HE ALMOST KILLED ME… THEN WALKED FREE

LISA WADE feared she would die when she was brutally throttled during sex – yet when she reported the assault, her attacker claimed it had been consensual. Shockingly, this defence is increasingly being used to get away with sexual violence, discovers Ann

hen Lisa Wade allowed a man she’d known for four years into her flat late one night in April 2016, she could never have imagined that within minutes, she’d be fighting for her life.

This man was a friend and, at the end of drunken nights out, an on-off sexual partner – a ‘friend with benefits’. Since he didn’t live too far from her flat, they’d recently fallen into a bit of a pattern – if he was out late, he would text and ask if he could stay over. Lisa usually said yes.

On this night, he did the same. When he arrived, he was drunk – Lisa had only had one glass of wine with her dinner. She was wearing just a dressing gown. Still, she had no reason to feel vulnerable. ‘There was nothing to tell me that he was in a bad mood or that anything different would happen,’ says Lisa, who is now 30, an NHS manager and freelance writer.

‘The moment I shut the door of the flat, he hit me. I was stunned – he must have seen by my reaction that I wasn’t expecting it. I sort of stumbled away from him towards my bedroom and he hit me again. And that’s when the strangulation happened.’

This man was big. ‘He would have been one and a half times, maybe twice my weight,’ says Lisa. ‘My first instinct was to fumble for my phone to call for help but he knocked it out of my hand. I fell against the wall, I knocked my bedside lamp over. I put up a hell of a fight initially.’

The strangulation was prolonged. ‘It wasn’t just one period of strangulation,’ she says. ‘He was choking me with one hand, then I’d resist, he’d release then pull my head back and grab my throat again.’ (The next day, when the bedroom had become a crime scene, police noted the clumps of hair.) ‘I wasn’t screaming, I was wheezing,’ she says, ‘and the last time he did it, when I nearly passed out, I could feel the room disappearing around me. It was a blurring. I can just remember this feeling that I was possibly going to die, like the fire was going out of me. It’s really weird to describe but there was this feeling of calm, this peaceful acceptance.’

Then suddenly, her attacker let go of her and began to laugh. ‘Don’t you know

I’ve done that before?’ he taunted. ‘Don’t you trust me to know what I’m doing?’ Once in the past he had put his hands to her throat during sex and she froze in horror, telling him to remove them immediately – which he did. Other than that there had been no ‘rough sex’.

The recent case of Sophie Moss, 32, from Darlington has put ‘rough sex’ in the news again. In September, her killer, Sam Pybus, received a four-year, eight-month sentence for manslaughter, after claiming that Sophie died by accident during consensual sex, and that Sophie ‘encouraged’ him to apply pressure to her neck. After a public outcry over the lenient sentence, the case has now been referred to the Court of Appeal.

While there are no thorough records kept on the ‘rough sex defence’ and how often it has been used in court, the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This has tried to keep count. According to their records, there has been a tenfold increase between 1996 and 2016. Out of 60 homicides where men used the ‘rough sex’ defence after killing women, 45 per cent resulted in the lesser charge of