Ruth’s story, coercive control, Fab Swinging, BBC, Radio Wales.

Ruth’s story, coercive control, Fab Swinging, BBC, Radio Wales.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0ns3q5d

Broadcaster Cartin Nye suggests over one million people in Britain have tried Swinging. That’s around 1—60 of the population. I think that’s bollocks. While my sympathy here was for Ruth, I don’t quite get what for example choking, beating and hair pulling have to do with sex but I do accept they did happen to her. Rough sex is as foreign to me as a liking for Fifty Shades. Piffle.

Ruth was coercively controlled. Which means, legally, she did not have the means to say no to beatings and rape. Chris, her husband, pimped her out as a walking and talking gloryhole. And she claimed to have had sex with over 100 men, she met online at Fabswingers.

Comparisons can be made with Gisèle Pelicot. But they quickly breakdown.

Pelicot was drugged, unknowing and an unmoving kind of gloryhole.

Ruth went to meet her fabswinging partners, seemingly, willingly. She admits to filming some meetings on her phone for her husband Chris to watch later.

She offered her phone to the police as a forensic tool to assist in the prosecution of her husband.

Fiction is truth for hire. My stories of ‘Beastie’ houses and abused women and children follow the usual conventions of plot. The ending may go back to the beginning, a circular tale, where everything changes but remains the same. Or the plot flips.

Here Ruth’s phone was her doing and undoing. She describes the moment she found out the police and Crown Prosecuting Service decided not to go ahead with the case because of contradictions. In phone messages she admits to talking to her husband and telling him how much she loved been used.  

Case closed. To my mind allied with her stay in a mental-health ward that’s understandable. Her credibility would be destroyed in court. She would find herself on trial and not her husband. And she would lose.  

Notes.

husband of 13 years.

‘It was just like I was a gloryhole. I wasn’t there.

Catrin Nye meets Ruth, who says she was pressured into having sex with strangers through a swingers website more than 100 times. Ruth explains why she is using her full identity. Her story raises difficult questions about consent, shame and control inside a marriage.

Whether saying ‘Yes’ is the full story? How many other women going through something similar in silence?

Presenter: Catrin Nye Writers: Catrin Nye and Jamie Bartlett

‘Ruth O’Grady from North Wales’.

Inspiration Gisèle Pelicot, courtcase.

How swinging can create shame. And shame can create silence.

2008. Ruth graduate with a degree in performing arts. Working in café. Meets Chris in the roughest pub in town. Chris works behind the bar.

They moved in together within weeks. He would show me off to his friends. She was MC. He was WC.

I found it funny when he said ‘I want to fuck the poshness out of you’.

It wasn’t long before they were married. They moved around a bit over the next few years. Moved to Birmingham. Ruth retrained as a teacher and threw herself into the job.

Ruth said the sex was rough from the start. He’d bring up ideas of her having sex with someone else.

‘Lots of people do it, nowdays,’ he said.

It made her uneasy.

She told him it wasn’t her thing. But over the next decade, the pressure slowly mounted

Then, Ruth’s friends told them, they’d started something new: swinging.

Every few months they’d meet up with people online. And have sex with each other’s partners.

2021. ‘Ive always wanted to do it. Let’s give it a go?’ Chris kept going on about it. ‘If you don’t like it? What’s the harm?’

Married for 12 years.

‘I finally caved’ Ruth said.

They joined Fabswingers. UK’s most popular website.

‘HornyCouple321’ Mike and Katy (their names online)

All the way to Liverpool. Top left corner of Wales. (catchment area)

What were the men like?

Most of them in a relationship. Married a long time. Wife pregnant. Unhappy in their marriage. Sometimes very happy.

Fetishes. It feels taboo at the start. This dark underworld. This dark underbelly. Oh, it’s only them that’s in on the secret is in on it. Then you realise everybody is in it. Your postie. Your spark. Your plumber. Your county councillor. Your policeman. Your landlords. DVD drivers. Everybody under the sun.

It’s just your next door neighbour.

So you were successful? Popular?

Yeh.

The plan was for both of them too have sex with men and women. But what actually happened was Ruth had almost all the sex.

The perception of swingers, generally, is one couple having sex with another.

But basically it was you (Ruth) having sex with other men. And Chris watching. He wanted to be in the house. Or not even in the house. It’s called ‘hotwifeing’.

Over weeks and months, a strange routine started to kick in.

They’d get messages. One of the men would be invited over. Sometimes to their house. Sometimes Ruth would go out and meet them. Sometimes in a layby or car park.

Ruth would have oral or penetrative sex. She would film it for Chris. This was their secret. No one else was to know.

Course you don’t want to tell anyone. The photos. The videos. The stuff he has on the website. Degradation.

Things ramped up very fast. Soon as she had sex with one man, she became ‘verified’.

More men were getting in touch. Chris liked the social side of fabswingers. Chatting with the men. Showing her off to them. Within months she’s having sex with multiple men a week. Sometimes several men in a single day.

Sometimes she’d tell Chris she wanted to stop. She didn’t enjoy any of it. She was doing it all to please him. There might be a short pause. But usually, pretty quickly, Chris would be back on the site. Organising more meets.

Telling Ruth, he’d found more men. And Ruth went along with it.

How many meetings in total?

I know it’s triple figures. Well over a 100. But I couldn’t tell you an exact figure.

Chris might put up a post: ‘It’s suck me off Saturday. We driving around this location’. ‘Let us know if you’re on a lunchbreak or something like that.’

We’d drive around in the car. Meet men. Suck them off. He’d drive around, while I was with a man in the back of the car.

So you sort of lose count. There’s the reststop ones. The daily ones. So I couldn’t tell you.

Do you consider any of the sex you had through that website, consensual?

‘No’.

‘I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be on it, in the first place.’

Officers arrest Chris for the offence of ‘Coercive Control’. Intentional pattern of behaviour to exert power or control over another.

Brought in for question. 22 March 2023. Chris bailed with an order not to contact Ruth.

Ruth sends the police her phone. They are able to download thousands of WhatsApp messages between her and Chis, over the 18 months they were on Fabswingers.

But the police find something else.

‘Are you gagging for cock again?’ Chris asks her in one exchange.

‘Yeh, I really enjoyed this whole week.’

23^rd November 2023. Ruth receives an email from the police. ‘Investigation filed. No further action will be taken’.

I felt humiliated. Really embarrassed. Then I felt guilty, I’d wasted the police’s time.

Over time, she felt this was wrong.

Catrin creates a FabSwingers account and is quickly inundated with messages from men. Professor Nicola Gavey explains why full consent is not always as simple as saying yes. And one male user describes encounters that left him questioning whether women on the site really wanted to be there.

Studying unwanted sex, since the mid 80s.

Something has changed in the last decade. Strangling, slapping and treating women as shit. It’s a give. It’s normal.

 How many women do you think don’t want to be doing it?

Martin: ‘Over half?’

Ruth, suicide attempt. Pychosis and depression. Tries to kill herself.

Several months on ward. Several rounds of electroconvulsive therapy. Doctors deem her ‘unfit to work’.

Aged 31. Cris is paid to be my carer. He brings up the idea of swinging (again).

 

 Clare the power and control wheel. Encircling them all is physical and sexual violence. Not about intimacy but entitlement. Sex used to exploit. Shame. Control.

Swinging has grown in popularity. Some surveys suggest over one million people have tried it. Becoming a kind of lifestyle choice?

Townhouse 25 000 people have attended it.

The Herald. 26 sex offenders in Scotland seek to overturn their rape and assault convictions.

Crown finally admits there was sufficient evidence in Goodwillie rape case.

Why 26 sex offenders in Scotland are challenging their convictions

The challenges stem from a landmark UK Supreme Court ruling in late 2025 that found Scotland’s courts had been applying sexual history evidence rules (Sections 274–275 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995) too restrictively.

What the Supreme Court said

•           Since 2013, Scottish courts have excluded certain evidence in sexual offence trials to protect complainers (rape shield laws).

•           The Supreme Court ruled that this approach risked depriving defendants of a fair trial under Article 6 ECHR.

•           Although the specific appeals were dismissed, the Court said the legal approach must change going forward.

This ruling opened the door for people convicted between 2013 and 2025 to argue that their trials were unfair because potentially relevant evidence was excluded. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) confirmed that 20+ applications have already been submitted, with more expected.

Why sex offenders are using this ruling

The 26 individuals argue that:

1.         Evidence that might have supported their defence was wrongly excluded – e.g., messages, prior interactions, or contextual behaviour that could challenge the complainer’s account.

2.         The exclusion of such evidence may have prevented juries from seeing the full relational context, including:

o          whether coercive control was present

o          whether sexual contact was consensual

o          whether the complainer’s account of distress or non consent was consistent

3.         They claim this amounts to a miscarriage of justice, because the Supreme Court has now said the courts’ approach was too restrictive.

A related example

A 2026 Scottish High Court case (JM v HMA) involved a dispute over whether text messages should have been admitted to challenge the complainer’s account of non consent. The court ultimately refused the appeal, but the case illustrates how contested the boundaries of admissible evidence have become.

4. How this connects to coercive control and sexual consent

This is where the issue becomes especially sensitive.

A. Courts need contextual evidence to evaluate coercive control

To determine whether sexual consent was freely given, courts must understand:

•           the relationship dynamics

•           patterns of control

•           the complainer’s emotional state

•           the accused’s behaviour over time

If evidence that illuminates this context is excluded, courts may struggle to assess whether:

•           the complainer was coerced

•           the accused exploited fear or dependency

•           the “consent” was genuine or conditioned

B. The Supreme Court ruling creates tension

The ruling aims to protect defendants’ fair trial rights by allowing more contextual evidence. But survivors’ advocates fear it may:

•           retraumatise complainers

•           allow irrelevant or prejudicial sexual history evidence

•           undermine protections designed to prevent victim blaming

C. Why offenders are appealing

The 26 offenders are not arguing about coercive control directly. They are arguing that the court’s ability to evaluate consent was compromised because the defence was not allowed to present certain evidence.

In other words:

They claim the jury did not see the full picture — and that this could have changed the verdict.

5. The deeper issue: consent, coercion, and fairness

This controversy exposes a fundamental tension:

•           Survivor centred justice requires recognising coercive control and protecting complainers from invasive questioning.

•           Defendant centred justice requires allowing evidence that might challenge the complainer’s account.

The Supreme Court ruling suggests Scotland may have leaned too far toward protection, at the expense of fair trial rights. The appeals by the 26 offenders test how far that principle will be applied retroactively.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6