Dear Judge M,
It’s been four months now since that summer day when I came to your courtroom for the sentencing hearing and to read out my victim impact statement. I play that day over and over in the reel of my mind. Backwards and forwards, and forwards and backwards like a recording that I can’t stop watching. That day has stayed with me and now lives with me and has become a part of me.
You cleared the public gallery and the dock so I could enter the court without him watching. But still my hands and teeth were clenched, my pulse was racing and my throat constricting as I walked through the back of the court, past the empty dock, past his counsel, past the empty seat where two moments before his wife had sat. And then I was in the witness box standing as tall as I could through all my trembling. And while I was standing there with my heart thumping and the sheets of my statement quivering a shield of screens was put up around me to keep me safe from hostile eyes.
I started to read in the pin-drop silence of the now full court. My voice catching once, twice and then staying strong until the end. I could see his barristers all hunched shoulders and dismissive airs looking down, looking away, caught in something intensely interesting on their laptops. I could hear the prisoner in the dock mumble and shuffle in his seat. I could feel the caught breaths of his supporters. I could feel their hostile eyes boring holes at me through the screens. But throughout I saw you looking back at me, not once flinching, and not once turning away despite showing you the horror of my wounds. You held my eyes and looked back steady, encouraging, listening.
You listened. You judged. And then you sentenced.
Fifteen and a half years. Imprisonment.
As those words filled the air and entered my new life, the shackles that I had always worn started to fall away from me and the bars of my prison started to lift. That day you judged not just his crimes but also my worth.
All these years my parents, my family and the prisoner had told me, with voices louder than mine, that nothing happened, nothing much, a small thing maybe but I was overreacting. And in the speaking of those words, my reality became twisted into a thousand tiny tourniquets. That distortion grew and grew inside me with tangled knots splintering off finding their way into every part of my being. Until all of me was infected and I had a sepsis of the soul.
But in that moment of sentencing my external and internal worlds aligned and my grotesquely distorted reality snapped into place like a dislocation released. The healing and answers that I had been searching for in the faces of a thousand different therapists, and never found, I found inside that court in that moment. I found my freedom in those fifteen and a half years, and I left that courtroom a free woman.
It’s been four months since that day. I am awake now having lived my whole life in a nightmare and I can feel the sun on my face.
Yours gratefully,
An anonymous victim