‘I thought I’d met my Prince Charming – then he forced me into marriage and I found out he had another wife’

Maya enjoyed every single second of watching her husband in the dock of Kingston Crown Court.

Mohammed Alakkawi, 25, refused to meet her eye last month as he was sentenced to more than 26 years for blackmailing her into marrying him and subjecting her to years of unrelenting control, abuse and sexual violence.

For the three years of their unhappy marriage she felt “so small and weak and scared and terrified” as she was sworn and shouted out, raped, assaulted and burned with cigarettes, she explained.

“This was my chance to sit there and stare at him and be like, I did it,” said Maya, whose name has been changed to protect her right to anonymity and is sharing her story for the first time to help empower other women to speak out. “You didn't kill me. You didn't scare me. You did for a while. You don't scare me anymore. I'm not scared of you.”

The construction worker had swept Maya off her feet when he entered her life in September 2021, when she was aged just 20 and living with her family in Palestine.

She had responded out of curiosity when he messaged her out of the blue on Instagram and they soon struck up conversation. He seemed “like a Prince Charming” and “everything I wanted in a man”, she said.

After just two weeks of exchanging messages he asked her to marry him. Despite her family’s misgivings, she travelled to Britain that December for a two-week visit, but it was not long until his behaviour “flipped like a switch” and he began to threaten her with a nude video of her he had recorded during the trip.

She lived in “absolute fear” of him sharing the footage with her Muslim family and her community in Palestine, including her friends and her boss.

“He was just threatening me every way he can that ‘I'm gonna show everyone that you're a whore, and that you're used, you're dirty’,” Maya explained. “He shamed me a lot. He blackmailed me.”

“It was after that video that he flipped a switch, and I felt the power dynamic shift, and I was kind of helpless to it because I was under his mercy.”

By late May, he demanded she book a flight to London and they were married a day later. She felt “paralysed” with fear during the ceremony and back at their hotel, she could not shake off the feeling that something was wrong.

She recalled watching him from the window as he made a call outside, adding: “I could just remember crying my eyes out, thinking like my intuition was screaming at me, like run away, this is so wrong. I didn't listen to it. I wish I did, but no.”

At first, Maya did not understand why Alakawwi refused to legally register their marriage, which was a Muslim religious ceremony, but she has subsequently learned it was because he was already married to someone else and also had twins with a third woman.

He was immediately insistent that she get pregnant as soon as possible and would force her to take a pregnancy test every night.

Sex was painful and horrible, she said, recounting the first time he forced himself on her: “The first week into our marriage, I was on my period, and he just didn't care. I begged him to stop. I was like, ‘this is not right, I'm on my period’.

“You're not supposed to have sex on your period in our religion. You know, it's like a big no. I told him like this is not right. This is haram [forbidden under Islamic law].”

But he just put his hand on her mouth and kept saying: "I'll be quick. I'll be quick.”

She added: “I remember, like a week into our marriage I thought, ‘Oh my God, did I just get raped?’, I didn't want to face that fact.”

The first time Alakkawi physically assaulted her, she was five weeks pregnant with their daughter. He had flown into a rage over a meal of spaghetti bolognese she had prepared because she had not mixed the meat and the pasta together and threw it at her, before punching her in the back.

But, isolated from her family who has disapproved of the marriage, she felt she had to put up with it.

“I just thought, you know, he's got anger issues,” she explained. “I need to deal with it. He's the father of my child now.”

He made Maya apply for Universal Credit and would immediately take the money when it landed in her account. Her husband had “100 per cent control” her life, she said, including making her get his permission to buy anything and forcing her to follow a strict cleaning schedule, wearing special cleaning clothes.

When he flew off the handle it was usually over her cooking or cleaning, but she feared he would kill her and her child if she tried to leave.

“I was just terrified,” she added. “I just walked on eggshells. I was like, just appease him. Just do what he wants. As long as he's quiet and fed, he should be fine. But he was never fine.”

It was Maya’s mother who first went to the police after she witnessed Alakkawi try to push her down the stairs while she was heavily pregnant with their second child, a son.

On the day he was arrested, he had been trying to make her go to the hospital to have a C-section against her will because he was “sick of her being pregnant”, she recalled.

At first, Maya did not want to give police a statement and struggled as she went through the difficult experience of giving birth to their son without a husband by her side. Despite bail conditions not to contact her, Alakkawi bombarded her with messages and calls to try and win her back - initially professing he was a changed man but later, when she did not relent, threatening her with the video once again.

It was then that she decided to give a statement against him.

“I'm like you know what, I'm not living in shame anymore,” she said. “I'm not gonna have you threaten me, threaten my children, threaten my family for the rest of my life, I have to give a statement.

“I didn't want to. I had to do it, for my children, for my children's sake, for their safety. I knew I had to give a statement.”

Alakawwi was found guilty of forced marriage and two counts of rape, including one occasion when Maya was breastfeeding her baby, following a fraught trial at Kingston Crown Court, in which he repeatedly flip-flopped over whether he was going to change his plea and admit his crimes.

He pleaded guilty to subjecting her to coercive and controlling behaviour, intentional strangulation, witness intimidation and harassment in the middle of the trial.

However the sentencing judge, Simon Heptonstall, refused to give him any credit, noting the tactics were an attempt to “manipulate the proceedings”and were an “extension of the control and behaviour through the marriage”.

He was sentenced to 16 years in prison with an eight year extended licence, plus a further two and a half years consecutive imprisonment. In total, he could serve 26 and a half years in custody.

Although the court process was agonising, Maya found it “life changing”. She has chosen to speak out for the first time for Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, adding: “There is life after abuse. You don't have to live in fear and abuse for the rest of your life.”

The mother is now thriving in college, where she is learning counselling and therapy, and she also aspires to write and illustrate her own children’s books.

She described her happy and bubbly daughter, now aged three and a half, as “the most confident little girl ever”, while her son, now one and a half, is the “cutest little man ever”.

“I'm not the same person I was,” she said. “I'm not scared, I'm not weak, I'm a lot stronger than I used to be. I think the whole situation and everything I did gave me a boost of confidence and that actually, you know what, I can survive without you, and I can be a very good mother.”

Detective Superintendent Lewis Collins, who led the investigation for the Metropolitan Police, said Maya had been “extremely brave and courageous”.

Police recorded 49,557 offences of coercive control in England and Wales in the year-ending March 2025, while the government’s Forced Marriage Unit provided assistance to 391 cases in 2025.

He urged other women experiencing abuse to speak to someone, whether it is a friend or family member, your GP, support services or the police.

“For victims who find themselves in a similar situation, help is out there, and I would rather you go to an organisation or a charity or whoever you feel comfortable with to have that conversation to make you feel safe enough,” he said.

“We'll always be here as a police service to look after you when you're ready to come to us, and we'll listen to you. We'll support you in the best way we possibly can do.”