A ‘therapist’ brainwashed my daughter to believe I had sexually abused her — it took six long years to win her back

A mother’s harrowing story of a family torn apart by a self-styled ‘healer’ who targeted girls from wealthy backgrounds

ONLY with the benefit of hindsight can Sarah Strutt now see that she missed a key warning sign of the horrors to come. She’d been invited to a final portrait sitting at her beautiful, artist daughter’s studio, only to find that on arrival all she could talk about was her new therapist.

‘She told me she only took the really special people and that while she charged £100 [€119] for the hour, they would then chat for three hours non-stop,’ Sarah recalls. ‘And that’s when my red light should have come on.’

Yet even if it had, what could she have done about it?

Sarah did not know it, but her daughter, who was in her early 20s, was already in the grip of a self-styled ‘healer’ called Anne Craig who would, over a matter of months, separate her from everyone she loved in the world.

Within two years of coming into Craig’s orbit, the young woman became convinced she had been sexually abused as a child, and cut off all contact with her family and friends for six long years.

The portrait she had lovingly painted of her mother was burned at Craig’s suggestion.

For much of that time, a despairing Sarah, now 69, together with her daughter’s father, stepfather and siblings, had no idea where she was, an experience she describes today as like ‘drowning in a vat of black oil’.

It ultimately took the help of a private detective and even an expert in cults to get her back. Although perhaps, most of all, it was the fierce love of a mother who would never give up on her child, that has resulted in their reunion today.

A constant reminder that things will never be the same, however, is illustrated by fact her daughter has now changed her name by Deed Poll, to distance herself from her old identity and past. Now going by the name of Hui Hue, she’s a happy mother of two boys, aged three and five, and a regular visitor to the beautiful home Sarah shares with her second husband, Henry.

To her family, it’s a small price to pay. Sarah knows how close she came to losing her, although her relief is accompanied by a visceral anger at the freedom given to unqualified ‘coaches’ who remain largely ungoverned by any current laws.

‘We can never get back the years we lost,’ she says. ‘I have to get beyond that, but I know how much we suffered — and how others are still suffering — and I don’t want anyone to go through the same agony.’

HER determination to raise awareness of unqualified practitioners is one reason Sarah took part in a compelling six-part investigative podcast, Dangerous Memories, which features women whose lives have been affected by Craig.

Most were from privileged backgrounds, a description that certainly applies to Sarah’s vulnerable, youngest daughter.

Her maternal grandfather, Charles SmithRyland, was a former Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire and owned the Grade II-listed Georgian manor house Sherbourne Park, where Hui, now 37, and her elder sister Sophie, spent their early years running free in the grounds of the sprawling estate.

Her father Timothy was an old Harrovian stockbroker.

Sarah, an engaging and charismatic blonde, was close to her clever and artistic daughter, who showcased her talents while at the private Tudor Hall school near Banbury. After school, she began a three-year-course at the prestigious Charles Cecil School of Art in Florence, where Sarah believes she got to know Anne Craig’s daughter, who was in the city at the same time.

Sarah admits she initially didn’t bat an eyelid when, in around 2010, her daughter, recently returned from Italy, told her she was seeing a therapist who ‘healed from the heart’. Nor did she know she was one of several young women, all from the same social circles, who had started to see Craig — who was not registered with any recognised body — at the home she shared with her former Royal Navy commander husband.

‘She said she needed time and space as she was going on a journey,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I trusted her. She was an incredible young woman, and while we saw her a bit less, she hadn’t cut off contact.

‘I remember she came to a family party and said she’d forgotten how wonderful family were.’ They spent Christmas 2011 together – one which Sarah latterly learned Craig had told her daughter would be ‘the last with her family’.

‘Can you believe how chilling that is?’ she asks.

It was certainly prophetic in the short term; Sarah would not celebrate Christmas with her daughter again for many years. She detached herself not just from her mother but nearly everyone she knew, breaking up with her boyfriend of four years and cutting off old friends and closing her Facebook account. By 2012, she stopped taking her mother’s calls.

‘I tried calling her from another line, but when she heard my voice she slammed the phone down,’ Sarah says. ‘She was actually living close by at the time and I ran out to the flat and hammered on the door. She looked startled to see me and then her eyes glazed over and she jumped on her bike. She rode off with me screaming after her, “Don’t cut me out of your life”.’

Sarah pauses. ‘That was the last time I saw her for six years, apart from the occasions we ambushed her.’

Sarah uses the word ‘ambush’ to describe desperate attempts to track her daughter down and try to reason with her, among them an occasion in November 2013 when she waited with Henry outside an art studio where her daughter was teaching to tell her they were marrying the following month and would love her to come to the wedding.

‘She replied saying something like, “Oh, it’s all about you, isn’t it?” ’

Henry then asked, very calmly, whether he or Sarah had done anything to upset her. ‘She replied no, so Henry suggested that if I had done nothing, shouldn’t we all go home together?’ recalls Sarah. ‘She had no answer, but then suddenly the brainwashing must have kicked in, because she put her shoulders back in the air and said, “It’s not for me to tell my mother what she’s done, it’s for my mother to find out”.’

A couple of months later, in early 2014, Sarah received a letter saying her daughter was ‘disinheriting’ her family and cutting all ties to her past. She changed her phone number and moved to an encrypted email server.

A complex and labyrinthine series of events followed. Months turned into years, and milestone events came and went, including Sarah’s 60th birthday, as she and Henry continued their desperate attempts to reach her absent