Why I messaged the man who RAPED ME

After a decade living in fear, Lianne La Borde realised forgiveness was the only way to move forward

- LIANNE LA BORDE

I’d glared at sex offenders as they sat hunched in the dock, flanked by guards. I’d stared down serial killer Levi Bellfield, sat close to black cab rapist John Worboys. Unruffled, unfazed, though the harrowing things they’d done chilled me. 

I was a journalist – a court reporter – and I did my job, showing justice in action. Proving these predators, despite being capable of evil, were cowards when caught, and (most) would pay for their savagery with their freedom.

So why couldn’t I face this one? Why, during this particular rape trial in August 2011, was a screen erected to shield me from the man in the dock?

It was because I was afraid. The tables had turned, and now it was my own monster sitting back there. He’d turned me from unflappable court reporter to victim, weeping in the witness box while my worst moment was raked over. And I hated him for it.

I’d spent my teens devouring true-crime books. So in 2007, after studying law and criminology, then journalism, I moved to London to write real-life crime stories for magazines. Soon I was writing court news too, mostly covering rape and murder trials.

Watching defendants in the dock and hearing what they’d done didn’t invoke terror in me. The opposite actually. I became fearless, witnessing what they were reduced to once their secrets were exposed.

So when I left a friend’s house in Hackney late one Friday night in October 2010, aged 26, I didn’t consider if the man chatting to me at the bus stop was a rapist.