children being pushed away from me.”
The economic abuse also increased. “He took huge sums of money out of my business and placed it into accounts held by him and his daughters. He left me to pay off the substantial mortgage on the house and then claimed in court that I had no financial interest in it.”
He also gave Katy’s car to his own daughter without asking her permission and micromanaged her every move – even telling her off if the milk was placed back in the fridge in the wrong place.
The physical assaults continued to escalate. In 2021, he attacked Katy in the car, punching her repeatedly in the face after she tapped his arm during an argument. Her nose was broken, as were the bones in her face. The surgeon who saw photos of her commented that he had only seen such injuries on dead people brought into casualty, and that she would have brain damage for life from the attack.
Katy did not report her abuser however. “I took myself off to bed. I had two days of serious concussion. It was difficult because he always minimised the abuse. The next day I told him he had broken my nose and he said he couldn’t have, because I only had one black eye, not two.”
Despite the assault, the next day Katy put on a big hat, a pair of sunglasses, plastered herself in makeup and actually joined a photoshoot with her daughter and later met up with friends. “People asked about why I had sunglasses on. Some people told me later they noticed the bruises. But nobody asked me at the time if I was okay.”
Katy continued to be in denial about what was happening to her, even when - after her perpetrator had a near fatal heart attack - the abuse increased dramatically. It was only after an attack that left her with two broken ribs and a haematoma to her kidney, as well as a broken bone in her spine and a chipped front tooth after she was waterboarded with a bottle of wine that Katy realised she had to do something. Her abuser had taken away her phone so she would not be able to call for help. Luckily, she had thought to download Facebook Messenger onto her iPad and was able to reach a friend.
Moving Forward
Katy says that she has spent a long time thinking about why she didn’t leave despite the scale of the abuse. By this point, she had spent a decade being emotionally coerced, and physically and financially abused, as well as being gaslit into believing that none of her injuries were that bad.
“I am a real problem solver in my work. I have never walked away from a problem in my life. It had to get to that point where I was half killed before I came to my senses. We all inherently have a fear of risk, the risk of being alone, of losing the lifestyles we have built up, of starting again.”
Her perpetrator was arrested and negotiated a plea bargain, pleading guilty to four counts of actual bodily harm. “It should have been grievous bodily harm but the difference between a low order GBH and a high order LBH was about five months in prison. I was assured that he would not be bailed because four judges had seen the extent of my injuries before and not let him out. But when he pleaded guilty the judge bailed him, so that was a shock.” He and his daughters blame Katy for him being imprisoned and have never asked after her wellbeing. In fact, they harassed her for months after his arrest.
Lessons for Employers
Katy knows her experience can provide some real lessons for employers. Firstly, she doesn’t look like a ‘typical’ victim. “I think employers need to understand the prevalence of domestic abuse. They need to recognise that one in four women and one in seven men are victims. People are papering over the cracks and coming into work every day.”
Katy was working for some of the biggest companies in the world, she points out, yet none of them ever picked up on her situation. She wishes one of those employers had signposted her in the right direction, with posters in the bathrooms or awareness sessions about domestic abuse. “I might have thought, hang on, this is happening to me. I might have found a name for what was happening and labelled it as such, and might have gone to talk to HR. I never even considered going to HR about what I was going through. I think employers need to understand that people are being controlled even when they are at work. We are called every day [by our abusers] to make sure we are there, we can have our lunch money totalled up to make sure we do not have enough to spend it elsewhere.”
She points out that abusers often let their victims work for the financial gain it brings them. As a result though, “work is sometimes the only place you get away from it. It is a sanctuary,” she says.
Last year, Katy was able to spend Christmas with her children for the first time in a decade. Life on her own has been wonderful, and she has never been happier. She wants employers to learn lessons from her experiences. “Make sure your employees know that your company cares, give employees the support and sanctuary they need, and point anyone needing help to expert resources,” she says.