Detective raped by fellow officer David Carrick calls on Met chief to resign

Linda Williams, who was attacked in 2004, says force’s handling of her case was ‘like being raped all over again’

A detective who was raped by the former Scotland Yard officer David Carrick has called for the head of the Metropolitan police to resign, saying the handling of her case was “like being raped all over again”.

Linda Williams, 60, who has waived her right to anonymity, was attacked by Carrick in 2004. She launched a legal case against the Met for failing to protect her against the serial rapist, and has now settled for an undisclosed six-figure sum without the force admitting liability.

Carrick, 51, who previously served as an armed officer in the Met, is one of the country’s worst sex offenders and is serving 37 life sentences after attacking more than a dozen women.

Williams, from Hertfordshire, has said the way she was treated by the force throughout her legal claim was “devastating” and that it drove her to contemplate suicide.

“The whole process has taken me right back to how I felt when I was raped by Carrick: controlled, abused and powerless,” she said. “If I was raped tomorrow, I wouldn’t report it. Both the criminal justice process and the civil process have been so traumatic.

“I say that as someone who was once a sexual offences officer, supporting victims myself. Despite that experience and my understanding of the system, I still wouldn’t report it, because of the complete lack of empathy and support I have experienced from the police.

“At no point did I feel they sincerely acknowledged that I had been through a horrific sexual attack and that the trauma of that had deeply scarred me, or their role in it all.”

Williams brought a civil case against the Met seeking damages on the basis that the force failed to protect her from Carrick and that she felt she had been unable to report the rape. She said the Met’s legal team in the case questioned the severity of her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis.

“They used the fact that I just got on with my life as best I could after the rape against me,” she said. “I was an exemplary officer and continued to perform well at work, and they relied on that to suggest I had shown no signs of psychological trauma.

“As far as I am concerned, it is Mark Rowley, the [Met] commissioner, saying these terrible things, as he was the defendant in the case.”

She said the Met needed to set up a unit overseen by victims like herself who understood what it was like to be raped.

“For this to happen Rowley needs to go and we need a new commissioner,” she said.

Williams alleged it was the “Met’s fault” that she could not report the rape in 2004, and that “little had changed” in the culture since then. She added that the force was “like an episode of Life On Mars”, the 2000s TV drama set in a fictional 1970s police station.

She said: “I wouldn’t have had the backup of my colleagues in dangerous situations and ultimately, I doubt anything would have been done about Carrick.”