Of all the details coming to light about Virginie de Selliers, the mother of convicted aristocrat Constance Marten, a few in particular stand out: that she works as a psychotherapist specialising in trauma, family and grief; that she hiredrivate detectives to search for her daughter on multiple occasions; and that she attempted to pass her daughter a Christmas card during a pre-trial hearing are among the moving and curious details to be revealed since her sentencing at the Old Bailey this week.
But for most people reading the various stories swirling around Virginie, 65, and the daughter now convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence, one seems to be raising the most questions. According to reports in several newspapers, Virginie — a devout Christian who focuses on “physical and spiritual being” in her work as a psychotherapist — also attended Holy Trinity Brompton, the evangelic church in west London with whom Constance, now 38, went onto fly to Nigeria and seemingly changed forever.
Virginie and Constance reportedly attended the church together from the year 2006, when Constance was still at her £30,000-a-year boarding school, St Mary’s school in Shaftesbury. The then-teenager took Holy Trinity’s Alpha Course, an introduction to evangelical Christianity, and attended its religious summer camps. Sometime after she left school, she made a pilgrimage to Nigeria with her mother and other members of Holy Trinity’s congregation, spending three months with Synagogue, Church of All Nations (SCOAN) in Lagos — an experience that is said to have had a profound impact on her, and maybe well have been the turning point for what happened next, according to loved ones.
See also: Inside Crichel House: Constance Marten’s ancestral country estate
Virginie is believed to have attended the Church of All Nations for a period of time, too — a matter of weeks, unlike her daughter who stayed for months, say reports — and was unaware of the abuse allegations that were later made about the so-called cult and its evangelical leader. So was she really to blame for introducing her daughter to this evangelical world, as Constance has suggested? Is that the real reason she offered to care for Constance’s two oldest children after they were taken away? And what of her other children — Constance’s brothers Maximilian, 36, Tobias, 33, and Frederic, 30 — why did only one of them attend the trial, and how do they feel about their sister’s tragic descent into a life of crime?
Virginie de Selliers, 65: the therapist mother who led Constance to Christianity
“Of course,” was Virginie de Selliers’ response to a request from a potential client on LinkedIn in 2024 — just a year after her daughter Constance went missing and sparked a 54-day nationwide hunt for her weeks-old baby.
The client was asking whether Virginie had experience dealing with “mother/daughter trauma PTSD in a cross cultural environment of different multicultural moral values” and Virginie — a trained psychotherapist specialising in trauma, family therapy and grief — replied to say she did indeed have experience in that field, and was fluent in both French and English, as the woman required.
The fact that the Belgian-born 65-year-old has such direct experience in mother-daughter relationships certainly adds a layer of intrigue to the already extraordinary story of her now-convicted daughter Constance, and speaks to the chain of events now suspected to have led to her disappearance and the subsequent death of her baby, Victoria, in 2023.
So what did happen exactly, and how much did Virginie have to do with it? Any clues, it seems, are likely to lie around the year 2006 — 17 years before Constance was arrested — when the mother and daughter pair flew to Nigeria to listen to the preachings of an evangelical pastor since accused of being a predator who committed rape and forced abortions on women at his church.
The two of them had had a tumultuous few years by this point, after Virginie’s now-ex-husband Napier, Constance’s father and a former page to the Queen, left the family to fly to Australia for a life of whale watching and spiritual discovery. The couple came from one of England’s most prominent aristocratic households — Napier was a former Page to Queen Elizabeth II, and Virginie was the granddaughter of former Conservative MP Anthony Crommelin Crossley — and Napier’s so-called midlife “awakening” made headlines at the time (and again years later when Constance went missing in 2023. Did his colourful past could hold clues to his daughter’s time on the run?).
Constance was just nine when her father walked out, and Virginie raised her and her four brothers alone. Two years after Napier left, she re-married a wealthy Belgian investment banker called Guy de Selliers, and moved the family to London. Constance lived with her mother and stepfather when she wasn’t at boarding school, and had an occasionally stormy relationship with them, as many teenagers do. Family friends insist it was rarely over anything serious. It was in 2006, when Constance was 19 and on her gap year, that the two of them took that now-infamous pilgrimage to Nigeria, after her mother introduced her to Holy Trinity Brompton, one of Britain’s most renowned evangelical churches which had become popular with high-profile figures such as Geri Halliwell and Bear Grylls.
“It was made very clear that Constance was being brought to get help — help in the sense that she was rebellious, strong-willed, disobedient,” a former British member of the church has since told reporters of that pilgrimage to SCOAN in Nigeria. “I can remember very specifically the time she came with Constance,” said another, of Virginie’s stint with her daughter in Lagos. “They stood out like a sore thumb, these really upper-class, white British people. We were told to take extra care of them. And Virginie was quite a presence.”
Exactly what happened while the teenager was in Lagos on her own is unclear, but we do know that she was hand-picked by its pastor, TB Joshua, to stay for longer, and it clearly had a profound impact. Constance later said the experience left her “completely broken apart'”. She was apparently forced to live in a dormitory with 50 other women under the watchful eye of armed guards. They were starved, she said, woken at night for readings from the bible, and made to call Joshua “Daddy”. “The leader looked me in the eye and said, ‘Your family doesn’t matter any more. I’m your father now’,” Constance later recalled.
Many of Constance’s female peers have since alleged that Joshua assaulted, abused and even raped them during their visits to SCOAN. “TB Joshua would send for the white girls to visit his bedroom upstairs, one after the other, he wooed them for sex,” author Bisola Hephzi-Bah Johnson wrote in her 2018 book about the cult, Deception of the Age Unmasked. There has been no suggestion that Constance herself was abused during her time in Lagos, but Johnson does allege that “Toots Marten” was one of Joshua’s early foreign female “disciples”, and Constance herself did later describe how he would humiliate her and the other white devotees. They were reportedly made to eat his leftover food, and forced to sleep on just a few hours’ sleep each night.
She always used to be wild, but also happy, kind and buoyant. She was darker when she came back from Nigeria
Constance reportedly left Joshua’s cult suddenly with the help of Virginie, and later blamed her mother for having introduced her to the evangelical world that her led her there. She was never the same after that Nigeria trip, say friends. “She always used to be wild, but also happy, kind and buoyant. She was darker when she came back and she found things more difficult,” one later reported. Was that where the mother-daughter rift began?
Quite possibly. In 2008 — two years after Constance’s gap year trip to Nigeria — she enrolled in an undergraduate Arabic course at Leeds University, the chapter in which she featured as Tatler magazine’s “Babe of the Month” and took trips to Nepal and Egypt. After university, she moved to London like the majority of her fellow graduates, working as a researcher for Arabic TV network Al Jazeera and gaining an NCTJ qualification in journalism before enrolling on an acting course at East 15 drama school in Essex. Friends say the young aristocrat was a “very good actress” and could have gone far, but it was during this time that she started to change. She lost interest in acting and dropped out of the course after a run-in with a course tutor. Around that same time, she began a supposedly turbulent relationship with a man we now know to be Mark Gordon, who she met in an “Indian shop” selling incense in 2014, and started living with him in Ilford, east London. “Please respect my decision, I don’t want to see any of you any more, please don’t try and find me or contact me, thank you, goodbye,” was the rough wording of the text Constance sent friends and family in the summer of 2016. She later claimed in court that she stopped speaking to her family two years before meeting Gordon.
In October 2016, Virginie is understood to have hired private detectives from London Security Group to trace her daughter after she failed to attend a family holiday. The firm reportedly brought in an agency called CSM Partners to undergo surveillance on Constance and Gordon, later arranging for Napier to try approaching Gordon in a café.
Over the following years, there were various attempts at reconciliations from Virginie and her ex-husband. The Mail reports that there was a brief reconciliation after the birth of Constance’s first child in 2017. Gordon had just been jailed for assaulting two female police officers at the hospital, but as soon as he returned to Constance, the family were cut off again. In 2019, Napier reportedly began wardship proceedings to raise his oldest two grandchildren, but the children ended up being placed in foster care.
In 2022, Virginie tried, putting herself forward as a potential carer for the same two children. She told the Family Court she “felt desperately sad for her daughter and the children”, but later withdrew her offer after being given full access to her daughter’s files. “She saw the relationship between the parents as an enmeshed and abusive one, and was concerned that if any of the children were placed with her she would not be able safely to care for them,” Virginie’s lawyer explained. The previous year, in 2021, Virginie had hired another agent, Blackstone Consultancy, to conduct a two-month surveillance operation on the couple.
Little is known about Virginie’s personal life during this long and tumultuous period, but we do know that her work as a psychotherapist began around the time Constance claims to have started cutting off contact with her family. She enrolled in a counselling degree at the University of Roehampton in south-west London in 2011, the same year Constance graduated from Leeds University, and began a two-year programme in systemic family therapy in October 2016, the same month she first hired private detectives to trace her daughter. Her LinkedIn page lists her as a counsellor and group work facilitator since the year 2012, with specialisms in trauma, family therapy and grief, and private practices in Shaftesbury in Dorset and Notting Hill in west London.
The first time she publicly commented on her estranged daughter’s disappearance was in February 2023, a month after Constance went missing. “To My Darling Daughter Constance,” she began an open letter handed to the press. “I know you well enough; you are focused, intelligent, passionate and complex with so much to offer the world. So many of your friends have come forward to say such positive things about you, assuring us of their warmest love and support for you and your family. You have made choices in your personal adult life which have proven to be challenging, however I respect them, I know that you want to keep your precious new-born child at all costs. With all that you have gone through this baby cannot be removed from you but instead needs looking after in a kind and warm environment.
“I want to help you and my grandchild. You deserve the opportunity to build a new life, establish a stable family and enjoy the same freedoms that most of us have. Constance, I will do what I can to stand alongside you and my grandchild. You are not alone in this situation. We will support you in whatever way we can. I am ready to do what it takes for you to recover from this awful experience so you can thrive and enjoy motherhood. I love you and miss you, Mum xx.”
The psychotherapist was present for every day of her daughter’s first trial at the Old Bailey in 2024, scribbling notes and wiping tears from her eyes as Constance described the moment she and Gordon reportedly considered taking their own lives after Victoria’s death. At one pre-trial hearing, Virginie was reportedly spotted asking an usher to pass a Christmas card to Constance, who was in the dock, and observers say Constance herself also cried when she saw her mother at the start of the 2024 trial. After that, Constance is said to have avoided eye-contact with her mother, despite sitting just yards away.
Less than a year on from that teary courtroom reunion and neither Virginie or any relative of Constance’s have been seen attending her current trial, which started in March and saw the 38-year-old and her partner found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence. “A mother who turns up to the trial every single day to hear what she has heard is not a mother who has abandoned her daughter,” a source said of Virginie after the 2024 trial. What was said or felt between Virginie and her daughter during the eight month period since remains a mystery.
Max Marten, 36: the oldest brother who married his sister’s best friend
Much of what is known publicly about Maximillian (Max) Marten, the eldest of Constance’s three younger brothers, comes from coverage of his high-society 2021 wedding to jewellery designer Ruth Aymer — who just so happens to have been Constance’s best friend growing up. Photos on Constance’s now-dormant Instagram account show the two young women singing along to rap music on a road trip and sipping cocktails together in Italy for Aymer’s birthday.
Aymer, a University of the Arts London graduate and "one of the most positive, loyal, upbeat humans on this here earth" according to Constance, had started dating Max, a Bryanston-educated sustainable real estate manager, the previous year, having met through family friends when they were just six years old and stayed close over the years. They became an item in 2015, when both were 26, and got engaged on a safari in Kenya four years later, in 2019.
The pair married six years later in an opulent ceremony at St Giles House in Dorset, home of his great-grandmother, Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, in August 2021, a week after their civil wedding at York House in Richmond, followed by lunch and an after-party with at Laylow on west London’s Portobello Road. A feature in Vogue showed his mother Virginie and brothers Tobias (Toby) and Freddie smiling with the bride and groom at their Dorset wedding, alongside Adrian de Selliers, believed to be Virginie’s stepson and named in Vogue as a “brother” of the groom.
Napier and Constance do not appear in any of the photographs from the wedding — an insight into the fracturing of a once tight-knit family of six. Indeed, the siblings were understood to be close growing up, Constance once describing their idyllic childhood of naked picnics on the estate and naps in hay bales.
After Napier returned from Australia, Max — his eldest son — was the one he chose to pass the family estate to. Max was studying science and geography at Oxford Brookes University at the time, and in 2013 he sold the house and 400 acres of its land to American hedge fund billionaire Richard Chilton for a reported £34 million. The rest of the property was divided among other heirs to the family fortune, including Napier’s five sisters.
Where Max and his wife live now and at what point they lost contact with Constance is not publicly known, but they are not understood to have attended Constance’s trial and did not appear in photographs entering the court. “My day starts with hugs from my husband, a shared coffee or herbal tea together,” she recently wrote in a blog for London shoe brand Rupert Sanderson in which a photo appears to show her holding a baby bump.
Tobias Marten, 33: the good-humoured middle brother who attended his sister’s trial
Tobias (Toby) Marten was the only one of Constance’s three siblings to attend her trial. He attended from time-to-time, apparently, and was pictured (picture shown above) arriving at the Old Bailey with his mother, Virginie, in January 2024, sporting a grey suit and a brown coat and rather more facial hair than the profile picture on his LinkedIn page, which lists him as the managing director of Political Confectionaries, a satirical baked goods company registered in Chelsea.
The most recent post on Political Confectionaries’ Instagram page was in August 2021, the same month as Max and Ruth’s wedding, with a plug for the company’s Brexit-themed shortbread biscuits. A couple of months previously, the company had made headlines for having a batch of its shortbreads rejected by a foodbank in Wandsworth for “not being apolitical”. “We’re proud to be a British company, and what’s more British than sorting things out over a biscuit?” Tobias’ co-founder Orlando Gaul told reporters at the time.
On Companies House, Tobias’ registered address is in Kensington. The Royal Agricultural University graduate previously ran a tree care firm with his father, Napier, after carrying out a work placement with the real estate firm Savills.
Frederic Marten, 30: the mysterious youngest brother who did not attend the trial
So little is known about Frederic Marten, Constance’s youngest brother, that several reports seem to miss him off the Marten sibling list altogether. That he is 30 years old, that he goes by the name of Freddie and that he attended Max and Ruth’s wedding in 2021 are about all that is known publicly about the youngest of the Marten brothers.
Once again, the mystery only adds to the intrigue surrounding the entire Marten family and the circumstances that led to Constance’s long, slow descent into a life of crime. Were she and her brothers close in more recent years? Did she ever open up to them about Joshua? Did they ever meet Gordon, and is there a reason Toby attended the trial, but neither of his brothers did?
Further details are expected to emerge as the trial continues and approaches the sentencing, but for now many of the mysteries surrounding this extraordinary story remain. All eyes on the sentencing in September.
