Jailed for faking her own rape
Troubled woman - Zoe Davydaitis was jailed for 18 months for perverting the course of justice
Wednesday 6th June 2007
I used to be just your ordinary, average bloke. Separated from my wife, Julie, 45, I doted on my two daughters, Sarah, 11, and Rachel, 4. After my week's work as a quality controller at a mobile phone factory, I'd drink lager in the pub with my mates and go carp fishing. I never realised how precious my ordinary life was until one day in September 2004. The day everything changed…
A loud rapping on my door woke me up at 6.30am. I'd had an accident at work seven months earlier, falling from a skylight. I'd been off sick ever since as my back was broken in eight places. I hobbled to the door on crutches. It was three policemen.
'Philip Young?' one of them asked.
I nodded.
'We're arresting you on suspicion of rape,' he said.
'I'd never do anything like that,' I replied, horrified.
The victim had done a Photofit, and someone thought it looked like me.
'We need you to come down to the station,' the policeman said.
Call me naïve, but even as I got into the back of the police car, I wanted to help. I knew I'd done nothing wrong, but the sooner the police eliminated me, the sooner they'd catch the real rapist. At the station, swabs were taken from my mouth for DNA. Then the interrogation started.
The rape had taken place six weeks earlier.
'You fit the description of the suspect,' the officer said.
'Long hair, dirty teeth, eyebrow piercing.'
Hang on a minute. The hair was fair enough, but I didn't have a piercing and my teeth weren't bad. No one mentioned my distinctive gold teeth or my 76 tattoos.
'Officers have just searched your home,' the policeman said. 'You own a grey T-shirt and
Levi jeans, the clothes the rapist was wearing.'
Grey T-shirt? Jeans? Didn't most blokes have those?
'I feel really sorry for this girl, but I'm not your man,' I insisted. 'I was at home watching telly that night.'
Afterwards, I had my photo taken for an ID parade. Later that day I was allowed to go home, on condition that I report back to Bedford Police Station every week. I felt so ashamed.
That night it was on the local news.
'Police are investigating the rape of a 20-year-old woman,' the newsreader said. 'She was attacked while walking her dog in a park last July. A 46-year-old man is helping police with
their inquiries.'
That 46-year-old man was me. Suddenly I felt terrified.
I hadn't done anything, but what would people think? And what about the saying there's no smoke without fire? Four months later I was called back to Bedford Police Station.
'We're charging you with rape and GBH,' the officer told me.
The GBH related to the fact the victim had bruises on her thighs.
'It wasn't me,' I stammered. 'My back's broken. I wear a catheter because of my injuries.'
Then the ultimate humiliation.
'I can't get an erection,' I admitted. 'I'm physically not capable of rape.'
It didn't seem to make any difference.
The victim had picked me out from the line-up and the police said they had enough evidence.
I was bailed and told to wait for a date to appear in court. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. A couple of days later, the local paper ran a story saying that the rapist had been found, and they printed my name.
My secret was out. I called Julie.
'Have you seen the papers?' I gabbled. 'You've got to understand, I didn't do it.'
'I know,' she said. 'You wouldn't hurt a fly.'
'You have to hide the paper from the girls,' I pleaded.
I couldn't bear the thought of my daughters thinking their dad was a rapist.
My two sisters and brother lived in New Zealand, our parents were dead. But as for my mates and strangers in the street, what would people think? I soon found out. That day I nipped to the local shop for a pint of milk. As I passed a middle-aged woman she muttered something under her breath.
'Dirty rapist,' she said.
Some kids who hurled stones at my flat, and the man who tripped me up in the street so I fell and broke my arm.
'I think it's best if you don't see the girls for a while,' Julie decided. 'You know how people talk.'
'But I haven't done anything,' I protested.
It broke my heart, but I had to think of my daughters.
I stopped going out. I sat in my flat with the curtains closed, sneaking to the shops early in the morning when no one was around. My first waking thought every single morning was how I'd get through another day.
At night I wondered if I'd be better off dead. I'd had death threats through the door: I'll kill you, rapist, you won't get away with this… I thought I may as well save them the trouble.
Two years after I was first charged, I reached for the pills I took for my back pain, and swallowed 56 of them. I waited for the calm. But fear came instead. If I died, my girls would never know I wasn't a rapist. The bloke who'd really done it would be walking the streets.
So I got up and quickly filled a pint glass with salt and water. I gulped down pint after pint until I threw it all up again with the tablets. I knew I had to clear my name.
In January 2005, I appeared at Bedford Magistrates' Court.
'Not guilty,' I said firmly when asked how I pleaded. A date was set for the case to appear at Luton Crown Court in March 2005. By then my nerves were shot to pieces and I panicked if I was alone anywhere with a woman.
Then one morning a letter arrived. As I ripped it open, I couldn't believe my eyes. Zoe Davydaitis has withdrawn the allegations of rape. A friend of hers had come forward and said Zoe had admitted making it all up. So not only had they got the wrong man, there was no attack in the first place. This sick joke had cost me three years of my life.
'Her relationship with her lesbian lover broke up, and she made up the rape for attention,' a police officer told me when I phoned the station.
'She even hit her thighs with a hammer to invent 'evidence'.
Words failed me.
Even the fact she was charged with perverting the course of justice didn't make it any easier. In March this year I went to Luton Crown Court to face the woman who'd ripped my life apart. I'd pictured a vulnerable victim. But Zoe, 24, was butch and hard-looking.
Jailed for 18 months after admitting the charge, she was the criminal now. Handing down the sentence, Judge Barbara Mensah told Davydaitis: 'This was a nasty, calculated and malicious lie which persisted over time.'
Now people came up to me in the street and wanted to shake my hand. But I still couldn't face them. That woman's lies destroyed me. She made a mockery of the system in place to protect women. Her letter of apology didn't wash with me. In it, she said she was sorry for the stress she'd caused me, but it read as though a solicitor had written it.
Now every morning I wake up and have to pinch myself.The nightmare is finally over. At last I can walk down the street holding my head high, a free man.
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