Sextortion: I was secretly filmed, then controlled for a year

Emma is not her real name and the BBC is disguising her identity.

She had never dated anyone before and had been talking to a 26-year-old man, posing as a 17-year-old boy, for a few weeks on a dating site before they had a video call.

They liked the same things. “He seemed like a normal guy,” says Emma, who is from London and now in her 20s.

His camera was not working, he told her, but he could see and hear her fine. By then she trusted him. He pressured her into a sexual conversation with him and into taking her clothes off. Emma did not feel like she had a choice.

The constant pressure put on Emma by this man left her with no choice but to do what he asked, she said, for fear of the repercussions. Emma knew it was wrong but didn’t feel able to say no to him because of his manipulative behaviour.

“I’m a very trusting person, so I never thought it would happen to me. You can either call it naivety or always seeing the best in people.”

After the video call, Emma says he revealed that he had taken the screenshots and told her they would only be deleted if she met his friend.

Fearing the images would be shared, Emma went to meet the “friend” – who turned out to be the man who had deceived her in the first place. She says she was drugged and raped during this meeting.

A year-long abusive relationship with that man followed.

She says that during the relationship that followed, the man acquired further intimate images of her.

He regularly threatened to expose them as a way of controlling her and getting her to do what he wanted, or prevent her from ending their relationship.

What frightened her most was not what it would mean for her, but what it would do to her family – above all her father, who she believed could lose everything, including the career he had spent his life building, if the images were released.

“That he would ruin my father. That was it. That’s all he had to say.

“He would ruin me. But I didn’t really care much for myself.”

She says he cut her off from the people around her.

“I became more secluded, more isolated, more drawn back. I completely broke, I suppose. He really managed to break everything.

“You’re a teenager, so you’ve already got the teenage problems. And to have something like that happen when you haven’t even started your life, it stops it, ruins it. You don’t really see a future any more after it.”