‘There’s this idea of the middle-class utopia, and that child abuse can only exist alongside poverty,” says Antonia Bernath, an actor best known for her roles in Downton Abbey and St Trinian’s. Now 38, she has spent most of her adult life trying to process – and heal from – the years of violence she endured at the hands of her father during the 90s.
“It started very early,” she says. “My mum said that when I was a baby, he would use my cart as a balance for his gun while he’d shoot groundhogs.” Later, he would beat Bernath to the point where it was painful to sit down. Didn’t her teachers notice? “No,” she says, “no one questioned.”
At first glance, Bernath’s family were the sort that others in their community in the US state of Virginia might envy: her father was a successful storyboard artist working regularly with companies such as Disney and Coca-Cola, and her mother was a model from England. They lived in a “huge house” away from anyone else. But behind closed doors, all Bernath remembers was violence.
Describing an average day, she starts with the nights. “He would scream until three or four in the morning,” saying things like, “‘I hate you, you should be dead. You’re not good enough to be my daughter. No one will ever love you. You are disgusting.’” Such emotional abuse was daily, as was the neglect. “He’d sometimes lock me out of the house at night with just a packet of biscuits.”
When he hit her – which he would do most days, usually with slaps or pushes, though sometimes with sticks – he would do so in sets of a hundred, and if she cried, he would double it. “He’d say: ‘This is because I love you. If your mother loved you as much as I did, she would be doing this.’ It completely warped my perception of what love was.” One minute he’d be hitting her and the next he’d suddenly “be sobbing on the ground, saying: ‘Just kill yourself. Everything was OK until you were born.’”
“Everything was just madness,” she says. Her father projected on to her something he felt he had inside of himself. “As soon as I was born, he said he saw a devil or some bad energy in me, the same he had.” He wasn’t religious then, although he did become so eventually.
Alcohol made it worse. He would often drink solidly for nights on end during a storyboarding assignment. “My dad was abusive when he was sober and drunk, but the alcohol definitely released his inhibitions,” she says.
Even when she was as young as five, she remembers, she would feel truly miserable. “People think that children bounce back and aren’t aware of what’s going on … but as a child you have no formed self. You are just forming or deforming in response to the trauma. It’s the entire way you interact with yourself and the world. You just are the walking embodiment of that abuse.”
Bernath describes being an “outsider” at school, where she kept the abuse secret. Although she wasn’t bullied, she had only one friend and struggled to make others. “I was so confused about what love is. I tried to make friends on the first day by giving kids Chinese burns.” When she was 10, she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She was “just always wanting to flee – and that transmuted as hyperactivity. And I was exhausted. I was only getting a few hours of sleep.”
Bernath was close to her mum. “She was the most beautiful, warm, loving, kind woman. She was just trapped. So although she didn’t protect me, I think of her as very down and depressed.” Although to Bernath it always felt like the violence was directed more at her, there is a lot she can’t account for. “My mum already had a broken leg when she broke her arm and she had to drive herself to hospital. I don’t know how she broke her arm but given he slammed my arm under a window when he saw me bite my nails, I can hazard a guess. It’s things like that.”
Her father controlled her mother right down to her wardrobe. “He threw out all the Biba and put her in what he wanted – very conservative clothes.” And, as is typical in domestic abuse cases, he isolated her from family and friends. Bernath remembers begging her mother to leave him. “Apparently, when I was two, we put him on the train and I said: ‘Well, Daddy’s gone. Let’s go get a new one.’”
As the years passed, the alcoholism – and the violence that came with it – steadily progressed. “We thought he’d kill us. I’m sure my dad even said it to my mum sometimes.” He always made it clear that if they told anyone he would “destroy” them.
On one occasion, when Bernath was 10, her mother did take them to Al-Anon, a support group for families of alcoholics. “He found out when we got home. He was just going mad, it was terrifying. That was the biggest thing in my childhood, being permanently terrified and thinking, he’ll kill me.”
That night, her father got into bed with her. “He started saying: ‘It’s because I love you’ and ‘Your mum doesn’t love me any more’, like poor me, and ‘You need to show me how much you love me’.” Then, she says: “He climbed on top of me. And I just froze, because I knew. But then he passed out and I just lay under him, still, until it was time to get up for school. I was terrified of what would happen if I moved.”
Bernath says that while she never explicitly told her mother what happened, she must have known because the next day, as they were driving home from school, her mother said: “We have to go now.” As they pulled up outside the house, “she told me to go in there and say to him: ‘It’s us or the drink.’ So I did.” Her father “lost the plot and charged out after us. I jumped in the car and we sped off but he chased us.”
They drove over the treacherous roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains. “I was looking over the back of the seat at him, [saying] ‘He’s coming, he’s coming.’” Her mother drove as if her life depended on it – and arguably it did. “We went round the windy corners and as it was becoming dusk, at the right moment she swooshed down under this bridge, turned off the lights and we just sat there. My heart was just pounding. He drove past. And then we waited, just utter silence.”
Eventually, when it felt safe, they drove to a friend’s home to spend the night. The next day, they began the long process of separating their lives from him.
But just as they were escaping one threat, they faced another. Not long before that fateful day, Bernath’s mother had learned that a lump in her breast was cancerous and that, without medical intervention, she would have only months to live. She had kept it secret from her husband but managed to access treatment. When he learned about it, however, he cut off the medical insurance, preventing her from getting further care.
It wasn’t until some time later – Bernath is unclear of the time frame – that her mother was able to restart the treatment she so desperately needed and that gave her three more years of life. Mother and daughter had made it to England to live with Bernath’s grandmother, “a true feminist powerhouse, and one of the first women at Oxford”. Things started to get better. “That was when I finally got a mum. Every minute she was out of there,” she says, referring to her marriage to her father, “she was incredible.”
When her mother died, “the ground came out from beneath me. That was genuinely the worst thing that ever happened to me.” Yet within the safety and support of her grandmother’s home she was able to keep going. An insurance fund from her mother’s death allowed her to go to private school, and during the holidays she’d return to her loving home.
This part of her life was not completely trouble free, however: at one point her father threatened to abduct her, and an order was issued to prevent him from contacting her until she was 21. But “the structure” of schooling helped. She was high achieving, went to Cambridge and managed to make plenty of friends.
Recovery from trauma is never linear – there are always ups and downs, and parts of one’s life can be out of control even when others are orderly. So, although Bernath was enjoying university life and finding her way as an actor, she was engaged in “self-harm” – battling an eating disorder – and “bingeing into oblivion” through her 20s.
Furthermore, the yearning for a parent led her to reach out to her father, who was by then living in New York. “I wanted to believe he’d changed,” she says. They would speak over the phone and on email, and although there were times she would have to cut him off when he distressed her too much – such as during a call when he “boasted he had passed out with a heroin needle in his arm” – he could be loving and proud of the daughter whose star was rising.
But, at other times, “he would say negative things and it would just absolutely destroy me”. She recalls a time when she had been holidaying in Thailand with a boyfriend. They had been off-grid for a while and she hadn’t had a signal to contact her father. When she finally did, he began “screaming things down the phone: ‘You’re unlovable, you’re disgusting, you should be dead.’ When he did that, I could just put the phone on the side as he yelled and go and have a swim.” Once, she gave the phone to her boyfriend and “his jaw just dropped”. He implored her to cut ties and, for a time, she did.
A few weeks later, while filming St Trinian’s, Bernath was in Tesco when her agent phoned to tell her that her father had died. She had to identify the body through photos. “He had decomposed because he hadn’t been found for two weeks,” she recollects.
Any chance of reconciliation, or even confrontation about what happened, was gone. But, traumatised by years of violence, she was “glad that he died. I walked away from my inheritance – I didn’t want anything to do with it.” Did she feel frustrated or robbed of the chance for some semblance of justice? No, she says: “He’s dead and probably died quite horribly so there was karmic justice.” Now, her life is “utterly full of joy”.
Learning to feel that joy took time and work. Therapy – “and lots of it” – helped her understand her eating disorder as an unhealthy method of processing the trauma. “What I found was that you can actually just completely get over it,” she says. “Not the feelings behind it – they stay a lot longer – but the actual behaviour can go.”
Part of her remarkable recovery has been learning about the psychological theory of “the internal or the external locus of control”. As Bernath says: “When you are a child, you’re genuinely so powerless. But when you are an adult, you can be a victim to the external where it’s like, ‘until they apologise, we’re all stuck’. But actually it is all up to me.”
She has learned to identify when the trauma is talking. Take her perfectionism, which she came to realise she had developed as a coping strategy. “I thought if I could just be perfect, then he’d love me and I’d be safe.” Of course, it was never enough. Even when she achieved things, an internal voice would still tell her: “You shouldn’t have won that,” or “Work harder”. With the wisdom therapy brings, she has realised that this was the internalised voice of her abuser, but also that of the little girl who just wanted to be perfect. This realisation has helped her bring compassion even to the “negative” thoughts in her head.
With ongoing therapy, she is, she says, learning to feel a whole range of healthy emotions again, not just the positive ones. “Sometimes the anger in you is the part that loves you the most, because that’s the bit that says it’s not OK to treat me like that. Or the sadness is the vulnerability in you that allows you to genuinely connect with someone.”
Alongside the therapy, it was meeting the love of her life – her husband, Ollie – that finally pushed her beyond the clawing reach of her demons. “Through him loving me, I saw that I was worthy of love and that the love I had to give was worthy of being received. You have to feel safe to feel happy.” Bernath is aware that “50% of people who have been abused in childhood end up in domestic abuse situations.” Thankfully, she says, Ollie is the “antithesis” of her father.
This victory, of ending the cycle of abuse, was felt most acutely when she became a mother. “There were times when I’d look at my daughter and think: ‘I was that age when I was being beaten up and starved and hated.’” While she is, she says, “not a perfect mum” to her two daughters – “my kids eat too much junk and watch too much television – she is proud to have ended the cycle of abuse. Indeed, it is that possibility – that such cycles can be ended – that drives her each day.
She is telling her story in the hope that it might help others suffering domestic abuse, which is estimated to affect about one in four women and one in 10 children. “Shame drives people into silence. We need a culture where it’s OK to talk about this. I want to be part of a call to arms to do whatever is possible to change that.”
In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
