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I know just how Huw's wife feels - I'll never get over the utter horror of discovering my partner was a paedophile
The little boy was about five. Blond hair. It is now over four years since Rosie Nelson last saw his face, and what he was doing (or, more correctly, being forced to do). The image will never, ever leave her.
‘I think about that little boy every single day,’ she says. ‘I wonder how old is he now? Where is he? Who is he?’
Her thoughts went directly to this child when, last week, she heard that Huw Edwards, the BBC newsreader, had pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images of children. Then to Huw Edwards’s wife, Vicky Flind.
Rosie Nelson called the police on her then partner, after coming across a computer memory card containing a stash of child abuse images and videos — almost 600, nearly 200 in the most serious Category A group
‘My heart goes out to her, because I was that woman,’ she says. ‘I was the one standing in the shower trying to scrape off my own skin. If I could have taken it off and bleached it, I would have. To discover that the man who you have loved, shared your life with, been intimate with, was part of... this.
‘And Huw Edwards’s poor children. They will never be able to move on properly from this. Never. Shame on Huw Edwards. Shame on him. Everyone who is connected with him must be looking back, wondering. Everyone.
‘His mother. His sister. Even his teacher, if he or she is still around. They will be sat there thinking “Oh My God.” ’
In the years since Rosie uncovered her partner’s appalling secret, she has been in touch with 600 women just like Huw Edwards’s wife, Vicky Flind (pictured with her now estranged husband)
It was the police, we now know, who knocked on Edwards’s door while investigating another offender.
In 2020, Rosie called the police on her then partner herself, after coming across a computer memory card containing a stash of child abuse images and videos — almost 600, nearly 200 in the most serious Category A group. It was the end of her relationship, and almost her sanity.
Although much has been made of the fact that Edwards now faces sentencing on charges that carry a maximum sentence of ten years imprisonment, Rosie scoffs at the idea that any sort of fitting justice will be served.
Astonishingly, her ex, businessman Peter Loram, who was 39 at the time of his conviction in July 2021, hasn’t spent a night in jail.
‘And the number of images he had was much greater that the number Huw Edwards had. He was sentenced to nine months, but it was suspended for two years. Where is the justice in that? In my eyes, he has escaped justice, my ex got away with it. And I will be floored if Huw Edwards gets a custodial sentence.’
Astonishingly, Rosie's ex, businessman Peter Loram (pictured), who was 39 at the time of his conviction in July 2021, hasn’t spent a night in jail
Where to even begin with the question of how it feels to discover your partner is a paedophile?
There are several times during this interview when Rosie, 51, breaks down and simply cries, but her anger at how society ‘refuses to confront this issue, and leaves the wives and the partners feeling alone’ is stronger than her pain.
Rosie has counselled other women about how to prevent such a discovery destroying them. She tells me that in the years since she uncovered her partner’s appalling secret, she has been in touch with 600 women ‘just like Huw Edwards’s wife’.
‘And, although I am sure [Vicky Flind] will be feeling very alone, she is not. There are many of us out there. In fact there are hundreds of us, maybe thousands, in Britain. And it’s not just the wives and partners that are affected by this. It’s the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, even the work colleagues.
‘Finding out your partner is a paedophile doesn’t just turn your life upside down. It destroys it. I still feel physically sick about what I saw. That little blond boy will never leave me. The shame of it. It seeps into your soul.’
As well as being a mother, Rosie is a former childminder. ‘I think it’s hardwired into women to just protect the children. I know it’s not all women, but that need to make the children safe is hardwired, visceral. Actually, it’s even more than physical. I think it’s almost spiritual.’
Shame, too, she says, on the people, the online commentators, who waded into the debate about what Huw Edwards did, and found excuses for him. She has been there, too.
‘One of my ex’s family members yelled at me afterwards for “making a big thing of this”. They said “but he didn’t do anything. He didn’t touch those children. He was only looking”. Do they not realise that the only reason these children are abused is so that the Petes and the Huw Edwardses of this world can “only look”?’
Rosie’s story begins in 1996, when she was the single mum of an 11-year-old boy, but thought she’d struck relationship gold with ‘perfect gentleman’ Peter Loram. They met on dating site Plenty of Fish.
Charismatic, and sharing her love of the outdoors, he seemed a dependable type. He whisked her to nice restaurants, and they enjoyed weekends in the Lake District.
He ran his own company (and she later joined him, helping in their home office). By their fourth anniversary together, in 2020 during lockdown, they were living and working together.
It was to this home office – ‘where I’d often use his computer. He never bothered about me doing that’ – she went one day, to find the card reader for her new credit card.
‘It wasn’t where it usually was, so I went poking around, looking for it,’ she says. ‘There were a few shoe boxes and in one were a load of electrical leads – and the card reader. I took it out, thinking “Why has he put it in there?” ’
Then she noticed an SD memory card, of the sort used to store files and pictures. ‘I just thought “weird”, wondered what it was doing there.’
Her mind went to one place.
While looking for something in her ex's home office, Rosie came across a hidden memory card - she was shocked by what she found on it when she put it in her laptop
‘I thought “porn,” ’ she admits. “I thought, “The bugger has been watching saucy videos”, so I put it in the laptop. I thought I’d see a woman tied to a chair, being spanked.’
She wouldn’t have been thrilled by that either, but the video that started playing automatically featured the little blond boy and shocked her so much that immediately, instinctively, she shut the file down.
Then she sat, shaking. ‘I actually thought I must have been mistaken. It must have been something that I just misinterpreted, and it was going to lead on to a comedy clip.’
She inserted it again, and then her world fell apart. ‘I had not been mistaken. And this time a menu popped up, with about 20 titles.
‘I only saw about four or five seconds of the video, but what I saw will scar me for life.’
She knows now that some women, when they find a similar cache, agonise for days, weeks, about what to do, aware of how sounding the alarm will send their whole world crashing down. Rosie did not hesitate.
‘I called the police. It was instinctive. Robotic. I can’t remember my exact words, but I said I’d found... something, child porn. They said “We will come now”. But Pete was due home from work. I said, “I do not want this man in my house”. They said, “Lock the doors.” ’
Rosie adds: ‘I locked my son and myself in the house, but we went out the back and were sort of hiding around the corner waiting for them to arrive. Pete arrived before they did and just thought he was locked out. He was shouting, “Rosie, Rosie”.
‘Then the police arrived. We watched as he was arrested.’
She recalls how, still reeling, ‘unable to breathe’, she had to do ‘the worst thing I have ever had to do in my life, which was to ask my 15-year-old son if this man – this boyfriend that I had brought into our home – had ever touched him, or looked at him, or behaved in any way that I needed to be concerned about.’
The answer was no, but the distress of that moment is still vivid, and she is crying now.
‘And it’s the first place our thoughts go, to the children,’ she says. ‘When Peter was convicted, I was contacted by a woman he had dated eight years previously. She said, “I have children. Should I be worried?” ’
The justice system seemed to work swiftly and efficiently. Loram was found to be in possession of 240 movies and 204 videos. The images were of children aged between two and 15.
In July of that year he appeared in court, and admitted three counts of making indecent images (by downloading them), and was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years.
He was also put on the sex offenders register and ordered to take a treatment course during 30 days of rehabilitation activities.
She has only seen her ex once since – when their dog Bentley, whom he had taken after the split, died, and she agreed to go with him to scatter the ashes. It was a difficult day.
‘But I remember him telling me even then that his counsellor didn’t think he’d do time. I couldn’t believe it. Where is the deterrent there? What stops these men doing it again?’
Our conversation today keeps returning to the (arguably much heftier) sentence meted out to the wives and families of those guilty of possessing child abuse images. Rosie set up a support group herself, because she realised there was a black hole that families fall into.
‘What I found afterwards was that there simply isn’t any support. The police basically told me that. They said, “You are not a victim”, so Victim Support don’t want to know. In the wider world, no one even wants to talk about it. It’s still taboo. If you mention the word “paedophile”, the general reaction is, “We don’t want to hear this”.
‘So you are left with the shame, and the guilt and the questions. I asked myself “How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have known?” People assume the wives and partners must know. They will assume that of Huw Edwards’s wife. Well, I will bet she did not know.’
The wives are always plunged into an impossible place, the objects of gossip and assumption, Rosie points out. She tells me that one friend made a clumsy remark wondering if Peter had found Rosie’s tiny frame attractive because of his paedophile tastes, and it has haunted her. ‘Because I am tiny. I am flat-chested. I wear a child’s age 13 clothes from Next. You drive yourself mad wondering about that.’
Actually, she was possibly better placed that most to deal with this. Rosie had also done some training as a psychotherapist.
‘So I probably did have the coping mechanisms – although I will say they went out the window when it actually happened.
‘What I did have was plenty of people around me, friends who were therapists. I did have support, but most women don’t.’
It is remarkable that she rebuilt her life at all, but she has. Three years after her ex was convicted, she is marrying again, but it has been a difficult journey. She does not want to name her fiance, but says she met him online, and took her niece with her on their first date ‘because I was so terrified’.
‘There was a point at which I never thought I could trust a man again. It was a long, long time before I allowed myself to open up. Longer still before I would be intimate. Even now, I am not living with my partner.
When he proposed, I said, “I think I have been pushing you away for years”, and he said, “I know, and I understand why”.
‘It’s only his patience, and the fact he is a decent man, that has made me feel able to let him in, because when you find out that you trusted the wrong person, that your whole life with him was built on a lie, it just turns everything upside down.’
Yet while Rosie could attempt to wipe her ex from her life (‘and I acknowledge that it was easier to do because we had never had children together’), others do not, or cannot make that choice.
‘Of all the wives and partners I have dealt with, some leave, but some do not. But I have yet to meet a mother [of a perpetrator] who has been able to cut the ties. And for that, they suffer far more than I ever did, because they can never let go. How can you let go of your baby?’
She reveals that two days after Loram was arrested, his mother came to see her. ‘And we both sat and cried. She is a lovely woman. She was devastated. She will never recover.’
What an astonishing woman Rosie is. She gave a Press interview not long after his conviction, smashing the taboo that ‘everyone should shut up about this’.
‘I got grief for that,’ she recalls. ‘Some people thought I should have kept quiet, brushed it under the carpet. Best not to make a fuss. I say, no, we owe it to the children to acknowledge this, even when it is horrific’.
It all comes back to the children. ‘And even if, as some people argue, Huw Edwards only received those images, and never passed them on, it was his duty, as an adult, to call the police.
‘It is all our duties to do that, to call it out, because otherwise children will keep on being abused every day, every hour, every minute.’