Laughing at the pub with a glint in his eye. Horsing around as we brushed our teeth and fought over the same tiny mirror. Pulling me into the seat behind him for a ride on his quad bike. And coming quickly to my rescue when a sinister, sweat-stained man tried to corner me in a dimly lit room.
These are the memories I have of an old friend. Or at least, these are the memories I used to have of him because, as the person I once knew heads to jail, convicted of 43 sexual offences against young women, I’m wrestling with the realisation that these sweet moments paint a pretty picture of a man who, it turns out, wasn’t so sweet at all.
What are you supposed to do when someone close to you turns out to be entirely different from who you thought they were? Recent celebrity stories have reminded us that a ‘but he didn’t do it to me’ line of thinking is not only inappropriate, but also risks undermining victim testimonies. So even if it’s uncomfortable, it feels important to go back and re-evaluate the past, to see what I might have missed, to reform my judgement going forwards and to honour the stories of those who suffered at his hands.
…
I first met Alex in the drama department at school. He wasn’t a teacher but was working in a supporting role. In his career as a stage and production manager, he eventually went on to organise events for the Royal Family and Elton John, but at the time that I knew him, he was mostly helping with the technical side of our school productions.
Because he wasn’t a teacher, we didn’t feel the need to observe the usual boundaries of behaviour. He was also young – 26 – and though I was 15 and in hindsight that 11-year gap feels like a gaping void, back then I was convinced I had the worldliness of a fully grown woman. I was already blagging my way into nightclubs and snogging men older than him, so it didn’t feel strange to be friends with someone in their mid-twenties.
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He was funny, if a little bit mysterious and his fleeting presence at school made him more intriguing to me. I was genuinely impressed by what he knew about theatre, which I badly wanted to get into, and also his knack for explaining things as a matter of fact, without condescension. As far as I could tell, he was well-respected by the other staff too, for the same reasons. And, over time, I developed a strong platonic affection for him.
Eventually, I started to spend bits of time with him outside of the school walls. He invited me and a couple of others to join his team as assistant production managers on an independent theatre show down in Surrey during the summer. For me, this was an incredible opportunity to take on proper, professional responsibilities in a ‘showbiz’ setting. I was given a headset and a walkie-talkie, proper scripts with stage directions to follow and even the opportunity to learn to do prosthetics.
It also meant nights spent holed up in a barn, sleeping on folding beds, with Alex just beyond a makeshift curtain on the other side of the room. After the show each evening we’d wind down together. We’d have a laugh over food, I remember a ketchup fight and various silly pranks; we’d chat, brush our teeth and conduct our bedtime and morning routines together. Recounting it, I know that some of these things will read as red flags, but they didn’t to me at the time.
There’s one particular memory that’s endured with crisp detail, because it did feel frightening and I was scared of perceptibly predatory behaviour, but it wasn’t Alex’s. In fact, it was Alex who swooped in to save the day, getting between me and a much older man who had cornered me with what felt like the intention of making me touch him inappropriately. In that moment I was grateful to have someone I trusted nearby; someone who it seemed had my best interests in sharp focus.
The Moment It All Changed
This year, after lengthy court proceedings, Alex Ralls, now 47, was convicted of 31 charges of sexual assault, 10 charges of causing a person to engage in sexual activity without consent and two charges of assault by penetration. One of the girls he violated was under 13. These incidents took place over a span of four years, during his time at a different school, long after I knew him.
When I first heard rumblings about misconduct, I had felt defensive. I quietly I assumed someone might have got the wrong end of the stick. I’d spent so long cherishing those memories of my teen years, it felt too uncomfortable to imagine that I might have been wrong about it all.
As the atrocious extent of his crimes came to light, though, it began to dawn on me just how important it is not to allow your own recollections to cloud your view of someone else’s trauma. In recent celebrity news, we’ve seen Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher let their positive experience of friendship compel them to ask a judge for leniency in a friend’s rape trial. If we’ve learnt anything from this and other stories, it’s that in cases where abuse is being discussed, other people’s tales of non-abuse are irrelevant. I’m clear now that while Alex never assaulted me, without a shadow of a doubt this is a man who acted abhorrently to others.
So what do I do with my happy memories? And what of the picture I had of myself as a street-smart teenager, confident and bold, wise enough to suss out weird behaviour? Michelle Bassam - a psychological therapist with particular experience in post-traumatic stress and sexual abuse - is helping me answer these questions.
‘You are grieving,’ she says, ‘for a friendship you thought was solid. One that even just a few months ago you could look back at and laugh about. And you’re grieving who you thought you were, too. But grieving is part of acceptance. Acceptance that that person is completely gone. And you know he will never come back now, even as a memory of who he was to you.’
The other part of acceptance, it seems to me, is giving myself permission for having been naive. ‘At 15 or 16, you didn’t have the knowledge, the experience or the maturity to understand everything you do now,’ Bassam offers. ‘You can’t blame yourself for that. As long as you recognise that your experience is different to that of his victims, then it’s okay to have nice recollections. Accept that that was the past, but we live in the present.’
One of the things that’s felt most horrifying, when revisiting those times, is that even in the happy memories of friendship and fun, there are parallels between mine and the stories of his victims. I met him through the school. He facilitated trips away from school grounds, for which he was the only adult in a guardian-like position over groups of teenage girls. And during these trips, he’d established himself as the first aider, ensuring you would come to him with problems, accidents or illness. Later, during the years he committed his crimes, it was in exactly these moments with girls away from home needing medical attention, that he would enact his abuses. It’s chilling to think our trips might have been some sort of early testing ground.
It’s easy to think, ‘But he didn’t do it to me.’ It’s much harder to examine the idea that there are things you missed, that you didn’t see the full picture, that even if you feel like you know someone intimately, it might only be one part of them. In almost every alleged abuser’s story there is someone who, at least at one time, thought they were kind of okay. Lucy Letby had plenty of friends. Georgina Chapman married Harvey Weinstein. It’s part of heeding the words of victims to confront our own naivety and to recognise that experiences that were a joy for you, could have been hell for someone else.
Natasha Bird is the Former Executive Editor (Digital) of ELLE.
