A man who strangled and beat his partner black and blue has been jailed for three years after claiming she had suffered her injuries by falling down rabbit holes.
Charlie Clowes, 55, from the Bedale area, subjected the victim to horrific, drink-fuelled violence at their remote farmhouse which destroyed her life and left her feeling suicidal, York Crown Court heard.
Prosecutor Andrew Semple said the named victim had reported Clowes to police previously but when officers came out, she declined to make a formal complaint.
He was issued with a domestic violence protection order to keep him away from the victim and banning him from contacting her for 28 days.
The order was imposed on May 9, but Clowes breached this twice just a few weeks later by contacting her.
Mr Semple said the couple’s relationship was dogged by Clowes’ drinking and had been exacerbated by the remoteness of the farmhouse after they moved to the area four years earlier.
He said the victim would try to avoid Clowes when he was “aggressive (and) in drink”, but on one such occasion, when she had retreated to her bedroom, he followed her in and beat her while she was lying on the bed.
The victim was also strangled and suffered extensive bruising after being “beaten black and blue”.
Mr Semple described the attacks, which followed “an hour of aggression” towards the victim, as “prolonged and persistent”.
In a separate attack on a later date, Cowes punched the victim with “full force” across her forehead and choked her. She suffered a lump on her forehead and a smaller lump and “significant” bruising to her arm.
Mr Semple said the former couple were now embroiled in a civil dispute over the farmhouse.
Clowes, a former tree surgeon, was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, intentional strangulation and common assault. He denied the offences, which occurred between January 21 and 30, after “ludicrously” claiming that the victim had suffered the injuries by “wandering about in the garden and falling down various rabbit holes”.
However, he was found guilty after trial and appeared for sentence via video link today after being remanded in custody.
In a statement read out by the prosecution, the victim said she had lost all her confidence due to Clowes’s brutality, and she was now a “shell of her former self”.
She said that during their relationship she was “constantly second-guessing his mood” and used to go to bed early to avoid him, while “sleeping with one eye open”.
She had since struggled to sleep, suffered with anxiety and was “terrified as to what he would do to me when released (from prison)”.
She said the psychological harm was even worse than the “physical torture” she had suffered.
Clowes had a previous conviction for assaulting an emergency worker in 2023 following yet another drunken incident when he attacked police officers who had been called out to a hotel. When they arrived, Clowes began shouting at them and slammed a car door shut into one of the officers.
Defence barrister Mahdev Singh Sachdev said that Clowes’ offending had been driven by his “relationship with alcohol”.
Judge Simon Hickey said the victim’s statement made for “thoroughly sobering” reading and that Clowes’s violence was so serious that it could only be met by an immediate jail sentence.
He ruled out any community disposal because Clowes couldn’t be trusted to comply with any such order “given your record on bail and your attitude to the offences both at trial and now”.
He told Clowes: “You are clearly a risk to women who you live with. Effectively, you destroyed (the victim’s) life. You have ground away her self-confidence (and) she was indeed beaten black and blue.”
He added: “You were convicted after trial, having suggested all those injuries – and they were significant – came about when she wandered about in the garden and fell down various rabbit holes, which was a ludicrous defence.”
Clowes, who was sat head bowed in the video booth, was jailed for three years and made subject to a 15-year restraining order banning him from contacting the victim.
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