Saskia Vandoorne

And for Amanda.

She had text messages from him where he apologized for what he had done the night before.

With that, she was able to bring charges against him.

But when I met Amanda, she was still living in the home where the abuse had happened.

Amanda couldn't sleep in the bed because for her it was now become the scene of the crime.

And she would sleep every night on the sofa.

And that also, the bedroom becomes something that, you know, that's where we go to rest.

That's where we go to, it's a restorative place.

But it becomes this dark, scary, terrifying place for these survivors.

And Amanda spoke to that, I thought, very eloquently in the piece.

And with Zoe, she talks about a disassociation and how long it took for her body to recover.

Because in a way, the body knew, but the mind didn't.

And it took Zoe a long time to be able to bring those two back together.

Another survivor we speak to in the piece, Valentina, not her real name, she talks about when she saw the videos,

feeling like she was a protagonist in a film that, in a horror film, but because she has no recollection of it, no memory of it, it feels as if it almost didn't happen to her.

So I think that's also a very difficult journey for the survivors is to be able to reconcile the mind and the body.

You know, the body keeps the score, the body knows the abuse that it's been through, but it is...

what makes this crime so particularly cruel is the memory loss also associated with it, that you start second guessing yourself because you, in Zoe's words, you know, how could she trust a man?

How could she build an entire life with a man who was able to do this to her?

And I think because you then, you find it hard to trust yourself because you don't remember.