“That’s how we break his power over us, by being together,” declares Shannon, one of four victims of Aaron Swan who detail his crimes in Lover, Liar, Predator. Among their disturbing stories of coercive control, it’s a hard but hopeful moment.
Shannon is not alone. In the largest ever survey of rape and sexual assault survivors by Operation Soteria, set up to change the way the police investigate sexual offences, 88% of respondents of the survey prioritised the prevention of future harm. Women aren’t reporting to protect themselves, they are reporting to protect other women from the horrors that they have been subjected to.
Lover, Liar, Predator, now streaming on iPlayer, is another shocking portrait of an abuser. It shows the access Aaron Swan had to vulnerable women as well as how hard the system makes it to stop a known, obvious and present threat. It should be shown in school Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) classes, along with workshops on what coercive control looks like – the love-bombing, the isolating aggression. We need to equip young women with the tools to recognise dangerous behaviours and extract themselves from those situations.
Natalie meets Aaron at the age of 17, escaping from an intensely religious background. We see her away from home for the first time, a goofy, happy kid. We then learn how that light was quickly extinguished by Swan coercing her into sex, impregnating her, marrying her and subjecting her to unwanted acts of sexual violence that she felt she had no right to object to. While doing this, Aaron constantly tells her she is worthless, that he is still in love with his ex and that she is lucky to have him.
Natalie goes into premature labour with her second child after violently being raped by her then-husband. She later recounts how she reported the crime to police while sitting next to her baby’s incubator, clear that the rape induced her labour. Watching Natalie’s interviews, I can’t help but think of the Epstein survivors whose stories are currently being used for political fodder while the world continues to ignore the actual victims who have not been believed for 15 years.
Lover, Liar, Predator’s rolling timeline shows how Swan moved between victims. After Natalie reports Swan, he goes on the prowl via Facebook in Scarborough and happens upon Jenni, a 16-year-old living with her mum and sister.
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Swan was already on the sex offenders list, but was nonetheless able to coerce Jenni away from her family and isolate her to move in with him in Jedburgh. Jenni’s mother alerted police and social services, who said they were unable to stop Jenni from going with Swan, despite past indicators of abusive behaviour. Swan is even found to have child sex abuse images on his iPad, but after escaping a conviction for raping Natalie, he is not given a custodial sentence. Instead, he is placed on another sexual offenders registry and is banned from being alone with his child – yet Jenni is still not protected from him.
Nor are other women. On the night of his engagement, he rapes Jenni’s closest female friend and uses that event to further humiliate and isolate Jenni, claiming it was consensual. Jenni loses her best friend and her route for escape.
As the horror story continues, the surprising unsung hero is Swan’s sister, who intervenes to try to protect the women in her brother’s orbit. She involves police when her brother threatens to kill himself and Jenni and later responsible for Robyn, his latest victim, enrolling in a course about domestic violence and abusive and coercive behaviour. In a remarkable turn of events, the course that she recommends to the 18-year-old turns out to have been written and produced by Natalie. It helps Robyn to report Swan to the authorities.
It’s easier to see Aaron Swan as a monster or an anomaly, but actually his behaviour is the very normal cycle of a sexual predator. The programme invites us to celebrate the moral and collective victory of the four women who came together to take him down, but that is nearly impossible to do, when the policing and justice systems don’t track, combine or help monitor predatory men. And for the four survivors we know about, there are five times that number whose stories we will never hear.
It should not take four women 20 years of corroboration and violent sexual assaults for a single predator to face justice. Just as it shouldn’t take hundreds of women and millions of emails to believe the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. I’m grateful to these women, but they shouldn’t have to do the work that policing and judicial systems fail to do.
Lover, Liar, Predator is available on iPlayer. Jamie Klingler is co-founder of Reclaim These Streets
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