‘Man treated daughter like slave for 11 years’

LONDON - A man treated one of his daughters like a Cinderella-slave for 11 years as he subjected her to a number of horrific abuses that included “pulling out her hair and telling her he wished she was dead”, a British court has heard.

A jury was also told that the man, who married five times and produced nine children, wrapped the victim in masking tape and put her in a holdall, saying she would be posted back to her mother, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

The victim, now aged 27 and a mother of two, was also allegedly kept in her bedroom for the entire summer holidays by her father who cannot be named for legal reasons.

She is also said to have been forced to do all the household chores, before being manhandled around the house to do them again because she had not met his father’s impossibly high standards.

Prosecutors said that the father “treated his own daughter with an extraordinary cruelty”.

“He treated her like a modern-day Cinderella — Cinders with no prince charming or a happy ending for her,” Sean Brunton told Exeter Crown Court.

“She became the household slave, the butt of his frustration, the family whipping boy - or girl.” He said abuse went on “each day without respite.”

“We say he was really for his daughter, the father from hell.”

The prosecutor said this was not “heavy-handed discipline once or twice or a severe punishment inflicted and regretted immediately” afterwards but that the victim was singled out from siblings.

The defendant left one family in London and brought the victim, aged just four, with him because she suffers diabetes and he would care for her, the report said.

He set up home in Devon with his new wife and they had three daughters.

Brunton said: “From that very early age she knew that he despised her, and that was not just childhood paranoia. If she tried to sit near him he would push her away, saying ‘you disgust me I wish you were dead’.”

Jurors heard he said the victim was “too ugly to be a child of mine” and stood on her fingers if she sat on the floor and twisted his foot to hurt her fingers even more.

When the victim was 16, she was thrown out of the house, the jury heard, without even her insulin and she went to stay with a family friend.

The father, who is now 73, denies thirteen charges of cruelty and ill treatment which date back to the 1980s and 90s. The trial continues.