Lifting lid on violence in the home

Nov 29 2009 by Coreena Ford, Sunday Sun

LUCKY to be alive Terry Smith last night lifted the lid on life as a battered man.

In an astonishingly graphic account, he provides a terrifying insight into what happens when love turns bad and reveals how he feared for his life at the hands of his crazed partner who left him for dead on a blood-soaked bed after a frenzied knife attack.

Alison Newman stabbed Terry eight times in a four-hour horror ordeal at their home in which he claims she tried to set fire to the bed as he lay upon it, refused to let him call for help for four hours and turned up the TV volume to muffle his cries.

When she finally let him call 999, paramedics spent over an hour stabilising him before he could be taken to hospital, where he spent a week recovering from an operation to repair wounds to his stomach, face, chest, back, legs and arms.

Sixteen months on, the physical wounds may have healed but Terry, 46, has been left mentally scarred by the attack.

But he hopes to see justice done when Newman is sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to wounding with intent at an earlier hearing.

Newman, 37, of Hebburn, South Tyneside, initially denied the charge but at last month’s hearing she pleaded guilty, claiming she was driven to carry out the attack following months of physical and mental abuse from Terry.

Terry was left devastated by his ex’s claim – which he vigorously denies – and today he lifts the lid on life as a battered boyfriend, saying HE was the victim of domestic violence during their turbulent two and a half year relationship.

He said: “I’m the victim, not her. The Government claim to be tough on knife crime and the causes of crime, yet she has been able to make all these claims about me in court and the judge believed her too . . . it’s outrageous.”

Terry told how everything seemed perfect when he and Newman first got together, having met in 2005 in The Red Hackle Pub on the Scotch Estate, Jarrow, where she worked as barmaid.

A few months later, however, Terry said she would start blazing rows when they had been drinking.