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My sex therapist said his 'laser penis' could cure my trauma and raped me. After fighting for eight years to be believed, I've finally exposed him
Eight years ago, Ella Janneh’s life was on an upward trajectory. Her 30th birthday was on the horizon, her finances were buoyant, her career was blossoming, and she had made enormous strides in confronting the deep-seated scars of childhood abuse.
Happy and healthy, she was buzzing with optimism about what the next chapter might hold. As she says: ‘I was feeling great; I was in a really good place.’
There is no self-pity in Ella’s voice as she says this; she will not be defined by sorrow nor by anger, rather there is the unspoken and inescapable pall of regret that comes with the knowledge that she is no longer that woman.
On a hot, muggy day in August 2016, Ella walked into the clinic of sex therapist Michael Lousada a woman full of hope, and walked back out, her life irrevocably changed by the actions of the very professional in whom she had placed her trust. The cost of that day is immeasurable.
Ella Janneh said the moment she walked into that sex therapist’s room the woman she used to be was lost
Ella has been fighting for eight long years to have what happened to her that day recognised in a court of law. And last week, it was
A strikingly attractive woman who thinks deeply and chooses her words carefully, Ella says: ‘There is me before and me after, and I am a very different person now. It [what happened that day] has touched every part of my life and lots of parts of me have not survived. I am a different being.’
Ella has been fighting for eight long years to have what happened to her that day recognised in a court of law. And last week, it was.
She was always resolute that what happened during the £750, three-hour ‘therapy’ session, in Lousada’s clinic — based in his flat in Belsize Park, north London — which he shared with his (now ex) third wife was sexual assault and rape.
During the session, Lousada instructed her to regress into her childhood self as an abused child, before telling her she had a ‘problem with penetration’ and that he should use his penis as a ‘laser beam’ to ‘energetically . . . absorb the trauma’. But in a stark indictment of both the largely unregulated therapy industry, and of the criminal justice system, the Crown Prosecution Service decided, in 2018, that it would not pursue the case.
Ella refused to let it go.
Last week, Ella’s dogged pursuit of justice was rewarded when a High Court judge ruled that there was ‘no doubt’ that the core account of rape and sexual assault by Lousada — a City investment banker-turned sex therapist, sex coach, counsellor (he’s used various terms) — that she gave police was true.
Technically, the term Mr Justice Baker ruled on was ‘trespass to the person’. But during a two-week hearing last month, Ella’s pleaded case was clear: Lousada, 57, a father-of-two, raped and sexually assaulted her.
Awarding Ella more than £200,000 in damages, with a further sum still to be decided, the judge entirely rejected the once high-profile therapist’s account that Ella had consented, and that his use of ‘penile and digital penetration’ was a reasonable treatment method for the problem she had gone to him with.
In fact, he’d told the court that he’d worked with around 1,000 clients, and had similarly penetrated 30 to 40 of them.
However, the judge said that by the time Ella was experiencing a ‘full-blown dissociative panic attack’, she ‘entirely lacked’ capacity to consent.
The judge said that Lousada ‘chose to ignore’ Ella’s obvious signs of distress, ‘this being motivated by the defendant’s confidence in his own ability to heal women through what were essentially sexual practices’.
As judgments go, it could not be clearer. There was no consent.
It’s a bittersweet, hard-fought vindication for Ella, who waived her right to anonymity when launching her civil case to confront the shame she knows so many feel about being victims of abuse.
The heavy toll of what happened was evidenced in the judge’s decision to award Ella damages for Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
As composed and fiercely determined as she might be today, Ella has been to the depths of despair. Suicidal more than once, she admits she self-medicated with alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism.
‘To be taken into what I thought was a therapeutic space and to have my biggest vulnerability used against me, to have that exploited,’ she says. ‘I lost my mind, it was shattering; I had to fight to hold on to my sanity.’
Sex therapist Michael Lousada said his ‘laser penis’ would cure Ella's trauma,
Humiliation, she says, isn’t a strong enough word for what she felt. She lost much more besides.
Her issues with intimacy worsened, and she still struggles to trust men. She has been unable to work at anywhere approaching the level she did previously and, now aged 37, she fears she might never become a mother.
‘Many things in my life have been put on hold,’ she says. ‘What would my career look like, what would my health look like, would I be in a loving relationship? There are many paths I was unable to explore because this has had to be the central focus of my life.’
She is speaking 24 hours after the verdict, her first full-length interview, and she is still exhausted, still unravelling the fact that perhaps this could, finally, be the start of a new chapter.
‘There’s a lot to unpack,’ she says, an understatement if ever there was one. Ella’s spent so much of her life overcoming adversity; her parents separated when she was a baby and she grew up with her British mother in Australia, where at the age of ten she was abused by one of her mother’s friends.
By the age of 19, striving to put her troubled childhood behind her, she travelled to London and started a job in a shop, before a four-year degree in anthropology and media studies at Goldsmiths University.
She first encountered Mike Lousada in the pages of a newspaper back in 2011, while travelling on the train to university. Not long previously she had started to experience panic attacks during sex, a frightening, embarrassing experience that she didn’t entirely understand, but knew related somehow to what had happened in her earlier life.
Lousada was an exponent in ‘body psychotherapy’, she read — a term she found compelling. He was training to be a qualified psychosynthesis counsellor, wanted to bring his services to the NHS, helping women overcome sexual abuse or psychological issues.
The therapist was already prominent as an expert on sex therapy and would be propelled onto an even bigger stage when he appeared as an expert in the pages of feminist author Naomi Wolf’s ground-breaking 2012 book Vagina.
To Ella, reading his words about helping women who had experienced trauma, was ‘like someone switching on a light’.
‘He was talking about the body and psychological trauma being linked, which felt totally relevant to me.’
Ella used her student loan to fund two sessions with the well-spoken Lousada — the first costing £80 and the second £300 — which, in contrast to what would come later, were ‘non-sexual’ and ‘not threatening’.
The panic attacks did not subside, but Ella couldn’t afford more sessions. So, for the next three years, she pursued a more conventional ‘talking’ therapy.
Ella was awarded £217,000 in damaged in a civil court
But then her path would return in Lousada’s direction. By 2016, his profile had continued to soar — notably, by then, he had set up, and briefly chaired, a professional governing body, the Association of Somatic & Integrative Sexologists (ASIS).
Ironically, you might think, one of the reasons the organisation was formed was because Lousada was concerned that there was a lack of appropriate boundaries within the spheres in which he worked.
His membership of this organisation, by whose code of ethics he was bound, and his own ‘client charter’ was declared on his website. Ella, now in a positive place in her life, decided to book another appointment.
There was just one last thing she needed to do for her life to be ‘fixed’. ‘I was feeling great,’ she says. ‘I was on the eve of my 30th birthday and I made a decision.’
While her first 30 years had been defined by her childhood experiences, she was determined that the next 30 would be different. She kept reading about something called ‘bodywork’ and its benefits for adult survivors of child abuse.
Expecting this to be something akin to a combination of breathwork, trigger point massage and medical/therapeutic touch, she reached out again to Lousada.
It was no trivial commitment, a three-hour session cost £750, and Ella was by no means certain whether Lousada could help, or whether any of the services he offered were suitable.
As she says: ‘My uncertainty about this was one of the main reasons for calling him up, rather than just booking through his website. He said, “Since I saw you, I’ve done a lot of work with child abuse”, so he gave me the impression he was even more equipped to help.’
Here, she thought, was an ‘expert’, someone in whom she could place her faith, someone akin to a medical doctor in terms of level of trust. Not for a moment did she imagine that this someone might consider their penis, their fingers, their saliva (the details of what happened to Ella are shocking) a form of therapy.
‘Who would?’ she asks.
She recalls vividly walking back out into the sunshine after her ‘session’ feeling like she was ‘underwater’.
‘I remember walking towards the train station in a daze,’ she says. ‘What I can remember is the stink of fear, my underarms stunk of fear.’
She called a friend, who gave compelling evidence of the raw emotion that poured down the phone from Ella.
‘I just remember all these people walking past at busy Dalston station, while I’m screaming down the phone,’ she recalls.
‘And then I hung up and walked straight to the supermarket and bought a bottle of wine.’
She didn’t want to accept what had happened. ‘I was in denial, I switched off my phone; I was just so humiliated I couldn’t talk to anyone.
‘This was meant to be a new chance at life. I had been so hopeful; I had a plan about how I was going to living my life and I walked out [of his clinic] all of that just completely shattered.’
She drank the bottle of wine and, the next morning, picked up the phone and screamed again, this time to a rape support service. She spoke to the police and an investigation was opened.
For the ensuing two years there was hope, ‘even knowing the appalling conviction rates’, that Lousada would be prosecuted.
But there was a new nadir, perhaps the lowest, when the CPS decided, in 2018, not to prosecute. Just days later, Ella, who has since nursed her terminally ill father through his dying days, discovered she was pregnant.
She won’t elaborate further, save to say: ‘I wanted to keep the baby but I just thought I cannot carry a child for nine months with the sorrow that I feel. I felt I couldn’t subject another human being to the distress I felt, for that to run through their veins while it ran through mine. And so I had an abortion, and it was so hard; it took me a very, very long time to square that.’
Until the CPS decision, Ella had avoided trying to find out more about Lousada, but not long afterwards she found herself turning to Google.
‘Naively, I thought maybe this had changed him, maybe his conscience had brought him to place where he was going to hold himself accountable.’
Instead, she saw he had released a book; his profile had grown. ‘I had been profoundly changed by this process and he had put on the accelerator,’ she says.
This discovery only added to her determination to press onward.
In 2019, Ella was referred to Catriona Rubens, a solicitor specialising in sexual abuse, at law firm Leigh Day by the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) to pursue a case via the civil justice system. Ella is appalled that the man who wreaked so much harm on her own life could still be practising. Even now in theory.
‘There’s no regulation to say he can’t,’ she says.
Hers, meanwhile, has become a voice for others.
‘It’s 2024 and there are so many victims [of male violence] walking around in silence, so many victims who have attempted suicide, and I just say, this is not our shame. Shame creates a currency where the police can say your story is not worth listening to, or the CPS can say your story is not worth listening to. I want the next person to feel emboldened.’
It’s painfully apparent to her that services for rape victims are inadequate. The current waiting list for an independent advocate through all stages of the justice system is three to six months.
Ella Janneh might have been taken to the lowest of lows, but she is determined to ensure a positive outcome from it.
But as lawyer Catriona Rubens says: ‘Serious questions now need to be asked of the system: the police, the CPS, and the fact that therapists like Mike Lousada can act outside any form of regulatory or ethical framework.‘
It must not be left to survivors like Ella to fight individual civil claims, at huge personal cost, in order to bring sexual violence and abuse of power to light.’