On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
I have met her twice. She testified. She had spent seven years believing it had been her word against his and that she had lost, and she found out at thirty-three that there had never been a contest, because there had never been a file.
She said one thing to me in a corridor in the state capital that I have not been able to put down.
She said: I stopped trusting myself in 2018. Not him. Myself.
She said she had spent seven years going back over that night trying to work out which part she had exaggerated, because two officers had come out and looked at her and made a decision in nineteen minutes, and she had assumed that meant they could see something about her that she could not.
Nineteen minutes on a Tuesday in March, and a woman rebuilt her entire opinion of her own judgement around it.
That is the actual damage. Not the case that was not brought. The seven years of a person quietly deciding she is unreliable.
That is the thing I cannot put down, and it is not what Sutton did to my daughter.
It is that a nineteen-minute unfounded call in 2018 is the reason there was a wedding in 2023.
