Northumbria police are reopening a sexual assault investigation after a woman who was sued for writing about her experience defeated the libel action against her.
Last month, the high court found that Nina Cresswell had “proved on the balance of probabilities that she was violently sexually assaulted” by Billy Hay, a tattoo artist, in Sunderland in 2010 when she was 20.
Cresswell said the investigation was a “positive move” and she hoped lessons could be learned, but it had come too late.
“I’m happy to cooperate, but I just can’t help but feel that the motives aren’t to protect me and to protect other women,” she said. “The police have only jumped to action since the media have been involved and a high court judge has called them out, so it feels like it’s 13 years too late to me.”
Hay took legal action against Cresswell in 2020 over a blog and social media posts she wrote at the height of the #MeToo movement. Naming Hay, she wrote that he attacked her when she was walking home from a nightclub where they had met earlier the same evening. He denies the claims.
Mrs Justice Heather Williams ruled that on the balance of probabilities Cresswell had been attacked, and she called the police’s initial investigation “deficient … and superficial”.
Cresswell, a copywriter, told police hours after the incident in 2010 that she had been sexually assaulted by Hay. Officers spoke to her at 6.33am, before she had slept and while she was still under the influence of alcohol. A few hours later, the incident had been recorded as “no crime”.
After being threatened with legal action by Hay a decade later, Cresswell re-reported the attack to police. In a letter, his lawyers stated that the pair had only “danced and chatted in groups”, but when questioned by police Hay said he had left the nightclub with Cresswell and tried to kiss her, but stopped when she moved away. Police reopened the investigation but decided there was no realistic prospect of prosecution.
After the ruling, Cresswell said she was looking forward to healing and moving on with her life.
But she said she was left feeling unsettled once again when two police officers turned up at her house without warning last Friday. “I went into full-on panic,” she said. “And I thought: oh god, what is it now?”
She said the two male officers said a more senior officer wanted to speak to her but they would not tell her why. Then, after her mother called them to ask them not to turn up unannounced again, they visited a second time, she said.
Cresswell said she complained about her entire experience with the police via email to Kim McGuinness, the Northumbria police and crime commissioner. She received an email on Monday saying police were reopening the investigation, she said.
“I went into full fight-or-flight mode,” she said. “It wasn’t that I was unwilling to cooperate. I was just having a trauma response.”
She said she would fully cooperate with the investigation, but she also hoped that police would learn from mistakes made during her case, including around interactions with trauma victims. “It would be good for the police to look into what went wrong, give some answers and learn lessons,” she said.
A spokesperson for Northumbria police said: “We can confirm we are reopening the investigation into the report of a sexual assault from 2010. It would therefore be inappropriate to comment any further at this stage.”
