'I knew my ex was controlling but I never expected he'd hold me hostage with a gun'
05.05.2022 - 23:13
/ ok.co.uk
Tonight ITV weather presenter Ruth Dodsworth shares her harrowing experience of domestic abuse in a powerful documentary. The broadcaster and her children were subject to years of coercive control at the hands of her ex-husband who, last year, was sentenced to three years in prison for his crimes. As Ruth details her abuse marriage in Controlled By My Partner? The Hidden Abuse, we meet a mum-of-four who suffered through a very similar story.
Mum-of-four Rhianon Bragg, 48, recalls how, during one terrifying night in a remote Welsh village, she believed she would be murdered by her controlling ex-boyfriend, mechanic Gareth Wyn Jones... "As I returned to my house on a summer evening, a camouflaged figure leapt out, pointing a shotgun at my chest.Terrified, I knew immediately who it was: my ex, Gareth. He had waged a campaign of terror against me for four months following the end of a five-year coercive, controlling relationship.
For the next eight hours, he held me hostage, threatening to kill me – one minute furious, the next full of self-pity. I knew he was fully capable of murdering me. It was a far cry from the early stages of our relationship, when Gareth showered me in affection.
We’d first met in 2013, after my car had a puncture while I was driving to see my ill father in Rhosgadfan in North Wales. Gareth, a mechanic from the village, came to fix it. At the time, my marriage was on its last legs, and I left East Anglia where I was living with my husband.Together with my four children, two girls and two boys – now aged 17, 15, 13 and nine – we moved to my parents’ house to be close to Dad, [who was] in hospital in Bangor.The farmhouse, which is about 800 metres from the outskirts of the village, is the only place I
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