How my lovely daughter was hounded to death
In this interview, raw with emotion, father of rape claim girl blames CPS for killing her
The terrible, anguished screams were like none David de Freitas had heard in his life nor ever wishes to hear again. They were the cries of his much-loved daughter eleanor screaming for him from her bedroom.
The 22-year-old had just received a private prosecution summons for perverting the course of justice. The case was being funded by a man accused of drugging and raping her.
Though according to her father police believed eleanor was telling the truth when she made her allegations in January last year, they decided there was insufficient evidence to bring a successful prosecution.
The case was closed and eleanor, a bright A* student, decided to move on with her life.
Indeed, she was about to sit the final part of her diploma in financial planning and was head-over-heels in love with an old friend from Durham University when that email arrived on August 13, 2013.
‘I was in the kitchen having breakfast,’ says David. ‘ She just shouted “daddy” from her room. It was the anguish in her voice. It was so . . . ahhh,’ he sighs a pained, winded, sound. ‘I rushed to her room and she showed me the email. She was shouting, crying: “I’ve got a summons for perverting the course of justice.”
‘I tried to reassure her because I wanted her to pass her exam. She’d studied so diligently for it that . . . ’ The sentence trails away.
‘That piercing shout is something I’ll never forget — never. It was just awful. I hope I’ll never . . . well, I know I’ll never have to hear that from her again.’
eleanor, you see, took her life on April 7, at the age of 23, three days before she was due to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court in London in a case supported by the Crown Prosecution Service.
‘I was probably the last person to speak to her,’ says David. ‘On the day she died I spoke to her by telephone from my office at noon and said: “I know you’ve got to see your solicitor. I can come for you afterwards and bring you back home if you like.” ’
He SAYS: ‘ She agreed. Then the next thing I hear is that she’s taken her life. It was 2.30pm. I had a piercing call from my wife. She was utterly distraught, crying: “ellie’s dead. Come home.” ‘I was just stunned. Stunned,’ he repeats. ‘ Shocked. Disbelieving. It was just awful. Totally unreal. A nightmare. A living nightmare.
‘When I got home I saw all these ambulances outside. I was hoping they’d been able to help her and bring her back to life, but it was not to be.’
David is back in that moment as he talks. he won’t say how his daughter died. It’s too painful. everything is too painful.
‘ She left really beautiful loving letters to us as her parents, to her boyfriend, to her friends, her words were beautiful — beautiful. My daughter was beautiful. She was a lovely, bright, wonderful girl — full of life, full of everything life had to offer. She was the happiest I have seen her in years before that email arrived.
‘If only the CPS had not supported that private prosecution,’ he shakes his head. ‘Because they did I have a dead daughter.’
David’s grief is a raw, tangible thing. he is, as he says, ‘very fragile at the moment’.
Yesterday the inquest into eleanor’s death was adjourned as the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, launched an inquiry into the handling of his daughter’s case.
In truth, David finds it unbelievable that the CPS saw fit to support any charge of false rape against his daughter — let alone one brought by her hugely wealthy accuser, who had been issued with an harassment warning letter from police.
eleanor — or ellie as she was known to her family and friends — was an exceptionally bright young woman with ten A*s and three As at GCSe, who’d won a scholarship for the sixth form at London’s exclusive Putney high School, before going on to read geography at Durham University.
But she was mentally fragile. So much so that suffering with depression and unable to cope with her studies, she was forced to leave university during her first year.
She was eventually diagnosed as bipolar and was receiving medication at the time of the alleged rape. ‘ellie was working at The Body Shop and studying for her financial planning exams,’ says David, who is himself a financial planner.
‘She’d taken part one and part two and got even higher marks than I did because she was such a bright girl. It was something I could help her with.
‘I remember when I had to take exams, she would write me good luck cards with handmade pictures. There’s one I’ve got with the outline of her hand on it and she wrote lovely little messages inside. That was when she was 17 or 18. I’ve never got rid of it.’ he shakes his head.
‘When she said she’d been raped, I felt so utterly helpless and incapable. I was shocked, gutted.’
he squeezes his eyes tight shut as if hoping he can make the sheer horror of this go away.
‘This wasn’t something I could take away from her.’
eleanor alleged she was drugged and raped on Christmas eve 2012, but did not press charges until January 4. When she decided to go to Chelsea police station near their Fulham home, it was the first David knew of the alleged attack.
‘ She didn’t tell me anything about it,’ he says. ‘I think it’s a father- daughter thing. She just didn’t want to talk to me about it.
‘She didn’t really want to talk to anyone. She did talk to some friends, but not me. I only got to know about it when she phoned to say she was going to the police sta-
tion.’ He doesn’t believe his daughter was lying. It’s an instinct parents have and Eleanor, for all her mental fragility, was, he insists, never a liar.
In fact, she was a hugely popular girl who, as her father says, ‘touched many people in her too short 23 years’.
So much so that at her memorial service on her June birthday, Fulham’s All Saint Church was packed fit to burst.
‘She always called me daddy,’ says David. ‘I looked after her as best as I could. I had no difficulty looking after her because I love her and she is my daughter.’ He continues to speak of her in the present tense.
‘I loved her so much right from the very beginning. I was there for her birth at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London, and holding her was a joy.
‘Right from a very young age, she recognised my voice and would smile when she heard me and saw me. We had a lovely relationship. It was a joy to have her in my life and so cruel to have her taken away.’
Indeed, David is a reasoned, gently spoken man but, when he speaks of the man who brought the case against his daughter, his voice hardens. He can’t even bring himself to mention him by name, but refers to him as ‘the perpetrator’.
DAVID sat in the public waiting area while his daughter was interviewed at Chelsea police station and travelled with her in an unmarked car to the Sapphire Unit, which deals with sexually violent offences, in Fulham.
‘I held her hand and gave her a kiss to reassure her — a peck on the cheek as a father would do,’ he says.
‘She felt better for having spoken to the police. I think the fact she was able to get it off her chest was important. It was calming.’
The team at Sapphire didn’t seem to him to have any doubts about the truth of what she was alleging, but said it was impossible to proceed because they feared inconsistencies in her version of events would be exposed in court.
Those with bipolar often blow hot and cold as their mood swings from high to low. David says the officers were worried Eleanor would be ripped to shreds in the witness box.
In texts and voicemails to friends following the attack, at one minute she was happy as a lark and, the next, wanting to take her life and preparing her will.
‘It was frustrating for her that she couldn’t put across in a believable manner what she want to put across, but she’d got it off her chest,’ says her father.
‘In the end, Eleanor had understood the police officers’ reasoning not to prosecute and accepted it. She decided what she would do is get on with the rest of her life.
‘I felt it was in her best interests that it wasn’t pursued because I wanted to bring an end to the suffering.’
The police had put her in touch with the Woman and Girl’s Network [a network that supports those who have suffered sexual attack and abuse].
‘She saw them on a weekly basis and it was very good for her. There was a light in her eyes again. She didn’t go through these extremes of highs and lows. It was a very comforting experience.
‘Then, when she got the private prosecution summons, for some unknown reason those sessions had to stop because of various legal issues involved.
‘This was a vulnerable person who needed help, but was suddenly being deprived of it.’
Eleanor’s alleged attacker had, it turns out, set about using his huge wealth to fund a prosecution against her after the case against him was dropped.
FURIOUS that the police were not pressing charges against Eleanor for perverting the course of justice or making a false allegation of rape, he spent £200,000 hiring a team to bring his private prosecution in an attempt to clear his name.
For several months before this, David had been optimistic.
‘There was a friend she’d had since Durham. He said to her: “Let’s meet up and see if there’s scope for this being more than just a friendship.” She did and it blossomed and was lovely. She was in such a happy place I can’t tell you.’
Sadly, that changed with that email on August 13.
‘I took her to the exam centre to sit her finance exam but she was very silent. I waited with her in the waiting room and then, when she went in, I left, but she couldn’t cope. She had a panic attack and had to get out of the exam room.
‘She wandered around aimlessly for a while, then she got in touch with me and I encouraged her to come home.’
Eleanor’s mental state worsened over the following months, not helped by persistent texts and voicemails from her accuser, threatening to ‘ prosecute her and put her in prison’.
‘He was very harassing of Eleanor and me. There were threatening voicemails, texts and emails,’ says David. ‘ We gave them to the police and that’s what they based the harassment warning letter on.
‘The police were very tolerant of his harassment. If they had shown zero tolerance and he’d been accused of harassment, he’d have had a very difficult job with his private prosecution and rightly so.’
Indeed. For now, though, David can only wait for the outcome of the DPP’s inquiry. ‘I just want everything surrounding Eleanor’s death regarding the CPS to be heard in a proper and open manner,’ he says.
Whatever is decided, though, it won’t give David back his daughter, which is the greatest sadness of all.