Woman Granted £217k In Damages After Suing Therapist Who Raped Her

A woman Ella Janneh has revealed her joy in being awarded £217,000 after sexual assault was not prosecuted and two appeals to CPS were dismissed.

After an 8-year fight she said at times broke her down, Janneh won damages in a civil case against TV sex therapist Michael Lousada who she accused of raping her.

“I don’t think anybody chooses to make the most humiliating experience of their life something to be publicly known for,” she said in an interview with the Guardian.

“But this shame is not ours, and I want to make this easier for the next person to speak out.”

Despite going to the police the day after the alleged rape, her case was not prosecuted. Two appeals to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) were dismissed and she was denied criminal injuries compensation because police told the awarding body she was “not a credible witness”.

“First and foremost I wanted justice,” said Janneh, now 37. “I wanted to be able to share this story with the world.”

Janneh started seeing the therapist, Michael Lousada, in 2011. She had been sexually abused as a child and had not received proper help to process this.

It left her depressed, as well as having panic attacks during sexual activity with her boyfriends.

“Because I really did not understand what was happening to me and it was really overwhelming, and I experienced a lot of shame and embarrassment about it, I felt like I needed to get help,” she said.

One day she picked up a copy of the Metro newspaper and read an article about Lousada, in which he said he wanted to bring the services he offered to the NHS.

In the years before she saw Lousada again, she had more traditional talking therapy and talked about the positive effects

“I was in a really good place psychologically and emotionally,” she said. “I felt very excited about my future. I felt very, very good about the progress I had made.”

However, she still experienced panic symptoms during sexual activity.

“[As] a woman in my 20s [I] didn’t want to be dealing with having these types of conversations with sexual partners about my sexual abuse,” she said.

And so she began checking websites for survivors of sexual abuse, and read about “bodywork”, described as “an emerging field that survivors were finding healing in”.

She says she remembered that she had seen Lousada in the past and booked another appointment.

Having seen Lousada’s social media posts, she believed he was “this pre-eminent expert in trauma” and paid £750 for the three-hour session in London.

She explained to him how her panic manifested: her hands would close up, she would hyperventilate and struggle to speak. She said Lousada did not explain what she should expect from the session.

“There was nothing, there was no communication on his end,” she said.

She did not believe that the session “would involve anything sexual” and thought “he would be treating me in the way a doctor or a therapist would”, she said.

After 30 minutes of talking, Janneh went to a room with a bed, where the alleged rape took place.

In documents filed with the high court, Janneh said Lousada told her his penis was “like a laser beam” that could “burn up trauma” and “absorb the trauma”.

The court heard that Lousada did not wear a condom. After hearing the evidence, the judge found that Lousada had instructed Ella to regress into her childhood self.

Janneh claimed the incident caused her to suffer a panic attack, leaving her unable to communicate and “incapable of providing valid and informed consent”.

In his defence, Lousada admitted penetration occurred but said he repeatedly received “clear verbal consent” from Janneh, although the judge decided that was not the case.

The judge said he had “no doubt” Janneh had suffered a “full-blown dissociative panic attack” and that she had “entirely lacked capacity” to consent to what happened.

After she left Lousada’s office, Janneh said she phoned her friend while she was on the train, but realised she could not talk about what had happened and hung up.

“Once I got to the station it had started to filter through what had happened, and I called her and started screaming, at Dalston Kingsland station [in east London], at the top of the platform.

“I just started screaming and then I hung up the phone, and went straight across the road and bought a bottle, and went home and just turned off my phone because I couldn’t talk to anyone.”

She added: “I felt totally and utterly humiliated, more humiliated than when I was a child, because that abuse had been used against me.”

The next morning, she switched her phone back on, and after hardly sleeping, called a sexual assault service as soon as it opened. “I just started screaming again,” she said.

The same day, she reported Lousada to the Metropolitan police, who began a rape investigation.

Following the police investigation, the case was referred to the CPS, but she was told that Lousada would not be prosecuted.

“I absolutely did not feel like justice was done,” she said.

“I just couldn’t understand how this was allowed to continue, and I just couldn’t sit with the fact that this was allowed to continue.

“I had wanted to die. That’s how bad I felt, that’s how destroyed I was, I almost lost my mind. I’ve gone in a space that is supposed to be therapeutic and the whole thing was turned on its head.”