A British woman who developed 2,500 different personalities to cope with being repeatedly raped by her 'depraved' father has successfully sued him for $840,000.
British Woman Abused By 'Monstrous' Father From The Age Of 4, Develops 2500 Personalities To Cope
By
Zainab Pervez in
Crime
On 20th May 2022
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Warning: Sensitive Information Ahead
The woman who developed some 2500 personalities to survive her father's sexual abuse from the age of four clapped her hands to her face with joy as the elderly man was sentenced to 45 years. She has successfully sued him for $840,000.
Jeni Haynes, 52, who is from County Durham but now lives in Australia, was abused from the age of four to 11 by her father Richard Haynes and has dissociative identity disorder as a result. The condition is a rare psychological disorder, in which multiple personalities with distinct memories and behaviour patterns exist in one individual.
After she reported his crimes to police in 2009, Haynes was extradited to Sydney from the UK in 2017, and jailed in 2019 for at least 33 years after admitting the abuse. The judge ruled Jeni's life had been 'destroyed' by the abuse, which took place between 1974 and 1981, with the victim taking the 'drastic step of removal of her anus and colon so that she does not have to defecate through the passages the defendant invaded, tortured and injured.'
The Haynes family moved from Bexleyheath in London to Australia in 1974. Jeni was four years old, but her father had already begun his abuse, and in Sydney this escalated into sadistic, near-daily violations. It ended in 1981, when they moved back to England. For seven years, she would be subjected to the most unspeakable abuse - which she said she only survived because of her other personalities.
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"My dad's abuse was calculated and it was planned. It was deliberate and he enjoyed every minute of it," Jeni told the court in a victim impact statement in May. She waived her anonymity rights, as a victim of abuse, so her father could be identified.
"He heard me beg him to stop, he heard me cry, he saw the pain and terror he was inflicting upon me, he saw the blood and the physical damage he caused. And the next day he chose to do it all again."
Haynes also brainwashed his daughter into thinking he could read her mind, she said. He threatened to kill her mother, brother and sister if she even thought about the abuse, let alone told them.
"My inner life was invaded by Dad. I couldn't even feel safe in my own head," Jeni said. "I could no longer examine what was happening to me and draw my own conclusions."
Jeni, who now lives in Queensland, first created a girl called Symphony when she was four - and this was the personality she would take on when she was raped.
Jeni previously said: 'Jeni was born and my father started to abuse her. An alter was created who came to take dad's abuse so Jenny didn't have to.'
She said the other egos came along after the abuse became too difficult for 'Symphony' to deal with. Among her other personalities are a young boy, Little Ricky and a teenager named Muscles.
She composed her thoughts through song lyrics, to try to hide them:
"He ain't heavy/he's my brother" - when worrying about her siblings.
"Do you really want to hurt me/ Do you really want to make me cry" - when thinking about her ordeal.
Her father restricted her social activities at school to minimise other adult oversight. Jeni learnt to keep herself small and silent, because if she were to be "seen" - such as when her swimming coach approached her father to encourage her natural talent - she would be punished.
Jeni was also denied medical care for her injuries from beatings and sexual abuse, which have developed into serious lifelong conditions. Now aged 52, Jeni has irreparable damage to her eyesight, jaw, bowel, anus and coccyx. These have required extensive surgeries including a colostomy operation in 2011.
Haynes' depraved rituals have made her fear birthdays, relationships, men, bathrooms and even enjoying food. He told her in one occasion: 'This hurts me more than it hurts you.'
He told her that her mother would 'spontaneously combust' if she ever revealed the abuse. 'Mummy doesn't want you and if you tell her, she will die and it will be your fault,' he said another time.
She later recalled: 'He implied she would drop down dead. He expanded my concept of 'telling' to include any kind of demonstration of pain, fear, terror or discomfort.'
She told the court in 2019: 'My dad stole my glasses off my face every time he wanted to abuse me. He took away my eyes and held them hostage. Whenever I cannot see or my vision is impaired, I panic and am plunged into flashbacks.'
Jeni said she would never understand what a normal father-daughter relationship should look like or experience the joy of having a baby - and she'd probably always be alone. Meanwhile she also revealed she never realised having multiple voices inside her head was considered abnormal.
'I didn't know that you're only supposed to have one personality,' she said.
Contemporary Australian experts refer to Jeni's condition as Dissociative Identity Disorder, and say it is heavily linked to experiences of extreme abuse against a child in what is supposed to be a safe environment. "DID really is a survival strategy,"
"It serves as a very sophisticated coping strategy that is widely regarded as extreme. But you have to remember, it's the response to extreme abuse and trauma the child has undergone." The earlier the trauma and the more extreme the abuse, the more likely it is that a child has to rely on disassociation to cope, leading to these "multiple self-states".
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The first personality Jeni says she developed was Symphony, the four-year-old girl who, she says, exists in her own time reality. "She suffered every minute of Dad's abuse and when he abused me, his daughter Jeni, he was actually abusing Symphony," Jeni told.
As the years went on, Symphony created other personalities herself to endure the abuse. Each one of what would be hundreds and hundreds of personalities had a particular role in containing an element of the abuse, whether it was a particularly horrifying assault, or a triggering sight and smell.
Some of her other personalities are:
- Muscles - a teenager styled like Billy Idol. He is tall and wears clothes which show off his strong arms. He's calm and protective.
- Volcano is very tall and strong, and clad from top to toe in black leather. He has bleached blond hair.
- Ricky is only eight but wears an old grey suit. His hair is short and bright red.
- Judas is short with red hair. He wears plain grey school trousers and a bright green jumper. He always looks like he's about to speak.
- Linda/Maggot is tall and slender, wearing a 1950s skirt with pink poodle appliqués. Her hair is in an elegant bun and she has tapered eyebrows.
- Rick wears huge glasses - the same sort Richard Haynes used to wear. They dwarf his face.
The family moved back to the UK in 1984, and the abuse ended. Jeni gave police a 900,000 word statement recounting her abuse when she first reported it in 2009. It took a lengthy period for police to compile evidence against him. Haynes was extradited from the United Kingdom in February 2017 to face a judge-only trial. He had been living among Jeni's extended family, to whom he cast his daughter as a liar and manipulator.
The charges were so serious it was feared a jury could be left psychologically traumatised. The case was one of the worst cases of child sex abuse ever documented in Australia. At the time, Jeni said: 'I want him to go to jail for a very, very, very long time and I hope his time in prison is as traumatic as my childhood was.'
As a child victim of sex abuse, she was given the chance to remain anonymous during court proceedings. But if she did so her father would also have remained anonymous, so she made the brave choice to take the story public.
Jeni said she wanted her father to face her in court because he'd previously thought of her as 'not real'. She explained: 'I am a blow-up doll... and today he had to face the blow-up doll and I hope he enjoyed every minute of it. She said she wanted her father to go to jail with 'everyone knowing what he did'. As they prepared for trial, Jeni agreed with her legal team how she would present her personalities during her testimony.
When she was asked a question, the character who knew the answer would 'come out and say it.' During the trial in 2019, some of Jenis' other personalities were allowed to give evidence against her father. Throughout her testimony her father smirked as she told how she had been tortured for seven years inside an inner-west home. Jeni referred to the accused as 'Daddy', her mother as 'Mummy' and her pet dog as 'Doggy' in court.
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Though her terms were child-like, she was able to describe her allegations in fine details. She claimed her father threatened to hurt her mother, sister and pets if she made noises, saying she was 'scared people would die'.
During an emotional testimony at Downing Centre District Court, she said she has waited decades to 'smack' her father in the mouth over his monstrous sexual abuse and she assumed 33 of her personalities to do so. She looked across at her father - who smirked and stared down in the dock for the hearing - and declared: 'Scum.'
Jeni said her father made her feel valueless and less than human.
'All the other alters... have done their job so well and kept Jenny alive', she said. 'When Dad nearly killed us physically, Symphony removed the alter who was almost dead and replaced them with a fresh alter to keep going'.
Shortly after the court heard from Symphony, her father switched his plea from not guilty and admitted to 25 charges. She believes this is because he did not want the world to hear her full testimony, to hear what he had done to her.
She said: ''Symphony' intended to testify in court for the whole thing. When my father raped Jennifer Haynes he raped 'Symphony'. 'He pleaded guilty because he was scared to death of hearing 'Symphony' testify about everything he did to her.'
The judge said no sentence could possibly measure up to the 'depraved and abhorrent' offending that Haynes was yet to explain. Describing the child abuse among the worst to come before the court, Judge Sarah Huggett noted the physical harm was often accompanied with 'significant gratuitous cruelty', including extreme psychological manipulation.
'Given the brutality and violence meted out, it is unsurprising that Jennifer believed what her father said ... and many years passed before she found the courage to report (it),' she said.
After a years long battle for justice, Judge Sarah Huggett sentenced him to 45 years with a non-parole period of 33 years, meaning Haynes can't be released until he is 104. He showed no emotion as he was sentenced.
At the time, she told 60 Minutes: 'Every one of my alters, every person inside, the war is over, we won. Stand down. We're free! We're free, we're finally, finally free.'
'When she [the judge] said 45 years I didn't know where to look, I didn't know what to say,' Jeni said. She spoke of how the sentencing caused the army of multiple personalities she had constructed rejoice in unison.
'The sounds in my head - it was like everybody spoke all at once - everybody inside was just screaming with joy,' she said.
Yesterday, she was award $840,000 (£478,504), with the judge calling Richard 'a depraved monster.'
After Jeni began her civil lawsuit, her lawyers obtained interlocutory freezing orders on the sale of a UK property her father owned in Darlington in County Durham. Although he was served with the court papers, Haynes played no part in the proceedings. Jeni sued through a 'tutor' because of her disorder.
She has spent her life studying, getting a masters and PhD in legal studies and philosophy but she has struggled to manage full-time work. She lives with her mother, both of them reliant on their welfare pensions to get by.
In Jeni's victim impact statement, she said she and her personalities "spend our lives being wary, constantly on guard. We have to hide our multiplicity and strive for a consistency in behaviour, attitude, conversation and beliefs which is often impossible. Having 2,500 different voices, opinions and attitudes is extremely hard to manage. I should not have to live like this. Make no mistake, my dad caused my Multiple Personality Disorder."
Jeni sat metres away from her father in court on to see him sentenced to 45 years. Haynes, who is suffering from poor health, will serve at least 33 years before he is eligible for parole.
Sentencing Judge Sarah Huggett said he would likely die in jail. His crimes were "profoundly disturbing and perverted" and "completely abhorrent and appalling", she said. Judge Huggett said it was "impossible" for the sentence to reflect the gravity of the harm.