I took my ex-husband to court for rape, but he walked free… 18 years on, I’ve helped his other victims get him convicted

On a grey afternoon in Edinburgh last November, four women took celebratory photographs together at the city’s train station — something that only months earlier no one could ever have imagined.

They were bittersweet souvenirs of a momentous occasion; hours earlier, the women had sat together in court while Aaron Swan, the man who had raped and abused them, was finally convicted of a series of sexual offences.

All four women were his victims, and all had thought they would never see him brought to justice — none more so than Natalie Collins, a 39-year-old charity leader who was married to Swan for four years and who had made her own allegation of rape against him in 2005.

Swan, also 39, had been found not guilty, but in the intervening years Natalie never lost hope of seeing the man she claimed had assaulted her and subjected her to years of terrifying coercive control be met with the full force of the law. Now she had joined forces with his other victims, forming an unlikely sisterhood that gave them all the strength to face their abuser and ensure that he could not do to others what he had done to them.

‘I feel like I was Victim Zero,’ says Natalie, who has courageously waived her anonymity in order to share her remarkable story. ‘My case cannot be retried, but I take huge comfort from the fact that Aaron will not be able to hurt other women for a long time — and that it was his victims who came together to make that happen.

‘We’d all been through so much that it was overwhelming — we all cried when the verdicts were read out. Later, one of the other victims messaged me to say “my justice is your justice”, which touched me to my core.’

Theirs is certainly a story of courage and redemption, although it is one that also raises sobering questions for our justice system. Swan had been placed on the sex offenders register at the age of 19 for sexually abusing a teenage girl and was also later convicted of possessing indecent images of children.

Nonetheless, he was able to commit offences over two decades, and may yet be investigated for other accusations of rape as other women’s stories have emerged.

‘He has been raping and sexually abusing women for 26 years, since he was a teenage boy,’ says Natalie. ‘I feel a burning anger that he managed to nearly destroy so many lives.’

Nearly being a crucial word here; today Natalie is adamant that she does not want to be defined by what Swan did to her.

Despite this, there is no doubt Swan’s abuse took its toll. She had to fight hard to rebuild her life, suffering a breakdown shortly after meeting her second husband of 17 years, a friend she had known since she was a teenager. ‘There were days when I could barely function at all,’ she confides. ‘In the end, it was my faith that kept me going, the sense there was something bigger than me guiding me forward.’

Yet that same faith had also contributed to the way that, aged 17, she fell under Swan’s spell.

Raised alongside her siblings in a strongly evangelical but happy Christian family, her views about sex and relationships as a teenager were naive. It left her vulnerable to the advances of the ‘incredibly attractive and charming’ Swan, who she met at a party. Six foot two, with a soft Scottish accent, he had a reputation for being a bad boy, but told Natalie he had ‘found God’ and was a reformed character.

She describes what happened next as ‘love bombing’ — a recognised term for the way coercive relationships unfold.

‘He’s telling me how amazing I am; how he wants to be with me all the time,’ she recalls. ‘Really quickly, I was enthralled by him.’

Such was his persuasiveness that within 12 days of meeting, he had manipulated Natalie — whose religious views meant that she did not believe in sex before marriage — into sleeping with him. ‘At that point I literally felt I would have to marry him,’ she says. Yet it was not long before Swan’s previous attentiveness all but vanished.

‘The compliments shifted to things like, “I’m never going to get over my ex-girlfriend. It’s not your fault, but you can’t ever be as good as her”,’ Natalie recalls.

He also admitted to sleeping with someone else. ‘Obviously I was ¬devastated, but I felt I had to forgive him,’ she says now.

‘Rather than running a million miles, I was seized by this sense that my love could save him.’

Swan also refused to use contraception, and within six months Natalie was pregnant, leading to a hastily arranged marriage not long after Natalie, still only 18, had given birth to daughter Isabelle*.

In the aftermath, Swan told her he had been serially unfaithful. ‘It was so complicated,’ says Natalie. ‘I was in a constant state of high distress, but felt I couldn’t leave him because he was the father of my child.’

Alarmed by the changes in their daughter, Natalie’s parents encouraged her to leave Swan, but it didn’t last. ‘He manipulated me back within a couple of days,’ she says. ‘So then I didn’t talk to them about it — I was embarrassed I didn’t have the skills to resist him. It was really torturous, being in this relationship with somebody who was so harmful, but not feeling able to escape.’

Events reached a head in 2004 when Natalie found out that Swan, then 20, was sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl. After confronting him, Natalie reported him to the police and he was convicted of having a sexual relationship with a minor, before being placed on the sex offenders register for five years.

‘Even then he talked his way out of it, made me feel that on some level my love could save him,’ she says. ‘I was so broken.’

Even worse was to come. Sexually violent throughout the relationship, the following year Natalie says that Swan raped her — by then 19 and heavily pregnant with the couple’s second child Jake*.

The attack, which started when she was asleep, was so vicious it was enough to persuade her to get out for good. She was in the process of trying to find somewhere new to live when, a week later, she went into labour 12 weeks early, almost ¬certainly as a consequence of the stress. Her son was so unwell that Natalie had to spend the next five months living in hospitals with her then two-year-old daughter.

With time away from him to think, she finally found the courage to leave Swan for good and report him to the police for rape. It was a line in the sand of sorts, although he continued to exert continual pressure on her, despite the fact she had moved from the area and he did not know where she lived.

‘I was 20, with two tiny children and I was highly vulnerable, but they released him on bail and within five minutes he’d rung me and started to pressure me to stop the case.’

The calls continued until the case went to court in May 2006. Although Natalie stood her ground, supported by family and friends who had rallied round, Swan argued they had had consensual sex within weeks of the alleged rape, undermining his wife’s accusation. She says now: ‘I was exhausted and vulnerable and in no position to stand up to him.’

He was found not guilty.

‘On one level it was devastating, but just knowing he’d been made to take the stand and answer the -questions of the prosecution was meaningful in its own right. It helped me to move forward.’

The process of building a new life was helped by the fact that as well as Natalie being given sole custody of their children, as a convicted sex offender Swan was allowed no contact with them. ‘Otherwise, he would have used that to try and abuse me further, which is a position many women find themselves in,’ she says. It was this knowledge that spurred her on to establish a course — ownmylifecourse.org — designed to help victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence.

Natalie trains providers to teach her course, which 10,000 women have accessed to date. ‘It became a mission for me to empower as many other women as possible to take control of their lives.’

She could have no idea that years later the course would end up helping other victims of her ex-husband.

Three years ago, by then living in Sunderland, her 17-year-old daughter established contact with her biological father on Facebook.

‘On some level I had known this day would come, but I was still ¬horrified,’ says Natalie. ‘My biggest concern was that he would sexually abuse her or her friends, so I immediately got the police and social services involved.’

It led to the discovery that, in 2010, Swan had been convicted for possession of illegal images of children, meaning a ten-year extension to his time on the sex offenders register. ‘Yet he was allowed unsupervised contact with three children from other relationships,’ she says.

After rekindling contact with Swan’s sister, Amy, with whom she had previously had a good relationship, Natalie was horrified to learn that her former husband had continued his pattern of predatory behaviour. After moving to the Scottish Borders, he had married a teenager, Olivia*, whom he had groomed over the internet when she was just 16 and who was pregnant by the age of 17.

‘Because she was over the age of sexual consent, and even though Aaron was on the sex offenders’ register, nobody saw him as a risk to her,’ Natalie says.

The couple were together for ten years, nine of them married, and had two children together until the relationship ended when Olivia discovered that Swan had got a 19-year-old girl pregnant.

‘He then began to terrorise her, slashing her tyres, writing expletives in faeces on her car,’ says Natalie. ‘She also reported him for two incidents of rape.’ Hearing this news for the first time was ‘shocking’. ‘Not so much his abuse, but that he had been allowed to do it. I felt this strong sense of a system having failed,’ she says.

After being put in contact with each other through Amy, the two women agreed to meet in a park with their children.

‘It was very emotional,’ she says. ‘We realised that Aaron had ¬controlled both of us, isolated us from our support network and attacked us in our sleep.’

There was a further horrifying twist to Olivia’s story: she had to confront the realisation that in 2013 her then fiance had also raped her best friend Hannah* in a bedroom of their family home.

Olivia had subsequently cut off all contact with Hannah after believing Swan’s assertion that she had ‘seduced’ him.

While Hannah had not reported the attack to the police — fearing she would not be believed — she did speak to a rape crisis charity shortly after the attack. Upon seeing on Facebook that Olivia and Swan were no longer together, Hannah reached out to her old friend. Encouraged by Olivia, it was only in 2021 that Hannah finally felt able to report Swan’s rape to the police.

Meanwhile, Swan had already moved on. By now, he was in another long-term relationship with Becky*, a young woman who, given their own experiences, Natalie and Olivia both suspected Swan may have been harming.

‘Amy had some contact with her and managed to persuade her to go on the Own My Life course,’ says Natalie. ‘Slowly, she began to understand that what he was doing was abuse.’

In the wake of this, Becky then felt able to make her own allegation of rape in 2022. The Scottish law’s Moorov doctrine allows unconnected cases to be tried together if there is mutual corroboration between the separate acts. This meant that Swan could be charged with cumulative accounts of raping all three of them.

The women sobbed through their evidence, while Amy, Swan’s sister, also corroborated the accounts of Olivia and Becky, who had confided in her about their experiences. ‘Amy is an amazing woman,’ says Natalie. ‘She took the stand and supported every single one of the women that he hurt. We were so grateful to her for standing up for us against him.’

When it came to his turn on the stand, Swan claimed the offences either did not happen or were consensual, but admitted to cheating on Olivia with 18 other women.

Finally, in November, a jury found Swan guilty of six of the seven offences with which he was charged, although one charge of rape against Becky was found ‘not proven’. Now remanded in custody, Swan is awaiting the outcome of an assessment for an Order of Lifelong Restriction, meaning he is considered such a risk he must be monitored for the rest of his life. He is due to be sentenced next month.

‘He showed no emotion at all,’ Natalie recalls.

‘At times, I was stricken by deep grief for all he’s taken from us, but I was also absolutely enraged at him — and at the injustice of how long he has got away with hurting women and children.’

All the women suspect there may have been other victims, although Natalie’s case cannot be retried. ‘If he can stay in prison then that doesn’t matter; I just want him not to be able to hurt anyone else,’ she says.

That knowledge is shared between all Swan’s victims, who take great comfort from what they have achieved together.

‘All of us meet up occasionally and gather together with our kids. We have a unique bond,’ she says. ‘It’s forged through something horrible, but out of it has come something wonderful.’

* Names have been changed.