An ITV presenter's former husband sent a horrifying picture of her to her children in an attempt to manipulate them.
Ruth Dodsworth's ex Jonathan Wignall was jailed for coercive behaviour in 2021 having blighted her family's life during a nine-year campaign of abuse.
She has since opened up about her ordeal ahead of the release of a new documentary about abusive marriages being shown tonight.
Reliving the trauma, she says at one point her children told her not to come home because the nightclub owner was threatening to kill her.
Ruth also shared a shocking image of Ruth in hospital that Wignall sent to her children while trying to exploit the situation.
A message with the picture reads: "This is what it looks like when you don't want your children anymore".
In a tweet highlighting the message, Ruth said: "Three years ago I was taken into hospital. He photographed everything.
"I never knew why.
"After he was arrested months later this is the message he sent my children.
"He couldn’t manipulate me anymore. So he tried to manipulate them."
Wignall has since been refused early home release, but Ruth is still preparing for him getting out of prison later on this year.
He was sentenced to three years in prison last April after pleading guilty to stalking and coercive control.
Ruth, who has since remarried, is determined that her story will help others and has taken part in a new television programme, Controlled By My Partner? The Hidden Abuse.
The programme will show previously unseen police footage of the moment he was arrested after making more than 200 phone calls to his wife, and includes input from her daughter Grace.
Ruth says: "Even now, hearing it just gives me the chills. I've made rather a concerted effort not to look at any pictures, photographs, but there's something about hearing that, hearing the anger in his voice.
"He was saying it was not harassment, 'she's my wife'. And that was very much the sort of the theme of his behaviour in a sense.
"She's my wife, she's my possession. And as a result, I'm allowed to do what I want. And I think that that was a pattern of behaviour that developed over the 20 or so years that we were together.
"And by the end of it, I felt like a possession. I felt I wasn't my own person. It was dehumanising. It was humiliating. It just took away every sort of sense of myself.
"And so to hear that, that was the morning really when everything changed. He was arrested then. And that was the last time I saw or heard from him."
Ruth's 18-year-old daughter, Grace, appears in the programme and says: “This was our reality, this was our lives, it was normal for us.
"And then all of a sudden we’re having all these professionals telling us that’s not right, and everything we’ve known is pretty much gone.”
Ruth also discusses how it took her years to recognise she was being abused and how her children’s fears for her safety made her realise Wignall’s behaviour was not normal.
She said: “I had no idea that the threats and manipulation my ex-husband used for almost a decade were actually a pattern of criminal behaviour.
“He would call me dozens of times a day, wanting to know where I was and who I was with. He would check my phone and even delete contacts from it. He would turn up at my workplace or insist that I leave the studio to eat lunch with him in his car.”
Ruth added: “It wasn’t until my own children began to fear for my safety that I realised what was going on wasn’t normal. In October 2019, I finally called the police and my then-husband was arrested.
"My ex-husband was jailed for just three years and nine months, but could be released later this year after serving less than half of his sentence – I can’t pretend I’m not scared, but I am trying to stay positive.”
Controlled By My Partner? The Hidden Abuse airs at 8.30pm on Thursday 5 May on ITV and on catch-up on the ITV Hub.
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