‘It all started with this,’ says Tilly, showing me a handwritten note on a small piece of paper.
She found it pushed through her letter box when she returned home one afternoon last July.
It was an unseasonably wet and chilly day, but the schools had just broken up for summer and Tilly was looking forward to more family time, including a short holiday in the UK with her husband and two children.
The note, from the police, asked Tilly to call the criminal investigation department.
An officer had written ‘not urgent’ at the end of the note, presumably not to alarm her.
‘I wondered if something had happened to someone close to me,’ she says.
‘Why would I need to be phoning that department of the police?’ She was confused and concerned, but calm.
‘When I called, they said they couldn’t tell me what it was about over the phone. They asked if they could come to the house.’
That was when Tilly knew it must be serious.
Hours earlier, one of the island’s most senior politicians, Jonathan Le Tocq, had been arrested, and police were contacting his victims.
Two officers arrived at Tilly’s home later that day, 21 July, the day after which nothing in her world would ever be the same again.
‘They told me they had found an account on social media set up by someone else but in my name, and it was public, so anyone could have seen it.
‘They told me it contained sexually explicit images, pornographic representations of me. And they told me who they had traced it back to. I was just numb, completely numb.’
Le Tocq was jailed last week for nine years, having admitted a string of online sex offences dating back to 2016, including possessing hundreds of extreme pornographic images, many involving implements of torture, making thousands of indecent and pseudo-indecent images of children, and sending indecent messages.
He offended through dozens of social media accounts he created under various names. He misused and manipulated the images of dozens of women and children.
Tilly was one of a number of local victims known to him.
Initially, Le Tocq misused images of Tilly’s face on accounts in which he posed as a sex therapist. He later set up an explicit account in Tilly’s name and pretended she was running it. He probed Tilly’s real social media accounts in search of images of her to manipulate.
He studied details of her life to make her role in the sordid accounts he was controlling seem more plausible.
On one account created in Tilly’s name, he uploaded fake sexually explicit images, as well as a photo of himself superimposed on a man who was holding the face of a woman while she was tied up.
He continued using that account until four days before his arrest. At times the account was private and at other times it was public.
‘I will never know who has seen it,’ says Tilly.
‘For the rest of my life I have to live with not knowing if people have seen it. I think of these images of me I know were out there and I hate that. This has taken something away which I will never get back.’
Tilly was one of several women and girls who provided the court with victim impact statements which the judge said made ‘harrowing reading’. Later the same day, she shared her full story with me, in an hour-long interview, under conditions of anonymity.
‘I don’t feel like the same person I was before all this. I have been through a range of emotions, from curling up in a ball and sobbing, to feeling violated and wounded with an internal physical pain that hasn’t gone away and I still feel daily. This has pretty much been every day since July.
‘Everything about me is a reminder, like my own name, my image in the mirror, my identity which has been attacked. Even going to the takeaway and them shouting out my name – I don’t want my name shouted in front of people. In the pharmacy, they ask your address, and that makes me anxious. Looking in the mirror reminds me of the images of me which have been described by the police.
‘It’s like a psychological rape. You have to absorb details of a certain amount of depravity you never even knew existed. I didn’t want that in my head, and I don’t want that in my head now, and that in itself is abusive.
‘I have just tried to keep going and stay busy and distracted. I feel that my brain has been in survival mode for six months. But there is only a certain amount of adrenaline until you feel that your body is starting to give out and I have had more migraines and heart palpitations.
‘It’s strange to go from living what you feel is a normal life to becoming a shell of your former self and questioning everyone’s motives. It has taken away my enjoyment of life and altered how I see the world and how I see other people.’
After the day in July that changed everything – the day of the handwritten police note, when Tilly found out she had been wickedly and persistently violated, but the full horrors of Le Tocq’s crimes were not yet known – Tilly and her husband had struggled to escape a recurring fear.
‘There was a comment on the fake page he was pretending was mine saying something about a “milf” on the school run. When I saw that, I panicked and wondered if that meant our children were involved. We were worried about that.’
They decided to stick to their plan for a short holiday towards the end of August. The nightmare of recent weeks had left Tilly disconsolate and exhausted, and they thought a change of scenery and a few days away with their children would do them all good. But on the first day of their holiday, their worst fears came true.
‘I could see the police messaging me, saying they needed to get hold of me urgently.’
Le Tocq had just been charged with numerous offences and remanded in custody.
‘The phone reception wasn’t very good, there was music playing, and I was blocking one ear trying to listen to what the police were telling me. Basically, they had found images of our daughter.’
Their daughter is a young teenager still years away from adulthood. Tilly and her husband spent the next few days agonising over when and how they should tell her. They waited until they were back home.
‘As you can imagine, that was a difficult conversation.’
More than 300 pseudo-indecent images of their daughter were found on Le Tocq’s devices, all of which he had obtained from a few family photos on one of Tilly’s genuine social media accounts, and then manipulated to satisfy, as the judge put it, his ‘warped fantasies’.
As well as trying to support her daughter through the ordeal they were now facing together, Tilly started worrying that she was to blame, as many victims do.
‘You start wondering if you did anything to encourage this attention. And then you feel guilty for putting a few pictures of your children on Facebook, even though it’s an innocent thing to do and you shouldn’t have to feel guilty about it.
‘I thought that if I hadn’t done that she wouldn’t have been dragged into this thing. You start questioning your innocent daily behaviour. Fortunately, my daughter was very gracious not to blame me for any of that.’
I spoke to Tilly and her daughter together.
They have always been close, and in recent months talking, reflecting, crying and struggling together, to find a way through this nightmare, has brought them closer still.
Tilly’s daughter uses the same word as her mum – ‘numb’ – to describe how she felt when she first became aware that she, too, was a victim of the shocking, sick online world Le Tocq spent years creating. She provided the court with her own victim impact statement.
She is articulate and polite, and the clarity and self-reflection of her words belie her age.
‘I really started processing it once we had met the police a few times and knew more of the details,’ she says.
She has had a lot of time off school. Her trust and confidence were shattered, and she knows they will take a long time to repair.
‘It changes your perspective on how people think. You don’t know if someone thinks like that or has similar intentions. You never know because you would never have thought that someone who was a pastor and in the States would think like that or be like that. I am now very cautious because I don’t know who thinks like that.
‘That is probably going to be at the back of my mind forever. I feel like I’ll always be a bit iffy about adults, especially people I don’t know.
‘I will always have the knowledge that, at the age I am now, this 61-year-old man viewed me in this way and wanted to view me in this way.
‘That is a horrible thing to have in my mind, and I feel it will probably always be in my mind, even if I’m not talking about it.
‘I have been exposed to sides of people and sides of the world I would never have known about or thought about, at least until I was older, or at all. I would never put myself in a situation where I would watch or hear anything about this sort of content, which is way too mature for my age. Even adults I have talked to have said that what the prosecutor had to say was just too much and disgusting and they didn’t want to hear it, and some of it is about children.’
The authorities and Tilly have worked together to protect her daughter from the most depraved details. Tilly knows more, but only as much as she has needed to know. Tilly’s daughter has shared what she knows, and talked about her feelings, with two very close friends. She is aware that other children at school and elsewhere know varying degrees of information. She and her mum have struggled coming to terms with uncertainty about who knows what, at times awkwardly avoiding conversations and at other times painfully explaining a little or a lot. It is hard enough with adult friends but even more so with friends who are children.
‘Even when I have told them, they didn’t really understand,’ says Tilly’s daughter.
‘How could they understand? I’ve been involved in this for months and I still don’t really understand.’
Le Tocq’s abhorrent crimes were made more shocking still because of the positions of trust he held across the community for so long. For 27 years, he was senior pastor at what is now The Rock Community Church.
For more than a decade until his arrest, Le Tocq led Guernsey’s external relations, representing the island regularly in Westminster, in France, where he had a second home, and in Brussels, where he claimed to have learned, while on a work visit there, many of the techniques he would use to create his extensive library of cruel, vile, criminal images.
He was involved in numerous charities.
Since 2009, he had helped establish churches in France through an organisation called New Ground.
On one social media account, in his own name rather than when he was pretending to be someone else, he claimed to be a counsellor specialising in recovery from marriage and relational breakdown, healing of the past, overcoming work-related stress and family mediation.
On another he described himself as he wanted the world to know him – ‘worshipper, lover, dad, pastor, musician, politician, in that order’. At some point, those things were no longer enough to satisfy him, his judgement and morality unravelled, and eventually the man behind the illusion was painfully revealed to the victims he abused, the family he betrayed and the community he deceived.
‘It shows a dangerous mind that he was able to live such a convincing double life,’ says Tilly.
‘He was highly intelligent and this was a very calculated level of depravity. He threw Christian phrases into some of these accounts and dragging that into the depravity is very odd for someone who said they had faith.’
In one account he set up under Tilly’s name, on which he pretended she was posting explicit images of herself, the profile he wrote of her included ‘daughter of a king’, a Christian term. This added insult on top of everything else to Tilly, who is an active Christian.
‘That was mockery – like, this is God’s daughter – worded as if it could be me describing myself, and then he had added other things, like mum of two and discovering her wild side, all to make the account and the images seem more plausible.’
It was through Christian circles that Tilly first met Le Tocq many years earlier, though they were not members of the same church. She had spoken to him at length a few times. Tilly wondered what could possibly have led him to target her, though of course it is now known that he had a long and unexplained list of victims. When confronted with his wickedness, Le Tocq said it was a way to cope with stress, which Tilly found shocking. His advocate was able to offer little more by way of explanation. The court was told that Le Tocq had commissioned a psychological assessment of himself to try to find reasons for his behaviour. It found little evidence that his upbringing as an adopted child could have led to his wrongdoing, he had not been physically or emotionally neglected or mistreated, and he had no diagnosed mental health or personality disorder of relevance. What he had done was again described as a form of escapism from other pressures in his life.
‘With the level of what he has done, I don’t think anything could be said to excuse or explain it. They said he was a wonderful person and that this was out of character. If you walk through a supermarket and yell at someone, that might be out of character, but it can’t be out of character when you spend so many hours over so many years creating such depraved images. Nothing of it makes any sense and we will probably never know why we ended up being targeted by him.’
The support of family and friends, some of whom have known of their ordeal since the summer, has been invaluable. Tilly has also continued to draw strength from her faith.
‘Even though my trust in people has been shaken, my trust in God hasn’t,’ she says.
There was reassurance, too, in the other victims’ impact statements read to the court.
‘It has been helpful to hear that we are not alone and that how we feel is sort of normal in these circumstances.’
Some of the other victims talked about health problems, not wanting to go out, and the effects on their relationships and trust in people. Potentially helping other victims of similar offences was one reason for Tilly and her daughter bravely sharing their full story publicly.
If Le Tocq completes his full sentence in prison, he will be released in August 2034, by which time he will be 70, but good behaviour could see him freed several years before then.
When I bring this up, Tilly asks her daughter if she minds us talking about something which they have evidently discussed and must be particularly raw for her.
She is happy for her mum to continue.
‘She is already concerned about when he comes out,’ says Tilly.
‘She is worried about not feeling safe. When you think about it, it doesn’t feel like that far away. We both know those thoughts are going to linger and so it’s not as if it’s now done and gone away forever.’
The court was told there was a medium risk of Le Tocq reoffending.
He will be subject to an extended sentence for two years and on the register of sex offenders for five years.
Tilly says they cannot fault the care or professionalism of the police, child protection officers, therapists, Victim Support and other agencies who have been with them throughout and in some cases will be for the foreseeable future.
‘We are very grateful that we will continue to have the therapy we need and support with counselling and through Victim Support.’
While the court was adjourned, not long before our interview, Tilly took her daughter into town for a different type of therapy, which seems to have been a success looking at the shopping bags by her feet.
‘We let her spoil herself. We said this was the one day when mum and dad couldn’t say no, after what she has been through and is still going through.
‘We are very proud of how she is handling this and of her statement to the court which they said was very compelling.’
Tilly and her daughter cannot currently be identified for legal and welfare reasons, but they have discussed one day being open about their experiences, as part of their recovery.
‘We don’t want to take it to our graves as a big secret, as victims we shouldn’t have to hide, and sharing things could help other people going through similar trauma,’ says Tilly.
It is too soon for them to know where recovery will eventually take them, but they are determined to get there.
‘This is a journey. Life is different, but life goes on.’
Tilly is not our interviewee’s real name. We have used Tilly, with her permission, to protect her and her daughter’s identity, for legal and welfare reasons.