[Ammi]

Four women, all survivors of the same dangerous man, join forces to end their nightmare and bring him to justice.

Jenni, Natalie, Shannon and Robyn waive their anonymity to tell their story in chilling detail, laying bare the confusion, intricacies and frightening realities of coercive control, and revealing how they became trapped by serial predator and sex abuser Aaron Swan.

Moving back and forth in time, this documentary unpicks how Swan got away with his crimes for so long, despite twice being placed on the sex offenders register. Telling their story in their own words, the women reveal how Swan’s later victims finally found a way to put him behind bars with the help of his first wife, who had been denied her own justice decades before.

Youtube video

…I just watched this, a very powerful documentary of a hideous abuser/rapist/manipulator but justice at last for his victims and by the bravery of his victims in taking back the control he’d forced on them…

The abuse took place over more than 20 years. Of the many victims, four courageously talk about their experiences for this documentary. One of them is Natalie Collins, a Christian gender-justice campaigner (Interview, 18 January 2019). Her direct experiences of abuse at the hands of Swan led her to found the Own My Life Course, which helps women to liberate themselves from male violence and control, and to live lives free from abuse. Ms Collins’s part in the story is redemptive; for it was through this transformative course that she encountered Robyn, another of Swan’s victims.

Like all abusers, Swan was an arch-manipulator with a recognisable pattern of behaviour: the targeting of vulnerable teenage girls, which was followed by love-bombing, their gradual isolation from family and friends, increasingly degrading treatment, coercion and control, and sexual violence. Another tactic of abusers is to tarnish the reputations of former partners by painting them as unstable and, therefore, unbelievable. By supporting one another and shunning the narrative that Swan had spun about each of them, the women were able to challenge him collectively. “That’s how we break his power over us: by being together.”

It is harrowing viewing, and includes details that are difficult to listen to; but there is also redemptive beauty in this search for truth and justice through the power of sisterhood.