On 26 May last year, Ellie Wilson sat in the witness room of the high court in Glasgow, waiting to be called. As chief witness, the rape victim in the trial of her ex-boyfriend Daniel McFarlane, her anxiety was off the scale.
“Any time the door would knock, I’d have this flash of black across my vision and the room would kind of spin,” she says. “It was the weirdest physiological experience. I was terrified in a way I had never been before. Then the clerk comes in dressed in robes and brings you into the court … I feel scared just thinking about it.”
Wilson, now 25, has experienced a rare thing: her rapist was not only prosecuted but found guilty. Though research shows that one in four women have been raped or sexually assaulted as adults, it is estimated that only one in six will report it and less than 1% of reported cases end in a conviction. The few who do see their rapist jailed rarely wish to share the experience but Wilson does – her friends call her “Ellie Telly”. Through Twitter, TikTok, the press, Panorama and BBC Scotland she is sharing what she has been through and how so much needs to change. She has crowdfunded to make a complaint against the defence advocate (defending barrister) in her trial. She is lobbying Scottish parliament for policy change and better safeguarding in universities. Most important for Wilson though is to just keep on talking so that other rape victims have some idea of what to expect when navigating the system. “Because I had absolutely no idea at all,” she says. “I went in knowing it would be difficult but it was harder than I thought. I didn’t expect it to be so personal.”
Conviction rates are far lower for date rapes than stranger rapes and Wilson had been in a relationship with McFarlane for more than two years. Both were students at Glasgow University – Wilson studying politics, McFarlane medicine – they had met in September 2017 through the athletics club. “I’d been going through a difficult time at the club and Daniel offered to coach me,” she says. “He was a really good athlete, better than me and very quickly he was my best friend.”
Three months later, while still just friends, he raped her. It was New Year’s Eve, they had been out partying and Wilson was drunk and had passed out in her bed when it happened. “I had a bad feeling the next day,” she says. “I woke up feeling something bad had happened but almost didn’t want to speak it into existence. I pushed it to the back of my mind because if I thought about it in any detail, everything would change and I couldn’t deal with the consequences of that.” Soon after, they became a couple.
The relationship was studded with jealous rows, temporary breakups and more abuse. On one occasion, Wilson refused sex because she had a UTI. McFarlane raped her anyway. She didn’t recognise this as domestic violence. “That’s something you maybe associate with older married couples,” she says. “When you’re young, it’s very easy to romanticise the kind of relationship we had. Your boyfriend should be crazy about you to the extent that they’re actually crazy!”
“It was a rollercoaster. When it was good, it was really good, but when it was bad, it was really, really, really bad. You’re like a drug addict. You want your fix. You just want it to be good again. I still maintain that I’ll probably never love anyone as much as I loved him – but that’s a good thing.”
She later learned that McFarlane had raped her on that first New Year’s Eve. He had told her in a text message the following summer: “PS The reason I told you you have probably been raped while drunk sleeping is because I did it.” Another time, with her phone recording their conversation while hidden in her bag, she’d asked how he felt about raping her. McFarlane replied: “I feel good knowing I’m not in prison.”
“I made that recording partly for my own sanity,” says Wilson. “I wanted the truth for when I doubted myself.” She also knew this was hard evidence should she ever need it – though it was another year before the relationship ended.
Wilson is very clear on why she stayed with McFarlane for so long. “Abuse doesn’t make you love someone less,” she says. “Often, it makes you love them more because it isolates you and makes you more dependent. He is the only person in the world who knows what you’re going through – and often he is the person that comforts you afterwards.”
During her time with McFarlane, Wilson became, she says, “a ghost” and “unrecognisable”. She had spent a week in hospital after an attempted suicide, had stopped going to classes and was retaking her final year by the time she ended all contact with him. This was March 2020, going into lockdown, and in that quiet space, she began healing and started to think about pursuing justice. “I wrote everything down and seeing it in words made it clear. He was doing a medical degree so it was partly for the safety of other people, but it’s also fair and right to want justice for myself.”
Within a week of Wilson’s police interview, McFarlane was arrested and charged. Next came a two-year wait for the case to reach trial.
“I knew that cases such as these were supposed to be heard in a year, but I was told that the Covid backlog meant it would be a lot longer,” says Wilson. “It’s like a cloud hanging over you, it’s never out of your mind.” Still, for the first year, Wilson felt she was doing well – she focused on her master’s and got a distinction and began working in the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. McFarlane had been suspended from Glasgow University so she assumed he would be back home in the Highlands on bail. Then she saw on social media that he was in Edinburgh, too. He’d been offered a place at Edinburgh University despite their awareness of his impending trial.
When you are living close to the man who has been charged with your rape – as many victims do during the long wait for trial – every day is traumatising. “Walking in public was terrifying for me,” says Wilson. “I would see his face on men’s faces in the streets. I’d freeze regularly, burst into tears at random moments. I started crying in front of the MSP I worked for. I had a really big scar on my arm as I chose to hurt myself instead of killing myself. I’d done all this healing, taken these steps forward and now I was going backwards.”
She was shocked by the absence of support available. “I knew that accessing mental health services is really difficult but I thought in these circumstances, when you’re going to court, there must be something, some sort of funding. There’s nothing.”
As the trial approached, Wilson struggled with suicidal thoughts. “I was terrified about how I would cope if he was found not guilty,” she says. “That was the big thing – to not be believed. If he was acquitted, it would be as if I’m being told it didn’t happen and that was the most painful thing in the world for me. I couldn’t live in a world that would let someone do that.”
When Wilson finally gave evidence, separated from McFarlane by a screen, she had no idea what lines of questioning to expect. “It’s not you v him – it’s the crown v him, so there’s no one talking to you about the case beforehand. You’re not allowed to be given any information.” The prosecutor’s questions took two hours. Then came the defence advocate – his questions to Wilson took two days.
Though Wilson had fully expected her accounts of the rapes to be challenged, it was still excruciating to hear. “He was massaging your buttocks and touching you in that area, you became very wet and that … led on to intercourse … maybe it was sore because you had this UTI, and so you were crying but you didn’t stop him …”
What she hadn’t expected was what felt like a character assassination. “The prosecution focused on facts,” says Wilson. “The defence was very different. He was charismatic, theatrical – he was more concerned with painting a picture.” That picture showed, in the defence’s words, “a straight-A student from a nice Christian background” who’d “fallen in love” with an arch-manipulator.
“He made a big thing that Daniel was a virgin when we met and I wasn’t,” says Wilson. “Respect in court is so important. We call the judge ‘My Lord’ and stand when he enters the room. But the defence kept calling me ‘this girl’.” “This girl, what do you know about her?” he asked the jury. “This is a girl without empathy all right!”
He asked Wilson if she liked to make McFarlane jealous. He asked about her drinking and what she wore to bed. He asked if she had narcissistic personality disorder – not based on medical evidence, just his own analysis. Then he asked if she’d heard of cluster B personality disorders – the judge instructed Wilson not to answer.
The case lasted six days. Wilson held her nerve and answered well – although that seemed to count against her in the defence’s closing speech. “She’s the strong one!” he said at one point. “I suggest to you that she can manipulate … You saw how she was with me! Daniel had to put up with that for two and a half years!”
McFarlane was found guilty – although the verdict wasn’t unanimous, even with a recorded confession included as evidence. “It was an immense relief,” says Wilson. She chose to attend the sentencing. “I wanted to walk into court and show I hadn’t been defeated.” McFarlane was now a convicted rapist but you wouldn’t know it when his defence advocate set out the mitigation plea. “Tragically, he went to university … he hadn’t even kissed a girl before then and he fell in love with the wrong person … They were like chalk and cheese, my lord … Their life experiences were very, very different … All this was a relationship that wasn’t going well.” “The word ‘rape’ was used once in that whole speech, the word ‘love’ was used six times,” says Wilson. “There had already been a guilty verdict but I had to listen in silence to what was essentially a tirade against me.” McFarlane was sentenced to five years. McFarlane’s defence advocate did not respond to the Guardian’s approach for comment.
Unlike with Wilson, more than six rape and sexual assault cases are discontinued every week as complainants withdraw their support – in many cases due to waiting for a court date that can stretch up to three years – which is about a third higher than nine years ago. Partly to address this, England and Wales is rolling out prerecorded evidence, where rape victims can give evidence and have their cross-examination as close to the time of reporting as possible, when memories are fresh and to avoid the long wait and trauma of open court. Scotland is considering a range of measures including specialist sexual violence courts with judge-only trials. Advocacy and support groups such as the Centre for Women’s Justice and Rape Crisis have pointed out that the current system incentivises defence advocates to destroy a complainant’s credibility and undermine them in any way possible. Plenty of research has shown that rape myths are alive and well in the average jury – ideas about how “genuine” victims would behave, what they would wear, how much they would drink – so the defence’s best chance is to play to them.
“I can see the argument for a panel of judges,” says Wilson, “but there are simple, less controversial things we can do, like ensuring defence questioning doesn’t cross the line and that complainants are treated with dignity and respect. We could ensure they have access to psychological support.” In order to make a complaint against McFarlane’s defence advocate, Wilson needed a copy of the court transcript, which was only available at a cost of £3,000 plus VAT. She raised this through crowdfunding and is now campaigning to abolish this prohibitive expense for victims of crime. “All it does is perpetuate the secrecy around the court.” She is also in discussion with Ucas and the Scottish government over the admission of students to university when they have serious criminal records or are awaiting trial.
In truth all this action is a kind of therapy. “The trauma will never go away,” says Wilson. “I need to pour all this energy and hurt somewhere. Of course I want change, but if I can help one person who is going through this feel less alone, then that means so much.” It also helps drown out the thoughts that sometimes surface in the quieter moments. She is still trying to make sense of it all. “I worry about him in prison, I feel guilty about the bright future he had, scared about him hurting himself,” she says. “But then I think about the person I was and what he took from me and all I’ve had to go through since. I need to remind myself that justice is something worth celebrating.”
• In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
