Picture posed by model
The first time Abbi Lawther was sexually assaulted, she was sitting on the kerb outside a nightclub, surrounded by friends.
Though she had never met her attacker Simon Cash before that evening in December 2018, they had been invited to the same birthday celebration and he had shadowed her constantly. ‘Anywhere I was, he seemed to appear,’ says Abbi, a beauty therapist, now 22. ‘He was big, scruffy, quite quiet – but he just gave off a weird vibe. One person that night had told me she’d known him all her life and wouldn’t walk on the same side of the road as that guy. You don’t want to hurt anyone, but it had got to the point where I was actively trying to avoid him.’