As a child my stepfather abused me. Then, when I turned 18, he forced me to marry him. This is the insidious way he groomed me… before everything changed

At first glance, Suzie Kennedy appears to have led a charmed and successful life. The pinnacle of her globetrotting career as an actress was appearing with Angelina Jolie in last year’s acclaimed film, Maria, about the life of Maria Callas.

But it was one candid chat with the Hollywood star on set, before the cameras started rolling, that she particularly cherishes.

Suzie confided in Jolie that when she isn’t filming, she works as a psychotherapist – and that her real passion is helping women survive.

‘She said, “That’s my passion too”,’ recalls Suzie. ‘She held my hand and said, “I wish you so much luck with what you’re doing”.’

The reason for this passion, however, is as traumatic as it is shocking. As a child, Suzie, now 48, was groomed by her stepfather, Ian, before he subjected her to a tyranny of almost unimaginable sexual, emotional and physical abuse. Such was his control over Suzie that, at 18, she married him.

When she finally reported him to the police aged 27, Ian was charged with six counts of rape and nine counts of assault against her, ‘and that’s just what police could easily prove,’ says Suzie. He killed himself awaiting trial in prison two months later in April 2007.

For years afterwards, Suzie was ‘in trauma’. It was only in her 40s when she trained to become a counsellor – which required her to have counselling herself – that her road to recovery began.

‘The abuse would have killed me if I hadn’t got help,’ says Suzie, who is talking about her harrowing ordeal in depth for the first time as an ambassador for Woman’s Trust.

The charity, which provides support to women who have experienced domestic abuse, is calling on the Government to increase funding for victim counselling, pointing out there are more domestic abuse deaths by suicide than murder.

In Suzie’s case, escaping Ian was ‘not the end, but the beginning,’ she says. She tried to kill herself three times in the aftermath.

Her parents separated when she was just one, following her father’s infidelity. The couple had recently moved to America for a new life but, devastated by her husband’s betrayal, her mother Jane returned to south London with Suzie and her sister, who was three years older.

Four years later, when Suzie was five, Jane met Ian – who Suzie only refers to as ‘my abuser’ and whose name she has requested we change so as not to upset his family – at a single parents’ club in 1982.

Divorced with two children who lived mainly with their mother, Ian, then 39, quickly became her father figure. ‘I called him Dad. He made me feel special,’ she says.

Ian, who didn’t work but was, she would later find out, a compulsive gambler, bought her magazines and pop music cassettes.

Although he and Jane never married and Ian kept his home nearby, they spent most of their time together. ‘We were a family unit.’

He cultivated Suzie’s loyalty by taking her side when she argued with her sister. He convinced Suzie that her mother becoming pregnant with her was what had driven her father to have an affair, that her mother preferred her sister and planned to send Suzie back to America. ‘I started to believe it was them against us.’

Only with hindsight does Suzie realise Ian ‘constantly belittled’ her mother, mocking her attempts to get qualifications at college. ‘He never hit Mum but he was cruel.’

At the time she was so trusting of him that when he started touching her genitals on the pretence of washing her in the bath when she was 11, she thought: ‘“It’s OK because you’re my dad.” I didn’t think it was wrong.’

One day after school when Suzie was 12, she was lying in Ian’s daughter’s bed in her nightie at his house. Ian said he would get in bed with her because it was cold outside. ‘I thought it was a bit weird,’ she says.

He ended up raping her, leaving her in agony. ‘It was so, so painful,’ she recalls. ‘Afterwards he said, “It’s only because I love you. If you tell anyone, you’ll be put in care. No one’s going to believe you.” I was so confused.’

Increasingly distanced from her mum, she spent more time at Ian’s house, where he abused her every week. Yet such were his powers of manipulation that he had convinced her he was the only person she could trust.

She now knows she didn’t love him, but at the time she really believed he had saved her and that if she left him ‘only bad things could happen. I felt there was no way out’.

When Suzie was 13, her mother broke up with Ian. ‘She got sick of his lies,’ Suzie now realises, and she had no idea of the abuse Ian was inflicting on her youngest daughter.

Today, Suzie says she harbours no blame towards her mother. ‘She didn’t see what was happening. He presented himself as a caring father.’

Indeed, with her biological dad still in America, Jane still saw Ian as Suzie’s father so when Suzie said she wanted to live with him, she reluctantly agreed.

Suzie had her own bedroom but Ian – who had cynically suggested to Jane before they split up that Suzie go on the contraceptive pill for her acne – insisted she spent nights in his room. ‘It was twisted.’

He encouraged her to bunk off school, which, increasingly anxious, Suzie found a relief. She sought respite watching old films, bleached her hair and wore vintage clothes in order to stop looking like herself.

‘I didn’t want to be in my body,’ she says.

Ian was first physically violent during her A-levels, when a boy from her school called the house. In a jealous rage, he grabbed her by the throat and pushed her against the wall. ‘He said, “You’re not going to go there any more”.’ So she didn’t.

‘I loved learning. He stole that from me.’

At 17, her sister called to say her real father, an alcoholic, had killed himself. Ian showed no sympathy. ‘He said, “You never had a dad. I’m your dad. Stop crying”.’

When she was 18 and Ian 52, he told her they needed to marry ‘for legal reasons’. Suzie, closeted from the outside world, assumed he was right. Now she understands this would make it harder for her to allege abuse against him. ‘It was safer for him.’

At Peckham Register Office in February 1995, Ian sent Suzie, dressed in a black suit, onto the street to find two witnesses. She persuaded a man and woman at a bus stop – astonished, now, that they agreed to help a teenager marry a middle-aged man.

‘Nobody questioned anything. I would have taken an 18-year-old girl away.’

Her mother, by now estranged from her daughter, wouldn’t find out that Suzie had married Ian until after he had died.

When Ian’s daughter, the same age as Suzie, asked why they’d married, ‘he said, “You’d better say you love me”,’ she recalls. ‘I felt dead. I was isolated. He controlled everything.’

Charismatic to the outside world, Ian enjoyed the increasing numbers of people telling him his wife looked like Marilyn Monroe. ‘He liked the attention I got from men, as long as I didn’t reciprocate.’ If he thought she’d looked at another man, he wouldn’t talk to her for a week.

‘He would rape me, beat me, throw my belongings at me, but wouldn’t talk to me.’

When she was 21, and someone on the street suggested she monetise the startling likeness to Marilyn, Ian agreed provided he kept control of her earnings. ‘I was so glad to be somebody else. I didn’t care about the money.’

One of her first jobs was an After Eights commercial in 1998, alongside Stephen Fry and Naomi Campbell. ‘Naomi was lovely to me. Nuggets of kindness I received through my work as Marilyn kept me alive.’

When still under Ian’s control, he stopped her from having a bank account or a driving licence, insisting on taking her to jobs and waiting outside until she was finished. The more jobs she got, the more depraved his abuse became.

Yet the humiliation was preferable to the ramifications if she refused, she explains, and she had learned to dissociate, ‘to take my mind somewhere else’. Her brain was no longer her own.

‘I was like a frog slowly boiling in water. I just adapted to my life. You don’t fear. You just exist,’ she says. ‘He’d say, “The only reason you’re Marilyn is because of me”. I believed it.’

She was plagued by infections, genital bruising and tears from the sexual abuse, but Ian never left her with visible wounds that could arouse suspicion.

‘He would twist my arm or shove me. He was very clever.’

He dug holes in the garden and told Suzie that if she cheated on him, he would bury her in them, telling her: ‘If the police come I’ll say you went away on a Marilyn gig and didn’t come back, and they’re going to believe me – so don’t f*** with me or I’ll f*****g kill you.’

In January 2007, Nathan, a model she had befriended through work, asked her on a date. She turned him down, saying, matter of factly, that they would both end up dead. His confusion persuaded Suzie to tell the truth about her violent marriage. Horrified, Nathan told Suzie to leave. ‘He said, “Suzie, he’s abusing you. People will help you”.’

Seeing her situation from an outside perspective for the first time, Suzie told Ian the abuse had to end one evening that month. He punched her in the face, pinned her to the bed and raped her.

‘He said, “I’m going to kill you”,’ says Suzie. She managed to struggle free, called Nathan and told him she was going to die. ‘He said “run”. He saved my life.’

Nathan called the police, who found Suzie standing on the corner of the street, her lip split. Even then, she begged police to let her back home. ‘That’s the level of control he had over me.’ The officer refused.

Ian was arrested and Suzie stayed with a friend she had met through the lookalike industry who had long suspected she was being abused.

Over the following days she was interviewed by police for hours at a time. ‘The police have to do it,’ she says, but reliving it made her feel she was ‘under water’.

When police interviewed her mother, she told them she loved Suzie – and was horrified by Ian’s crimes. ‘My abuser had convinced me that my mum didn’t love me and that’s really sad,’ she says. ‘The mental scars ripple through families.’

Ian’s son told police he had witnessed Suzie being abused as a child and agreed to be a witness for the prosecution. Nobody could have helped her at the time, she believes, because she had become so adept at covering for Ian.

In February 2007, he was charged with 15 counts of assault and rape. The trial was set for May at Southwark Crown Court and he was remanded in Brixton Prison. One afternoon in April, police called Suzie to say Ian had killed himself in his prison cell.

‘I started crying,’ she recalls – her tears a complex mix of loyalty, relief and anger. Had he not died, she is sure he’d have been found guilty, but ‘he’d be out by now’. Nonetheless, she says, suicide was his final act of control.

‘It’s horrible he didn’t face justice. He left me and Mum with the shame.’

She and her mother, now 76 and a retired headteacher, started to rebuild their relationship.

Suzie stresses her mother, who says she suspected nothing, is a victim, too. ‘Mum says she she’ll never forgive herself for not protecting me. I said there’s nothing to forgive.’

While police suggested Suzie had counselling, ‘no one ever followed it up,’ she says. ‘They said I should move on.’

Yet she was, in many ways, more vulnerable at that point. She started a relationship with Nathan, but it ended after two months. ‘I was too damaged.’

She took three overdoses and spent years numbing her

pain with alcohol, partying and casual sex.

‘I didn’t have any respect for myself. I was drinking constantly. People thought I was happy, but it was self-harm. I felt worthless. My body didn’t mean anything. I was in danger.’

In 2016, aged 36, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Studies have linked sexual abuse victims to an increased risk of this form of the disease and Suzie believes it is a ‘legacy’ of her ordeal. Radiotherapy and chemotherapy resulted in her being unable to have children.

‘I was devastated. It felt like something else he stole from me,’ she says. Even then, the cancer spread to her lymph nodes. She was told her chances of recovery were ‘slim’.

In hospital, having radiotherapy one day, she felt someone touch her arm and tell her she’d be OK. ‘I thought it was a nurse,’ she says. ‘It was the kindest feeling.’

Yet when she tried to thank them, she realised there had been nobody in the room.

‘I said to Mum, “I think I have met God”. I felt there was a reason all this had happened to me. God turns wickedness into some semblance of good.’

Suzie’s mother sat by her side throughout her chemotherapy and Suzie has now been in remission for nine years.

Continuing to work as Marilyn, she went on to appear as a lookalike in Hollywood films alongside Stephen Hawking and Ryan Gosling, has sung at parties for Kate Moss and Simon Cowell and advertised everything from

Citroen cars to the Hollywood Superbowl – most recently playing the Hollywood icon in Maria with Angelina Jolie.

Yet, determined to help others, she also enrolled on a counselling course at the London School of Theology.

‘You have to have counselling to be a counsellor and that was when my life changed. Therapy freed me of shame,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you can have the mind of a misogynist abuser because you’ve been so ingrained in it. It’s taken me years to get my self-respect back.’

She qualified as a psychotherapist four years ago. The domestic abuse survivors she helps tell her she seems to understand how they feel, ‘because I do and you can’t fake that. What can happen to your mind is frightening.’

Having rid herself of her defence mechanisms, she is happily single and has been sober for two years.

‘Recovery isn’t easy,’ she says. ‘It’s taken me years, but I’m strong now.’

• Jane’s name has been changed. For more information about Womans Trust, see womanstrust.org.uk.