When Carol Anne Burger called Boynton Beach police just before 1 p.m. October 23, 2008, she sounded panicked.
"I... I don't know if this is an emergency, but it could be," she told the 911 operator. Carol was breathing heavily. "My girlfriend didn't come home last night." She immediately rephrased her statement: "my roommate."
Carol stammered on: "And... um... I... you know, that's very unusual — she went to the gym... about 8:30, 9, or something, and she didn't come home. I woke up this morning, and she wasn't here. And I just got a call now from a woman at Gateway Boulevard, Pyramid Books, said somebody turned in her wallet and her car keys." Carol's heels clicked rhythmically in the background as she paced around the house. "I don't know where she is!"
The operator asked for her address, and Carol gave it, but she sounded hesitant, as though she wasn't quite prepared for the reality of investigators showing up at the house. "Now... you know... I don't know what what's... that's not... that's —"
"Hold on, ma'am," the operator interrupted. "I have to ask you some questions."
Carol said she wasn't sure about her roommate's age. She said she drove a gray BMW but didn't know the license plate. The cadence of her clicking heels picked up.
"I'll send someone over to meet with you," the operator told her.
"Oh," Carol said. "I can't — I'm supposed to be at the unemployment office." Then she relented: "I guess I'll call them."
Officer Evelyn McCoy arrived at the pink and yellow house on Churchill Drive minutes later. Carol, 57, was wearing makeup, a pantsuit, and three-inch heels. She repeated her story to McCoy: Her ex-girlfriend — they were separated but still living together — had left for the L.A. Fitness on Congress Avenue around 9 the night before and hadn't been home since. Carol said that she'd tried calling to ask her to bring home milk but that the call had gone straight to voice mail.
"I don't know where she could be," Carol told the officer. "This is so unusual." McCoy looked around briefly and saw no signs of a struggle.
The Boynton Beach Police Department issued a missing-persons alert by 4 p.m., just in time for the evening news. The story aired on every local TV channel that night and was on the front page of every daily newspaper the next morning.
Jessica Kalish was a gregarious software executive who used to host AlterNet, a gay and lesbian radio talk show in Miami. Her wife, Carol, was a writer covering the presidential election for huffingtonpost.com. To outsiders, it seemed they were the embodiment of contemporary domestic bliss: two smart, professional women living in an immaculate house replete with screened-in pool, a cabana bathroom, and plenty of room for their two adopted racing greyhounds. Soon, though, all of South Florida learned the unsettling truth.
Just after 11 that night, a woman driving on Congress Avenue spotted Jessica's BMW sedan between two Dumpsters, around the block from a police substation. The driver's-side window was smashed. There were splatters of blood on the left side of the car. On the back tire. On the undercarriage. There was more blood — and hair the color of Jessica's — along the rear bumper. At the edge of the trunk. On the upholstery of both front seats.
And there, on the floorboard, stuffed headfirst beneath the back of the driver's seat, her legs bent awkwardly across the back seat, was the body of 56-year-old Jessica Kalish.
Lead detective Alfredo Martinez arrived within 20 minutes of the discovery. He knew immediately that this was no indiscriminate robbery or random act of violence. "When I looked in the back seat, at first glance, you could automatically see that this was an emotionally driven crime," Martinez would recall. "Somebody was in a rage."

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Jessica spoke four languages, had a black belt in karate, and prided herself on being a tough, strong woman. She was tall and lean, with short, dark hair and eyes like tiny flames. She liked fine single-malt Scotch, expensive cigars, and smart, passionate women. She grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Queens, in a traditional Jewish home with both parents and a younger sister, Sibyl. As a child, Jessica would disassemble kitchen appliances and put them back together. She had an intense fascination, her family would later say, with the way the world fit together. She knew very young that she liked women, and at 17, she left her parents' house in Forest Hills to live a bohemian life in Greenwich Village.
"It was the 1960s, and Jessica epitomized the new kind of fearless lesbian," Sibyl Kalish remembers. "She wasn't really butch, and she wasn't a fem. Jessica always defied any label anyone wanted to put on her, but everyone around her fell in love with her energy and her desire to get the most out of every moment in life."
Jessica earned a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was one of the first women enrolled in the esteemed engineering department. To pay the bills, she lied about her age and began working as a bartender in a lesbian bar and driving a taxi at night.
Late one evening in the early '70s (friends disagree on the exact year), a group of women flagged down Jessica's cab and dumped a very drunk, petite, fiery woman in the back seat with instructions to take her home. Jessica liked the woman — Carol Anne Burger — and the two became friends. In time, however, life carried each in a separate direction. Carol moved to Hawaii and became a scuba instructor. Jessica moved to Miami, where she worked at a series of tech companies and began hosting her show.
In 1998, Jessica took out a classified ad in a local GLBT newspaper. She was particularly intrigued by the clever response of a diving instructor named Carol living in Boca Raton. When the two met, they realized they'd dated 20 years earlier.
Carol was another well-read, worldly woman from New York. She was smaller, with a wild blond mane and a smile that lodged in the memories of the people she met. Like Jessica, Carol was verbose and passionate about politics. She quoted Shakespeare and liked fine dining, obscure trivia, and relaxing with her greyhound, Cleo, in front of the TV, where she'd watch her favorite show, CSI. Growing up, she'd been a tomboy and a bit of a wild child. She attended the original Woodstock. (On the 25th anniversary of the festival, she bragged to a Palm Beach Post reporter: "I did inhale.") In her 20s, she worked as a photographer as well as a scuba instructor, bouncing between New York and Hawaii before moving to Florida in the late '80s. She worked at the now-defunct Delray Beach Times and Twin Cities News in Pompano Beach before landing a job writing for Credit Union Times, where she won awards for her coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
She told friends that most of her family had shunned her because of her sexual orientation. (Her family says it was actually Carol who cut communications, saying their conservative beliefs were too frustrating to deal with.) Her closest friends recall a gentle, sensitive woman. "If Carol found a cricket in the house," friend Helen Gale remembers, "she would gently scoop him up and take him outside and let him go. Sometimes she got upset if she thought she hurt an animal."
Carol appreciated the secure feeling she had around Jessica, and Jessica liked Carol's free spirit and tenderness. Soon they were spending every free moment together. One night when Jessica was away on business, they talked to each other on the phone until the sun came up. They decided to buy a house together in 2000, on Churchill Drive, in a quiet, diverse subdivision on the east side of Boynton Beach. The couple made quick friends. Neighborhood children came over to watch movies and play with the peaceful greyhounds. On hot days, Jess and Carol would pass out old-timey glass bottles of Coke.
When they noticed conservative bumper stickers on a new neighbor's car, the women baked a welcoming cake and brought it over to announce — in front of the children — "We're gay!" As a couple, they were ardent, vociferous participants in the political process. "If there was a rally anywhere around here," a neighbor recalls, "they were the first two there, with signs." After George W. Bush moved troops into Iraq in 2003, Jessica and Carol started flying their American flag upside down.
Jessica was the moneymaker, always suave, always the first with a sharp, witty joke. Carol was the dreamer, at home in the vastness of water, a freelance writer — and also financially dependent upon Jessica. Money eventually became a contentious issue for the seemingly happy couple.
Another point of tension: Jessica's family didn't like Carol. Early in the relationship, while they were staying with Jessica's parents in New York, Jessica's mom caught Carol smoking pot. On another trip, as the couple said goodbye to Jessica's family at LaGuardia Airport, Carol realized she'd forgotten her laptop and began shrieking at Jessica. "She threw a childish tantrum," Sibyl says. "She made an awful, embarrassing scene in the middle of the airport. Even security wanted to know what the problem was."
Other people witnessed Carol's tantrums too. One morning, as a lawn service was cutting down a neighbor's branches with a chain saw, Carol bolted out of her house, phone in hand, screaming at the startled landscapers. "It was 11 a.m. on a weekday," the neighbor remembers. "I kept telling her, 'You're out of line here, Carol. You're out of control right now.' But you could tell by the look in her eye at the time, there's no way to describe it other than just pure 'crazy.' "
A few days later, Jessica apologized for Carol's behavior.

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Despite their growing problems, the couple couldn't resist the chance to make a political statement. In 2005, not long after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in that state, Carol and Jessica flew up for a ceremony of their own. The reception party, paid for by Jessica's parents, was held in Connecticut.
By then, though, friends noticed the couple fighting more frequently. At a party just after the wedding, the women had to excuse themselves for the duration of dinner to go to another room and argue.
Near the end of 2007, Carol and Jessica began telling friends they were separated but still sharing the house until they could sell it. Carol slept in the guest room, and the two would go days without speaking to each other. She told friends that she and Jessica wanted to divide their property and go separate ways, but neither woman trusted the other enough to sell the house and split the money fairly. And a traditional divorce wasn't an option: Since their marriage wasn't recognized in Florida, they couldn't get a divorce here; and since they didn't live in Massachusetts, they couldn't get a divorce there.
Then Carol lost her job at the Credit Union Times. She applied for — and started receiving — unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, Jessica bought a BMW and began seeing another woman, a feminist writer living in Massachusetts named Wendy Hunter Roberts.
"Carol would get so sad," Helen Gale recalls. "She said [Jessica] had become cold and cruel to her." Carol told friends that Jessica said she'd never loved her, that she didn't know how she'd ever been attracted to Carol. She complained that Jessica would spend hours on web-cam dates with her new girlfriend, intentionally speaking loud enough for Carol to hear.
In June 2008, Carol wrote out a suicide note, but she couldn't follow through with the act.
"Jess didn't even say Happy Birthday to me this morning," Carol wrote in an email to Helen later that month. "What a putz. [It's] hard to reconcile the person I loved so much with the person I see before me now."
Helen was a close confidant of Carol's in the year before Jessica's murder; Helen too was ending a long relationship, and the two women connected over the shared experience. Carol stayed with Helen in California for two months in early 2008. Helen often came to Delray Beach to see her mother and also visit Carol. They emailed daily.
The correspondence reveals, in Carol, a torn, complex woman. She was at times optimistic, hoping to sell the house, travel, and put this part of her life behind her. Other times, she sounded jaded: "Frankly, I just don't have much faith in living in America in the next coming years," she wrote at one point. She was still devastated by the death of her mother a few years earlier. She was worried about losing the money she had tied up in the house and felt alone and abandoned. But she never hesitated to extend warmth to her friends, often dropping in a quick "I'm thinking of you" or "Please feel better..." and always closing with "Love, Carol."
Some emails reveal that she made a conscious effort to be cheerful. "Better days are coming," she wrote Helen in early summer. "Happy days, brighter days... I'll put the house on the market and get away from this toxic human being asap!"
Last July, Carol was invited to cover the presidential election for the popular political blog huffingtonpost. She wrote about young Florida Democrats, about the opening of the Obama campaign headquarters in Delray Beach, and about the South Florida gay community's push to shoot down Florida's Amendment 2, which would, as Carol wrote in a post, "enshrine one-man, one-woman marriage into the state Constitution."
"The amendment is vague," Carol told her readers, "so it could allow for disenfranchising contractual and domestic arrangements and take away recognition already granted by many cities and counties in Florida."
Though the exposure on such a highly trafficked media outlet was great, the huffingtonpost job didn't pay. Still, Carol told Helen she was hopeful: "I'm gathering the strength I need to do the unpleasant work that lies before me: getting the house ready to sell and then selling it and moving on," Carol wrote to Helen.
A week later: "I've so much work to get done in order to put the house on the market," Carol wrote. "My goal is to list it in Sept. or Oct. and hopefully to do the sale and be out by year's end."
In an email from August, two months before the murder, Carol mentioned that Jessica "had her lover pick her up again." She said she was sad. "I'm feeling pretty isolated," she wrote. "I just can't bring myself to punish people with my sad self whenever I'm down. But I usually bounce back in time."
As credit markets froze in September and the price of real estate in South Florida plummeted, Carol grew more desperate. She told people she felt trapped. The rotating highs and lows seemed to spiral, taking Carol deeper into a dark depression. But she refused to take medication. "I'd rather just be sad than chemically dependent," she wrote to Helen. "If medication works for you, great. It's not for me. Most people I know who've taken them never seem to get off that merry-go-round."
When she took Helen to the airport at the end of a trip in October, Carol began sobbing uncontrollably, saying she didn't want Helen to leave. "I can't go back to that house," Carol cried. "Not with her. I can't take it."
"You've gotta move out, Carol," Helen said as she comforted her friend. "You have to."

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About noon on Friday, October 24, Boynton Beach police announced that they had found Jessica's body. Calls to the house and to Carol's cell phone went to voice mail. Knocks from neighbors and reporters went unanswered. When officers didn't get an answer at the door just after 2:30 p.m., they headed around the side of the house. They could hear a greyhound barking inside. In the backyard, they found Carol. She was dead, lying in a pool of still-warm blood next to the screened-in pool.
"When we first found her and secured the scene, we weren't even sure at that point what we were investigating," Detective Martinez recalls. "We didn't know if Carol was distraught, missing Jessica, and just couldn't take it anymore. Or maybe this was a double murder, set up to look like suicide."
As police moved from room to room, Martinez noticed what looked like a single drop of brown paint on the floor of the garage, near the washing machine. But since the rest of the garage appeared undisturbed — there were piles of furniture, scuba gear, old lamps — the detective didn't think much of it. Only later, when another detective found a similar spot on the wall in the cabana bathroom, did they test both drops and determine they were blood.
Police obtained the necessary warrants and spent the rest of the afternoon moving furniture out of the house. The back bathroom was the first place crime-scene investigators went with the Luminol, a chemical that attaches to iron found in hemoglobin. Even if the area has been cleaned thoroughly, when sprayed under a black light, Luminol turns bright blue wherever blood has been present — a reaction scientists call "chemiluminescence." The Boynton Beach crime-scene technicians first sprayed the chemical on the bathroom wall, near the spot of blood. The wall started to glow. They sprayed over the sink. It too started to glow.
"From the amount of blood we found in the bathroom," Martinez says, "we originally thought the murder must have occurred in that room." Evidence of blood was present on every wall, all over the shower, on the door, the mirror, the tile floor. The sink had overflowed at one point; the Luminol unveiled haunting blue streaks down the front of the cabinets.
That, though, did not compare to what police discovered in the garage.
With the carpets and futon and scuba gear out of the way, the Luminol revealed what looked like a killing floor. There had been, at one point, three large puddles of blood and a set of footprints mapping the killer's path. There was more blood in the washing machine and patterns outlining where Jessica's car had been parked during the attack.
Though friends and family members dispute some of the details, police pieced together a narrative of what they think happened: On October 22, Carol spent the day helping Helen Gale's mother move boxes after a flood. After work, Jessica and her new girlfriend chatted via web cam until about 7:30 p.m. Jessica showed Wendy her new haircut; she had just gotten her dark brown hair cropped short, with sassy spikes in the back. Jessica used her L.A. Fitness membership card at 7:48 p.m. and worked out for an hour. Carol was at home, stewing over something — what exactly, no one will ever know. When Jessica pulled the BMW into the garage, Carol confronted her in a rage. Carol picked up a screwdriver.
Because there were scratches on the car door and the driver's-side window, police believe Jessica was still in the car when the attack began. When Jessica got out, Carol didn't stop swinging the screwdriver. Jessica's forearms were scratched, her hands punctured. Carol chipped Jessica's front teeth. She struck Jessica's chest. Then again. Then Jessica's face. Her shoulders. Jessica fell to the ground. Streaks of blood beneath where the car had been suggest that Jessica — who was much taller and stronger than Carol — was stretching out her hands, desperately trying to get under the car. Then Jessica crouched into a prone position near the rear driver's-side tire.
Most of the blows landed on Jessica's neck and on the back of her head. All told, there were 222 stab wounds. The lacerations were, on average, an inch to an inch-and-a-half deep, and most were shaped like the tiny plus sign on the tip of a Phillips-head screwdriver. The fatal strike was likely a blow to the spinal cord. The struggle — and subsequent overkill — probably lasted about 20 minutes.
After the attack, an exhausted Carol pulled Jessica's body toward the trunk, but she was too tired to lift her lifeless former lover. She dragged Jessica's body back around the side of the car — leaving smeared blood and hair in the front of the trunk and on the tires. She opened the back door and pushed Jessica up, onto the back seat. Then she walked around to the passenger side, leaned in, and pulled Jessica the rest of the way into the car.
Carol drove Jessica's car, with Jessica stuffed in the back, to the parking lot where it was found — at some point leaving a broken cigarette on the back seat to throw off the police. (Though Jessica relished the occasional expensive cigar, she detested cigarettes.) Then Carol walked home two miles in the rain and began cleaning. She wiped the weapon clean and put it away. She mopped up all the blood in the garage (except for the drop Martinez saw). She stripped down, ran around back to the cabana bathroom (so as not to track blood through the house), washed herself, then washed that bathroom. She got dressed and drove a mile in the opposite direction of the car and dropped Jessica's keys and wallet in a rough neighborhood near the corner of Gateway and Seacrest Boulevard. Later, she moved carpets over the spots in the garage where the most blood had been and put furniture over the carpets.
Then Carol made herself a snack, worked on her résumé a bit, and waited.
After she got the call that Jessica's wallet had been found, she called 911 with a panicked voice. She paced through the house while on the phone, her heels clicking down the seconds before her life unraveled. She spent most of that evening talking with police and, later, going on about how worried she was to a neighbor. "Where could she be?" she said again and again, still pacing. "I don't know where she is."
The morning of October 24 — after police had discovered Jessica's body but before the information was made public — Danielle Dubetz, a reporter with WPTV-TV Channel 5 at the time, went to the house with her cameraman and spoke with Carol, seeking an update on the previous night's missing-persons story. Carol answered the door in her bathrobe and looked like she hadn't slept in three days. She agreed to email photos of Jessica but asked not to appear on camera. As they left, Dubetz noticed something especially odd: As Carol had repeated over and over I don't know where she is. Where could she be? — the supposedly grieving woman wasn't making eye contact.
"Normally people are in such distress," Dubetz remembers, "they stare at you in your eyes and it just cuts you to your core. We're the first people there, and they're pleading for help. She was asking for help, but she wasn't looking at me at all. It was so strange."
At some point between 11:30 a.m., when the reporter left her house, and 2:30 p.m., when police arrived, Carol brought her .38-caliber pistol to the dining room table in its case. She loaded the gun and walked out back by the pool, shaded by the screened enclosure extending from the house. She removed her flip-flops and reading glasses and placed them gently on the glass patio table. Wearing only a bathrobe and panties, she looked at herself in the mirrored sliding door and placed the gun under her chin.
Nobody heard the shot. The bullet left a hole in the top of the screen.

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When police found Carol's body, they noticed an odd, deep, L-shaped abrasion on her knee. It looked fresh, but they couldn't think of what might have caused such a wound. But when they examined the garage, they noticed that a large, metal Coleman toolbox had one drawer sticking out slightly. The shape of the drawer matched the wound exactly. Detectives concluded that Carol must have been running at the car when it pulled in, and she knocked her leg on the drawer's metal lip. Perhaps that was what pushed her over the edge. That drawer contained three Phillips-head screwdrivers.
After the sad incident, some observers suggested that the story of Jess and Carol highlighted the need for across-the-board legal recognition of civil unions and same-sex marriages. "It's very messy for us to get disentangled," says Elizabeth F. Schwartz, a Miami-based family attorney specializing in same-sex issues. "This is one example of many of a couple that entered into a marriage and then couldn't get themselves out of it. When the kind people of Massachusetts grant you the right to marry but Florida won't recognize those marriages, it can make getting a divorce very difficult. Certainly the answer is not to kill your ex, but it does remind us that the consequences can be grave when we don't have a legal and appropriate way out."
As details of the murder-suicide trickled out, the crime captivated the public. Not only was it remarkable in its brutality — the number 222 served as an inescapable representation of one woman's immense pain and anger — but perhaps more shocking were the demographics involved: two married, post-menopausal, educated lesbians.
Still, what happened with Carol and Jessica echoed so many other cases of domestic violence: Tension built and built until the relationship, and the lives of the participants, came to a horrible, climactic end. Beyond the luxury cars, the beautiful house, and the high-profile careers, they were not impervious to the stresses of a sour relationship, worries over money, or the desperate pains of mental illness.
And in that way, Carol and Jessica were just like everyone else

There's an uncomfortable degree of sexism and homophobia to a lot of media coverage of catfishing. One favourite is the man who thinks he's falling in love with a sexy young thing, only to discover that she's a middle-aged, overweight housewife - as Nev Schulman, Catfish's presenter, did. Whilst it's amusing to laugh at men arrogant enough to assume that younger women will fall at their feet, the joke is really on Angela Wesselman for assuming that someone like Nev could ever be interested in the real her.
Conversely, the trope far from conventionally attractive men paired with pretty, thin women is everywhere from Sex in the City to the silver screen. Women, we're told, should see past a man's looks to the heart of gold beneath, but a plain woman's best chance is to plaster a model's photo on her internet dating profile and shave a few years off her age.

Amazing karma

There is the odd moment of beautiful karma, though - in 2011, it was revealed that two prominent lesbian bloggers having an online relationship were both revealed to be married, heterosexual men - a fact neither Tom McMaster or Bill Graber had been aware of when they sent steamy emails to one another.
"Sex by deception" is a phrase that has cropped up in multiple cases in Britain over the past few years, in seemingly similar circumstances. In 2013, following a consensual relationship between two teenagers above the age of consent, "Scott", born biologically female but who had talked about having a sex change, was essentially convicted of not being able to conclusively prove his female partner knew that he was trans.
Blogger and activist Zoe Imogen is concerned that this ruling could lead to a rise in trans people having to disclose their medical history in a way no other person would be asked to do before sex, potentially putting their lives at risk. She says that the "sex by deception" ruling is less about sexual assault and "more about “gay panic” – straight folk being “tricked” into gay relationships by presumed-fake trans identities."

Experimentation but at a cost

Identity is fluid, and the internet allows for a level of experimentation that can be dangerous in the real world. Women can live out their fantasies from the safety of their own home, men don't have to worry about being gaybashed for flirting with the wrong guy and trans people can start to inhabit their real gender without the stress of having to 'pass'. The case of Gayle Newland has a tragic component - although she believed that her friend knew her real identity but struggled with her own sexuality too much to admit it to herself, the fact remains - a woman was emotionally violated and sexually assaulted by someone she trusted.
The reactions of both the judge and the media, disproportionate to the majority of rape cases that even make it to court or to press, show that sensitivity training around LGBT issues is much needed - but the LGBT community itself should think before rushing uncritically to Newland's defence.
Abuse happens everywhere, and the queer community shouldn't overlook it when it's one of our own.
The truth is that most people present an ideal self online - the Pinterest perfect home can look like a bomb site for real.. At no point, when l tweet this article later on, will I mention that I wrote it in my pyjamas. But sometimes, the gap between who you are and who you want to be is so insurmountable that it's easier just to be someone else entirely.

When she was a teenager (she’s 27 now, and a student nurse), Amara was raped. It affected her in ways she didn’t expect, and couldn’t find help for. “I couldn’t go to the doctor anymore because I didn’t want to be touched,” she says. “I tried to go for a cervical smear and it reminded me so much of the forensic testing I’d had - ‘lie down, do this, do that’ - that I couldn’t go through with it.”


At first, Amara says, “I thought maybe I was really weird and there was something wrong with me”. She googled “rape, body image, can’t go to doctor” and found nothing.
But when she asked the other women in the support groups she attended about it she quickly realised, “Ok, I’m definitely not the only person.” Those women talked to other women and soon Amara was receiving emails from all over the country.
“It felt like I’d opened the floodgates in terms of women talking about how sexual assault had left them feeling,” she says.
“Some women had eating disorders after experiencing sexual violence because they felt like they just wanted to disappear. Some were self-harming. One woman in her sixties said it had affected her entire marriage. She was raped 40 years ago, before she met her husband, and it had ruined their whole sex life. She found it difficult to be touched. It affected the way she felt about herself physically.”
Amara understood the woman’s feelings. She was so desperate to escape her own body – she described her body to me as “the crime scene” – that she couldn’t even look at herself in the mirror. “I was connecting my physical self to what had happened,” she says. “And to all the feelings that went with it. I felt numb, like my body didn’t belong to me anymore.”
Sh! in Hoxton Square, London, is the UK's only sex shop specifically for women
Her solution was Café V – a monthly meeting in a Shoreditch sex shop. It offers practical advice on how to enjoy sex again after rape.
“It’s ‘v’ for ‘vagina’,” she says with a laugh. “We wanted it to be fun. Often I’d go to support groups and come out more depressed than I’d gone in. You don’t want a regular downer, you want a space where you can say, ‘this is how I’m feeling, this is the issue I’m having, how do I deal with it?’”
It’s held in Sh!, the UK’s only sex shop specifically for women. “They’ve been incredibly supportive,” says Amara. Around thirty women attend each session. Some of them are so tense during sex they black out or vomit. For others, any physical intimacy triggers flashbacks of the assault.
Amanda O’Donovan, the psychologist, tells me, “People with a history of sexual trauma often dissociate from their bodies completely, so it’s a matter of encouraging them to focus on physical sensations again.” She helps run Cafe V as well as the My Body Back clinic.
At a recent meeting, she suggested taking a moment in the shower each day to notice the feeling of warm water on the skin.
She also gives advice on when and how to tell new partners about the assault, and how to be clear about what they do and don’t feel comfortable with. Café V is now launching in cities around the UK and the My Body Back team is talking to organisations in the US about running workshops there, too.


The clinic has seen a similar response. The flagship operation in St Bart’s is already enormously over-subscribed. “Scaling up is a big priority,” says O’Donovan. They are working with NHS trusts in Nottingham, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff to open further clinics over the next few months, and have been approached by organisations in New York and Los Angeles about replicating the model in the US.
The demand is huge. “One in five British women has been raped,” says Amara. “The average GP will have hundreds if not thousands of patients dealing with this on their books, even if they don’t realise it.”
I visit the My Body Back clinic on its second day of operation. It looks like your average NHS clinic: strip lighting, speckled grey floor, lilac-upholstered waiting room chairs. Except for the coffee table, which is laden with gourmet teas, cakes and pretty china cups.
“We get through a lot of tea here,” laughs Amara. The spread serves a serious purpose. Before they arrive, the patients tell Amara “what they’d like to drink, what newspapers they’d like to read - anything that will make them feel more comfortable. Today, someone asked for crosswords. Another woman wanted a fan and a sick bag. It’s about giving them choice.”
They also discuss potential triggers. For example, one patient wanted to make sure nobody told her to relax while she had her smear test – because it was the same word her rapist had used throughout the attack.
Messages from the Notes of Love project, in which strangers offer support to victims of sexual violence
As well as Café V and the My Body Back clinic, Amara runs a number of other workshops including Notes of Love, in which strangers write messages of support to victims of sexual assault, which Amara distributes to Rape Crisis centres.
The messages help with something Amara herself struggled with. “You see these polls saying people think it’s the woman’s own fault if she gets raped,” she says. “I worried about starting My Body Back because I didn’t want to get judged.”
In the end, she decided providing these services was more important. “And you know what? Nobody’s been anything but positive about it.”
We run through My Body Back’s upcoming events together. “Gosh, we’re doing a lot aren’t we?” she says, a little surprised at herself – and at the support she has received.
“It just goes to show,” she reflects. “Once people want to get things done, they do.”

The traditional wedding ceremony for a bride involves the biological father walking his daughter down the aisle to pass her off to the soon-to-be hubby. Obviously that isn't always possible depending on the circumstances. But what happens when the daughter technically has a biological father and a stepfather?
Most of the time the dad who brought her into the world assumes the responsibility. Then again, there's Todd Bachman who went out of his way to stop the wedding procession and bring his daughter's stepdad to the altar with him, causing almost every person in the crowd to break down into a puddle of mushy tears.

A husband took this photo of his wife after he came home from some time away. Aww she looks so cute sitting on her bed, posing for this picture. After he looked closely at the picture he decided to divorce her.
When the husband took a closer look, do you see what he found?
In the corner of the bed, under the mattress .... a guy that she was cheating with was hiding there the entire time.

This is British woman Sarah Tetley, 26, and she's been with husband Charlie Tetley, 34, since she was 18. There were a few hints that something was a bit off about him. He admitted to sleeping with prostitutes at his bachelor party. When Sarah become pregnant, he told her she would have to have an abortion if it was a boy. After they had their daughter, Charlie wouldn't even touch the baby for 3 months and threatened to leave Sarah if she didn't lose weight. He would shut himself up in his room and was very protective about his computer.

But even so, Sarah was not prepared when the unthinkable happened one night . . .

One morning Sarah was woken up by her husband doing something that wasn't right, as she told 'This Morning':

"I woke up in the morning in that drowsy waking up stage and realised he was molesting me in my sleep. At the time I thought I’d just pretend I was asleep. … He stopped pretty quickly "

She ran downstairs and decided to alert the authorities. The police ended up taking a look at Charlie's computer and what they found was shocking . . .
The police found home videos on Charlie's computer that documented hundreds of instances of his raping and/or molesting his wife Sarah in her sleep. What's more disturbing is that she remains lifeless in the videos; it is suspected that Charlie had been drugging his wife to keep her docile during these attacks. In addition, there was also footage of him having his way with household objects. Sarah never had a clue.