Tennis coach ‘kicked, punched and spat’ at daughters he wanted to become champions
A TENNIS coach assaulted and verbally abused his two daughters in his obsessive drive to turn them into champions, a court heard yesterday.
John De’Viana, 55, took the girls out of school to subject them to gruelling all-day training regimes.
They were forced to practise from 5.30am until bedtime and not allowed to eat if they did not try hard enough, it was said.
The court heard De’Viana spat at the older daughter, Monaei, now 21, as she was driven back from a tournament “because he considered she had not performed as she had ought to”.
He allegedly forced her sister Nephe, 19, to carry her kit in a bin bag to “humiliate” her and called the girls “fat” and “lazy c---s” when they were “as young as nine or 10” if he felt they were not training hard enough.
Nephe told the court how her father made her run around a court for up to seven hours without a break in an attempt to make her a star.
She described one incident in which her father took her off court and punched and kicked her with his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.
Snaresbrook Crown Court was told De’Viana had made the lives of his daughters miserable to fuel his ambition that at least one would be a “rich, famous and successful tennis player”.
David Povall, prosecuting, said the girls were “being deprived of food at lunchtime because they were not trying hard enough. “His obsession with their success meant that this sort of behaviour was constant.”
The court heard De’Viana, who has a background of competing in karate, took both girls out of school as they turned 11 to give them more time for tennis.
“There were occasions when he was serving balls at them in order to punish them for the way they had trained poorly,” Mr Povall said.
He said the abuse ended when De’Viana and his partner split up in 2011. Soon afterwards, “both girls, despite their success, gave up tennis”.
Questioned by De’Viana’s defence lawyer, Tara Adkin QC, Nephe denied she was exaggerating the abuse and said she had been forced to play the sport from the age of three.
“I told my father frequently that I hated playing tennis,” she said. “One time I did stop, but he manipulated me back into playing tennis.”
De’Viana, from Ilford, Essex, denies two counts of cruelty to a person aged under 16. The trial continues.