UPDATE: |’He seemed really nice, then he told me I had invisible handcuffs on’ News

A domestic abuse survivor has bravely spoken out ‘to warn other women’

A woman who was raped and sexually assaulted by her then partner in a sickening case of domestic abuse has bravely spoken out ‘to warn other women’.

She said she’s ‘forcing myself to learn to love myself and to be happy and present’ again after her horrific ordeal at the hands of Daniel Wide, 33. “The abuse got so bad that when he went to pick up a takeaway, I would fear for the person serving him,” she said.

The woman also revealed misogynist Wide ‘despised’ female officers who dealt with the case against him, and would ‘mock them’. He’s now serving a 10-year prison sentence – a sentence that also includes an extended period of five years on licence on release.

The woman said alerting the police and ‘actually being believed by the police’ saved her life. Wide, she said, would tell her she had ‘invisible handcuffs’ on.

“I am speaking out to warn other women,” she said. “I worry about how much anger he could take out on other women in the future. Especially because he openly hates women.”

The woman, from Cardiff, said she became involved with Wide around seven years ago, having vaguely known him through mutual friends beforehand. She said a chance meeting marked the beginning of her life-changing ordeal.

“It was August 5, 2018,” she said. “A family member fell outside my house and Dan happened to be walking past. I hadn’t seen him for years. He came over and he picked them up and seemed really nice. A couple of days later I was in town catching a bus home and I called ‘Dan’, and that was it. He sat next to me on the bus on the way home. We started seeing each other from then on.”

At the time, the woman said she was in a ‘bad place mentally’. She described how he would regularly say he had put ‘invisible handcuffs’ on her and that he viewed her as a slave.

She said: “I was very mentally unwell at the time. He made out he was helping me with that at the beginning. I was so vulnerable and he could sense it. He said as soon as he saw me, he knew how kind I was. He was later upfront about the fact he would fake cry to pretend to understand my pain.

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“At the start he seemed like he was there for me. It was like he was my best friend who I was also attracted to. It took only a few days for the more sinister signs to show, but by that point I was already involved with him and I felt like I needed him because of my vulnerability at that time – and I really believed in that.”

The woman said she refused his demands to take drugs. “I knew at that point I was in a really, really bad situation,” she added. “But I didn’t have anywhere near the amount of strength I needed to get out of it. He did bizarre things. On one occasion I was asleep in my flat and he used my phone to video himself slapping and stroking my face. I wouldn’t even be able to tell you why he did that. But he would put his mask back on and make out that it was nothing, and then I would feel like the crazy one.

“The saddest part is that this is just a snippet of what happened – it doesn’t even touch the sides. There was so much more abuse. For him it was just a way of living.”

She went on to detail graphic sexual abuse at his hands before finding a way to leave him. Several years later, however, Wide began turned up at her house again, reports WalesOnline.

“I had zero tolerance by that point,” she said. “He didn’t like this. He would call me crazy and so I decided to record him. At first I didn’t do this to give evidence to the police. I did this to reassure myself that I wasn’t going crazy.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but pressing record captured Wide’s vile behaviour in the moments before he would go on to rape her. “The first time I recorded he threatened to rape me ‘whether I liked it or not’,” she said. “Then he did it in my house.”

She said she’s been left with a severe form of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Following Wide’s final attack on her, she said she confided in a friend who encouraged her to tell the police. She said she now owed her life to the officers at South Wales Police who took her report seriously. “I rang the police in July, 2023,” she said. “I think that is what saved my life; actually being believed by the police. Being believed and heard after Dan had warped my mind so badly to the point that I didn’t know what was right or what was wrong.

“The police were absolutely amazing. I can’t express enough how much they saved my life.”

Wide, of Llys Maelfryn, Malvern Drive, Llanishen, Cardiff, was arrested on July 4, 2023. Initially ,he entered not guilty pleas but later admitted charges of rape and sexual assault by penetration.

“He absolutely despises women,” the woman said. “He despised the female officers who dealt with the case. He would mock them. He’s really misogynistic.”

“I don’t drink anymore, I’m eating well and I will soon be receiving therapy. I am constantly fighting the urges to not be inside my head and actually being in my present mind, as well as learning healthier ways to take my mind off it. I’m forcing myself to learn to love myself and to be happy and present.”