For six years Leah Collard was known by one of two names when she was behind closed doors with her partner.
“He would call me a fat ugly c*** – that was my name,” she said. “Occasionally he would call me a fat ugly lazy c*** depending on whether I had been cleaning or not.”
Earlier this year her ex-partner, 29-year-old David Rhys Williams, pleaded guilty to assault and a public order offence against Leah. She has now bravely spoken about what it was like to live over half a decade with a domestic abuser.
“We first got together in May 2013,” she said. “The first behaviour that I noticed was about a month in. I wanted to go out with my friends and he said: ‘No – I don’t like your friends, they are trouble, you are not going out with them’. Throughout our six-year relationship I never went out once.”
Leah claimed that type of behaviour quickly escalated into violence and aggression. On one occasion Leah managed to secretly record some of their interactions on her phone where 6ft 3in Williams appears to have been strangling her while she was pregnant with his baby.
You can hear the recording in the video below. Please be aware it is very distressing and contains strong language:
During the clip, recorded on New Year's Eve 2013, Leah can be heard saying “Get off me, get the f*** off me” while a man can be heard laughing. Williams has confirmed to WalesOnline that he is the man in the recording.
“Don’t do that to me – I am pregnant!” Leah can be heard screaming. “You will make me have a miscarrage with your f***ing child. You want to kill your child do you?”
Williams can then be heard to reply: “Who gives a f***? Who would want a baby with you? You are a f***ing slut.”
In the recording she says she will call the police and Williams replies: “What is 999 gonna do? Give me 120 community service hours?”
At one point a clearly terrified Leah can be heard confronting her then-partner. She tells him: “You just strangled me. Get out the house you f***ing woman beater. I am getting my son away from you.”
Williams replies “Get an abortion” before adding: “All you do is push me and push me. Do you know what happens to people who laugh at me? End up in hospital with life-changing surgery. I don’t give a f***. That is who I am.”
At one point, after Leah says Williams has just strangled her, he replies: "Yeah – so what?"
Towards the end of the recording, during which Leah appears to call the police at one point, Williams can be heard screaming again and again at her to rip up her pregnancy scan photos.
“If we’re over rip them up,” he says. “F*** you, f*** me, and f*** this family.”
“I hoped that he would change,” said Leah. “I was also scared of leaving because of financial problems. I thought I might struggle on my own with the kids. A lot of the time he threatened he would kill himself if I left.”
In the recording Williams can be heard saying he will cut himself if she leaves him.
Leah said: “It is hard because when someone is controlling you it is like you can’t live your own life. You’ve lived your life through them for so long that you just don’t know what to do.
“They can make you scared of them but also completely dependent on them.”
Leah says it wasn’t just anger she faced – she claims she was also controlled both in her working life and financially.
The 29-year-old, from the Vale of Glamorgan, said: “Paranoia was a big thing. I would go to work and he wouldn’t believe me. I was and I would have to take pictures and send it to him.
“I was a carer at the time out in the community and because I wasn’t in one place he thought that I was out doing things behind his back.
“A couple of months later I had to change my job and he rang up one of his friends’ mums and got me an interview in a care home so he knew I was in one place. I didn’t know about it until he said I have an interview.
“I was on good money in my old job and then at the care home I was on much less.
“It was a massive dip but I did it to keep him happy. I was only in the care home for about six months.
“I left there after a while because we couldn’t live off that small wage and went into another community job. But then I had all the same problems.”
She claimed Williams would get angry over how she cleaned the family home.
“If I washed the dishes and let them dry on the side he would smash all the dishes,” she said.
“He would also demand I give him money. When I got the child benefit he said he needed the money because he had booked a new £300 tattoo.
“Every month he would say that he needed new football boots and if I said we couldn’t afford it he would just smash stuff up. I would then give in and give him the money because I wanted to quiet life.”
The turning point for Leah came when social services threatened to take her children away.
After the assault in April, which Williams admitted at Cardiff Magistrates’ Court, she received a letter from Vale of Glamorgan council saying the relationship had previously been “recognised as ‘high-risk’”.
The letter said: “We have been informed that you intend to resume your relationship with Mr David Rhys Williams.
“Our department has a number of concerns that this relationship is detrimental to the wellbeing of your children who may in turn be at risk of significant emotional harm.
“Additionally in resuming the relationship it may be seen that you are failing to protect your children by exposing them to domestic violence.”
They said they would consider further proceedings. It was then that Leah finally left Williams.
“I feel like I don’t have to walk on eggshells anymore but my anxiety is through the roof,” she said. “There is a two-year restraining order but what happens after the two years?
“I am fed up of just being this horrible little victim.
“I walk around but when I am in Barry visiting my family I get really nervous that I will see people who know him and they might do something.
“I don’t want this anymore. I want people to understand how he treated me. I want people to understand what I went through.”
For Leah one of her biggest frustrations is that because Williams admitted charges of assault and using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause Leah harassment, alarm, or distress, she never got to publicly say what she endured.
She said: “If it had all gone ahead in court it (the recording) would have been played in court and people will have heard it. I never got my day in court.”
Williams, of St Brannocks Close, Barry, pleaded guilty to assault by beating and using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause Leah harassment, alarm or distress.
On October 21 he was fined a total of £369 and ordered to pay £100 in compensation to Leah along with a victim surcharge of £30 and prosecution costs of £85.
He was also made subject to a two-year restraining order preventing him from contacting Leah.
When approached by WalesOnline Williams refused to provide a comment.
If you, or someone you know, is affected by domestic violence, visit the Live Fear Free website, or call the helpline on 0808 80 10 800.
