REAL LIFE: MY EX TRIED TO KILL ME:
The year Doctor Angela Jay’s ex-boyfriend stabbed her 11 times, 71 women were murdered by people they once trusted. As Angela tells Genevieve Gannon, she now dedicates herself to fighting domestic violence every way she can.
how romance turned deadly
Doctor Angela Jay knew her stab wounds were already enough to kill her when her attacker poured petrol on her bleeding body. As the liquid cascaded over her, her mind raced. She thought of her family and of escape and survival. She thought of what she knew about the man she had briefly dated, who now held her wrist tightly with one hand, and covered her in fuel with the other.
It had been a matter of mere months since she’d met Paul Lambert, 36, on dating app Tinder. But his rapid switch from charming and attentive to obsessed and threatening was enough to drive
her out of her home on the
NSW Central Coast. “His behaviour escalated very quickly and I started seeing sides of him that I haven’t seen before,” Angela says.
She had been staying with family after discovering Paul had stolen a key to her house as part of his increasingly menacing behaviour.
“I did have an instinct that something bad was going to happen,” she says.
She had fled her home in a hurry. After a few days, she made the decision to stop by and grab a few things.
“It was daylight. I needed some clothes. I needed to feed my cat and at the time I thought it was safe just to duck home,” she says.
Paul was lying in wait inside her wardrobe. When Angela entered her room, he grabbed her. He was irrational, crazed and Angela didn’t know how far he would be willing to go. “I thought, I can’t wait to find out, I have to run for it or die trying.”
As she tried to escape he stabbed her over and over, then covered her in petrol. The fuel made her slippery and she was able to break free from his grasp. As she hurtled herself down the stairs she had one goal: survival. She burst out of her front door, where she found her neighbour, who had been drawn by her screams. Angela collapsed, but still had the presence of mind to tell her neighbour how to treat her wounds.
By 9.45 that night, she was in hospital and Paul was dead. When police caught him in Bonville, 150km away, he lunged at them with a knife. They opened fire, aware of what he was capable of. He had stabbed Angela 11 times.
Angela, now 30, is doing the best she can to move on from the attempted murder. Sitting among the trees on her father’s tranquil balcony in Lane Cove, she emanates warmth and a quiet strength. “I feel very lucky,” she tells The Weekly.
She is candid about the ramifications of the attack: nightmares, pain and the ongoing mental toll of facing a violent death. “It’s the scars you can’t see that hurt the most,” she wrote earlier this year. “I narrowly escaped murder and a part of me definitely died that day.”
But she finds salvation in action. When we meet, Angela is training to walk the Kokoda Track to raise money for White Ribbon Day. It is painful, but she is grateful it is something she gets to do. The year Angela was attacked, 71 women died at the hands of a domestic partner.
“The physical challenge is really symbolic,” she says. “Going on that trek and walking for the people who can’t.”
Pushing through the pain is therapeutic. A controlling man tried to kill her and the throb of her legs as she trains is proof he didn’t succeed. She came out of her ordeal stronger, changed, but grateful. Her determination is now focused on a single goal – to fight domestic violence.
“No matter what you’ve been through you can always turn a negative into a positive,” she says.
Bad romance
Born in Laguna Beach, Angela’s childhood was spent moving around
Southern California. She went to many schools before her family returned to Australia when she was 14. “It did make me stronger as a person to be able to cope with new environments,” she says. She has always been a high-achiever. Angela modestly describes herself as a people pleaser, but it’s clear she has a deep-seated drive to succeed.
Her family settled on NSW’s idyllic Central Coast near Gosford where Angela quickly developed a tight-knit group of friends who she’s still close with today. An academic and active student, she relished the challenges of high school.
“I always loved school and I have always been a perfectionist,” she says.
After she graduated she was thrilled to be accepted into medical school. “I was always looking for the next challenge. I think the inherent people pleaser in me thought: what could I do that would help people?”
Ultimately she chose to specialise in gynaecology and obstetrics, and in August 2016 she moved to Port Macquarie. She was not daunted by starting again in a new town. But she was nursing a broken heart after a recent break-up, and she felt lonely.
To combat her feelings of isolation she installed Tinder on her phone and matched with a few men. One of them had thick dark hair and friendly smile. It was Paul Lambert. “He looked nice in his photos,” Angela wrote in 2017. They started chatting.
“Having had not the best romantic history, going into a new relationship I was very hopeful,” Angela says.
Paul lived four-and-a-half hours away so they got to know each other over the phone. When they decided to go on a date, he flew to Port Macquarie and booked a table at a Tapas restaurant. Angela was flattered by his attention.
“He said to me he got the sense that I was always taking care of others and he wanted to take care of me,” she says.
Initially, the budding relationship gave Angela renewed hope for her future. But it wasn’t long before she started to think something wasn’t quite right. Paul was very intense and he soon became completely infatuated with Angela. She told him she thought they should just be friends. He was incredibly upset. She decided to give him another chance.
“Initially I wanted to make it work,” she says. “I was very lonely prior. It was only natural to think, well this is part of being in a relationship.”
But as fresh doubts started to surface, Paul continued to smother her with attention.
“Looking back at it now, I think that should have been a bit of a red flag but when you’re in a new relationship you can rationalise away everything.
“As things progressed it became clear to me, this is an element of how he has managed to manipulate previous relationships. As soon as he doesn’t start getting his way, that’s when those little things that he’s controlling escalate into more serious things.”
Attentiveness mutated into stalking, harassment and irrational bursts of rage. Angela told Paul never to contact her again.
She came home on the night of October 30 to find him waiting for her at her house. He said he was there to collect his possessions. Frightened, she gave them to him and told him to never return.
He would talk in the third person. At one point he said, ‘I can’t tell you what I’m going to do. I’m the good person right now’. He threatened to kill himself.
“Looking back now, I think that should have been a bit of a red flag.”
“I didn’t know what he was going to do but I had enough instinct that I was in danger,” she says.
On the day he attacked her, however, Angela was completely unprepared. She had gotten into the habit of doing a sweep of her home with a knife in her hand. She jokes that she doesn’t know what she would have done if she had found him during one of her searches, but the point is that she was alert. On this day, she didn’t check the house. She felt relatively safe.
That’s when he leapt out of her wardrobe and grabbed her around the neck. He told her he just wanted to talk. He was agitated, edgy. He interrogated her while she sat on the bed. Angela was near the door and knew escaping was her best shot of making it out alive. As she lunged for the exit he came after her. She saw her own blood but she didn’t even feel the knife. Then came the petrol.
“I thought, I’m going to burn alive and my family is not going to be able to recognise me,” she says. So she ran for her life.
The frontline
Returning to work was a big part of Angela’s recovery. There and in her spare time, she devotes herself to chipping away at the problem of domestic violence. Her fundraising efforts have already attracted headlines, but that is just part of what she is doing. In between her charity efforts and working in the hospital, Angela is studying a graduate certificate in medical and forensic management of sexual assault so that she can assist at her hospital’s sexual assault service.
It is a disturbing fact that
Angela’s work as an obstetrician and gynaecologist puts her on the front line of Australia’s domestic abuse crisis.
“Sadly rates of domestic violence increase in pregnancy,” she says. “We’ve certainly had patients who are in labour with a black eye.
“We’ve had cases where I’ve had to speak to the patient alone and make a code word like, if you want us to get security and you’re feeling unsafe you need to tell us this and we’ll know what that means.”
In such situations, the maternity ward can be a tense place where medical specialists have to exercise vigilance.
It is common for women to find the very intimate gynaecological examinations its Angela’s duty to perform difficult due to a history of sexual assault, or sexual abuse as a child. The volume of women who have an adverse reaction to the delicate, but routine, pregnancy procedures “blows your mind”, Angela says.
“It’s not something that you see once a month, it’s something that you often see daily,” she says.
“We do sometimes see really awful things.
“One of the things I feel really lucky about is that because I have been through my experience it has really opened up my eyes to a lot of situations and made me really interested and passionate in the area.”
On the anniversary of her attack last year, she wrote: “I’m so thankful to be here today.”
When she walks Kokoda Track she will have 71 white ribbons tried to her backpack. She will be walking in solidarity with the 71 wives, mothers and sisters who died the year she nearly did.
“I’m constantly reflecting on the fact that 71 women were murdered the year I was almost murdered in acts of domestic violence in Australia,” she says.
“I’m really seeing this as an opportunity to do this for them.
“I never knew any of them, but I feel very connected to them in some way because I could have been one of them.”
As her scars ache and burn on her trek, the white ribbons will spur her on. They’re always in Angela’s mind, the 71 women who weren’t as lucky as her.