My husband was found not guilty – then went on to abuse other women

‘The stories men tell about redemption are about bad men becoming good men.

‘But for women, the act of being saved comes from the way they care for and love one another in light of what men have done to them.’

Natalie Collins isn’t speaking generally. Last year, she sat in court for weeks listening to and supporting three women who had been manipulated and abused by a man named Aaron Swan.

She had made her own allegation against him nearly two decades earlier, but was left shattered when a jury believed his account over hers and Swan was allowed to go free.

After picking up the pieces and rebuilding her life, Natalie, 40, set up a course she hoped would help those subjected to domestic violence in the same way therapy helped her.

More than 14,000 women have found support on her Own My Life course since its inception in 2020 – including another young woman unfortunate enough to have fallen into Swan’s possessive orbit.

The two of them, along with two of Swan’s other victims, banded together to form a sisterhood that finally ensured he could not continue the campaign of rape and abuse he had subjected them – and likely many others – to over the course of some 30 years.

He was eventually found guilty of six charges — four counts of rape, one of sexual assault and one of abusive behaviour against one of them —and jailed for six years.

An order for lifelong restriction attached to that sentence means he’ll never be released without supervision.

‘The horrifying thing was that if the police had done their job in 2006, he wouldn’t have been able to rape so many other women,’ Natalie says.

‘This is a man who has been raping girls since he was a teenager, and it took until he was nearly 40 for the seriousness of his dangerousness to be recognised.’

Natalie grew up in a working class and ‘very evangelical Christian’ family in the north of England. She recalls how that came with ‘all sorts of ideas about what relationships should be like, always with the opposite sex and abstinence’.

It also left her vulnerable to the lure of Swan, who told her he shared her Christian faith and swiftly started ‘love bombing’ her.

‘He kind of sucked me in,’ she recalls. ‘He was telling me all his deep dark secrets and I then owed him all my deep dark secrets.

‘Suddenly, by like day five of knowing each other, he knew more about me than anyone else ever has. And that can be utilised and exploited later on.’

Within 12 days of meeting, Swan had manipulated her into having sex, which in the context of Natalie’s faith meant ‘really the only solution was to marry him’.

‘He knew what this crossing the line into sexual activity meant in my life,’ she says.

‘What abusers do is they find ways to hook something into you that basically makes it impossible to extricate yourself.’

Swan also refused to use contraception, meaning Natalie fell pregnant with their daughter within six months and they were married soon after.

The compliments that peppered their early relationship soon gave way to more possessive and controlling behaviour.

Swan also regularly cheated on her.

In hindsight, Natalie – now an expert on male violence against women – recognises he was likely manipulating the other women into having sex with him in the same way he coerced her.

There were several times she tried to leave, but he would always change her mind.

Things came to a head in 2004 when Natalie discovered Swan was sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl, something for which he was convicted and placed on the sex offenders register.

It was the spark that ignited Natalie’s desire to pack up and leave Swan for good.

But the thing about abusers, Natalie reflects, is they can sense when something shifts and their partner ‘isn’t in this anymore’.

‘Very often that’s when they will escalate their behaviour,’ she adds. ‘And he violently raped me.’

She was pregnant with their second child at the time and their son was born three months premature just a week after the attack.

He was ‘incredibly ill’, Natalie recalls, and they spent the next five months living in hospitals.

It gave her the time and space she needed to finally leave Swan for good. Natalie reported him to police over the rape and he went on trial in 2006.

But he walked free after telling jurors they had had consensual sex while he was on bail, undermining her claims.

‘He manipulated me,’ Natalie says looking back at how events unfolded.

‘I was in a highly vulnerable state with this sick baby. He’s the child’s father and I’m living in a hospital an hour and a half from my hometown. I mean, in terms of vulnerability you really couldn’t get much worse, could you?’

She goes on: ‘After that I became really traumatised. I went on a course that helped me realise that what happened to me and what he’d done to me had this name – “abuse”.

‘I thought all my bad feelings were because he kept cheating on me, and not because he was horrifically abusive. I just didn’t know the name of it.

‘I thought adults could abuse children – I had no idea that you could be abused by a partner.’

Natalie ended up moving down to the south of England, rebuilding her life and marrying again.

She also put the knowledge gained through ‘lots and lots’ of therapy and counselling into developing her Own My Life course.

It provides women with training, resources and support with the aim of helping them take back ownership of their lives from abusive men and from patriarchal systems.

More than 14,000 women have found support through the course.

Natalie had no idea that one of those would be another of her ex-husband’s victims.

Then, three years ago she found herself ‘catapulted’ back into Swan’s life when their daughter, then 17, contacted him on Facebook.

After getting back in touch with Swan’s sister Amy*, with whom she had always had a good relationship, Natalie discovered he had moved to Scotland and continued his abusive ways.

He had got into a long-term relationship with another teenager, Olivia*, after grooming her over the internet when she was 16 and getting her pregnant within a year – all despite still being on the sex offenders register.

Amy put Natalie in touch with Olivia and the pair met up with their respective children and shared their similar stories with one another.

Olivia revealed her guilt at cutting off a friend, Hannah*, who had also been raped by Swan, only for him to later claim she had seduced him into having consensual sex.

The two repaired their relationship once Olivia left Swan and in 2021, she reported the rape to police after being asked to do so by her old friend.

Meanwhile, Natalie and Amy began to fear that Swan’s new partner, Becky*, who he similarly coupled up with when she was still a teenager, was being harmed in the same way they had been.

Amy persuaded Becky to attend the Own My Life course, Natalie says, adding: ‘Going through that course, she realised he was abusive.

‘Olivia then asked the police, “can you just go around there and ask has he raped you?”, because I don’t think she was ever going to volunteer that, but she might now be in a position to.

‘The police went around and asked her, and she disclosed having been raped.’

Under Scotland’s Moorov doctrine, evidence from one crime can be used to corroborate evidence from another, meaning Olivia’s, Hannah’s and Becky’s allegations could all be tried together.

Although her own case couldn’t be joined with it, Natalie sat through the trial to support the women.

‘I sat through the whole court case, which was horrifically traumatic,’ Natalie says.

During the trial, Swan’s own barrister told the court he admitted cheating on Becky with more than a dozen other women.

Natalie says she would have seen some of those as ‘the other woman’ when she was with Swan and recalls screaming at one in a nightclub once for sleeping with her husband.

‘It wasn’t actually until I ended up back in contact with the others that suddenly I was like, “oh my word – none of these women were consenting to sleeping with a married man”,’ she adds.

‘That’s not what happened here.’

This time Swan did not walk free. He was convicted of six of the seven charges he faced.

‘It’s incredible really – the idea that the course was the reason why his woman was enabled to report it to the police and have a very different experience than I did. It blows my mind,’ Natalie says.

She has photos of them – ‘The Sisterhood’ – smiling together taken after the trial.

‘For me there is something really profound about like, this is the most horrific, horrific story, but actually what comes out of it is that none of us are defined by this story.

‘None of us are defined by this stuff.

‘When you’ve had someone who has spent his whole life making women hate other women because he’s raped them and is skilled enough to make them think they consented – to reject that and to choose to care for and love those women and want the best for them is the absolute best way to reject the world he has tried to create.’

*Some names have been changed.

Natalie has worked as an advocate for survivors nationally and internationally for over a decade and is the author of Out of Control: Couples, Conflict and the Capacity for Change.

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