I’ll always remember the horror of discovering my ‘mild big’ accomplice was a paedophile. I known as the police after discovering 400 vile photos. Now I’m prepared to inform my story – and assist different ladies dwelling via the disgrace: ROSIE NELSON

After she’d phoned the police and told them her partner was accessing online images of child sexual abuse, a shaking Rosie Nelson called a friend.

‘She said something that made me feel quite ill,’ Rosie recalls. ‘She said ‘I wonder if he was attracted to you because you have the body of a child’.

‘I thought, ‘My God’, because it’s true that I am incredibly petite. In some shops, I wear age 12-13 clothes from the children’s section. I still wonder about that. Is that why Pete was with me?’

She still wonders about all sorts of things in relation to Pete – a man she now refers to as ‘Pete the Paedophile’.

‘You can’t help but go over everything and think, ‘Was this significant? Should it have been a sign?’.

‘For instance, there were times Pete went off sex. He’d say it was because he’d put on weight and didn’t feel attractive. As a woman you are quite attuned to that, and I was sympathetic.

‘Now I wonder if it was just an excuse. Is the truth that he didn’t want to have sex with me because he wanted to have sex with a child?

‘The thought turns my stomach, but the truth is I’ll probably never know.’

It is six years since Rosie, 53, a childminder turned hypnotherapist, made a discovery that ripped her life apart.

Rummaging through a box at her home in Devon in May 2020, she found a digital memory card she had never seen before.

How strange, she thought, as she inserted the card into a laptop to see what was on it – only to be confronted by images that she can never erase from her mind.

One was of a little blond boy, aged about five, being sexually violated.

‘That’s when my world imploded,’ she says. ‘I still think of that little boy. What became of him? Who is he?’

The horrific photographs and videos (police found more than 400 of them, 200 in the most serious ‘Category A’ classification applied to child sex offences) had been downloaded and viewed by Rosie’s partner of four years, businessman Peter Loram, the man she’d invited to live in her home and thought of as her ‘gentle giant’.

In 2021, as a result of her call to the police, Pete, then 39, was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for two years.

Very few women who have discovered their partners are paedophiles speak out about it. But with extraordinary bravery Rosie has – and has been vilified in return.

She tells me she took the brunt of Pete’s family’s anger and pain. ‘One family member told me I shouldn’t have gone to the police. It could have been dealt with within the family. But I know they’ve had it tough, knowing he’s a convicted paedophile.’

More surprising was the wider disapproval of her public stance. ‘When I did an interview for [online men’s magazine] LADbible, the comments were sickening.

‘People wrote, ‘How could you not have known? You must have known’.

‘I’ve been called all the names under the sun. I’ve been accused of setting Pete up, exaggerating everything. Little wonder women don’t speak out.’

So why is she doing so now? ‘Because so many women don’t, and it kills them. They feel they have to live with this unspeakable shame. It really is the biggest taboo.

‘I said no to keeping it in the family. Why should I be silenced because of what he did? Why should the blame fall on me?’

In particular, sharing her experience has brought home the scale of the problem.

Since first speaking out for a short news story on the BBC six years ago, Rosie has been contacted by around 600 women, all of whom have similar terrible tales.

Until about two years ago, Rosie ran a support service, talking distressed wives and partners through the darkest moments of their lives. She was never able to get these women together in a room (‘the shame, and the fear of being identified, is too great’) but she spoke to many of them on the phone or on Zoom calls.

Through tears, they all told eerily similar stories: of shock discoveries or creeping suspicions. Some were dealing with families destroyed; others hadn’t yet plucked up the courage to go to the police, knowing that the fallout would be life-changing.

All said the same thing: they felt so desperately alone in their shock and grief.

Rosie had hoped to get funding for a more formal service, but the logistics were prohibitive. In the end, it proved too much, she tells me.

‘I was trying to do it alone,’ she explains. ‘What it made me realise, though, was that some sort of recognised national support service is desperately needed.

‘We have so many paedophiles in this country that the prisons can’t accommodate them – and those are only the ones we know about. How many wives, children, family members does that leave?

‘When it happened to me, the police suggested I speak to Victim Support. But I didn’t want to be labelled as a victim, because the real victims are the children. The whole experience has made me realise there are so many women out there who are just floundering around in this mess the man in their lives has created.’

She believes she can still help – by being up front about the fact this is something ‘that can happen to any woman’.

Rosie’s story begins in 2016, when she was the divorced single mum of an 11-year-old boy.

Her marriage of 17 years had ended six years earlier, and when she met Pete on the dating site Plenty of Fish, she couldn’t believe her good fortune.

Confident, charismatic and handsome, he was great company and shared her love of nice restaurants and dog walks. They enjoyed weekends together in the Lake District. He was easy to talk to, and got on well with her son.

At the time, Rosie thought her life was complete: ‘I never imagined that we had any great secrets’.

Pete ran his own campervan conversion company and by their fourth anniversary together in 2020, which fell in lockdown, they were living together and she was working for his company.

It was to their home office – ‘where I’d often use the computer. There was no secrecy about that’ – that she went one day to hunt for the card reader for her new credit card, and opened a shoe box that contained a jumble of electrical leads.

In the box she noticed a small SD memory card, of the sort used to store computer files and pictures. It did occur to her that she was about to come across a porn stash, she admits.

‘That’s where a lot of women’s minds would go, isn’t it? But I thought it would be saucy videos. Something naughty, but . . . legal and not completely vile . . . I had no idea how bad it was going to be.’

On inserting the card into a laptop, a video immediately started playing, and the little blond boy appeared on her screen.

When she realised what she was looking at, she instinctively closed everything down.

‘I was shaking. I thought, ‘I can’t have seen what I think I have. I just can’t. This is some comedy clip, or something, and I’ve just jumped to the wrong conclusions’.’

She opened the device again, and this time a menu popped up, giving crude titles that offered vile tasters of the content within.

Rosie clicked on one: ‘I only saw about four or five seconds of the video, but I will never be able to get rid of what I saw.’

She sat numb for a moment, trying not to vomit, suddenly realising that an epic decision had to be made, one that would change the direction of her life.

In a state of shock, she called someone she trusted – a man who had been mentoring her through hypnotherapy training.

‘I was so distressed. I don’t even know how I got the words out,’ she recalls.

‘I said, ‘I know I have to call the police but I want someone to tell me I need to do that’. He immediately said, ‘Call the police’.’

She did. ‘I was like a robot. I can’t remember my exact words, but I said I’d found . . . something, child porn. The police said, ‘We will come now’.’

Having been advised to lock the doors – as Pete was due back from work and, as she put it, ‘I didn’t want that man in my house’ – her next, horrifying, thought went to her son, who was 15 by this time.

What followed was a conversation that is every mother’s worst nightmare. ‘I couldn’t breathe at the idea of this. I remember him kind of leaning over the banister and I was asking him if this man – this man I’d brought into our lives – had ever touched him,’ Rosie recalls. ‘It’s the first place we women go to.’

To her relief, her son assured her that Pete had never harmed him, or behaved in any way that he found worrying.

The police – she is full of praise for the way they handled everything – arrived promptly.

‘They said, ‘You did the right thing’, and they started to search, taking devices. I was in a state of shock. I couldn’t think straight,’ Rosie says.

‘Your whole world comes crashing down, and there is no rule book about how to behave or what to do. But I knew even then that there was no way I was going to protect this man, or minimise what he had done.’

Pete was arrested and found to be in possession of 240 videos and 204 images of children aged between two and 15.

In July of the following year he appeared in court, where he admitted three counts of making indecent images (by downloading them), and was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years. He was also put on the sex offenders’ register and ordered to take a treatment course during 30 days of rehabilitation activities.

Rosie has strong views about the ‘leniency’ of all this.

‘When the police saw the extent of what he had, they told me, ‘He’s going down’,’ she recalls. ‘I was just flabbergasted when he didn’t even get a custodial sentence. He never spent a night in prison, which I think is outrageous.

‘To me it says something about the scale of this issue, if Pete didn’t even reach the bar for imprisonment.

‘One of his family members tried to argue that he had ‘only’ viewed images, not harmed actual children. That misses the point. These are real children who are raped so that men like him can get off on their fantasies. Let’s not minimise it.’

After the shock of the discovery of Pete’s crimes came the fallout, which landed squarely on Rosie’s shoulders. She says the thing most women struggle with is the ‘guilt that they should have known, that they somehow missed the signs’.

‘We all like to think we’d know, and I would lie awake at night wondering how I hadn’t even suspected,’ she says now.

Were there signs, in hindsight? In this case, there were precious few. Pete wasn’t the sort of man who would hide his phone from her (‘in fact, I’d often answer it and talk to his mum’). Nor was he in the habit of sitting up late at night in another part of the house on his laptop.

Indeed, she only discovered he had a history of heavy internet porn use after his arrest.

‘After that I spoke to a few of his ex girlfriends, and discovered he did have a history of it, and of it being a problem.

‘The girlfriend he was with for quite a few years before me told me that was why they split up.’

She adds: ‘I do think we should be worried about internet porn, and the ‘softer’ stuff being a gateway to more extreme versions. I simply don’t know how it was with Pete, but maybe if I’d known about his history, I would have been more alert.’

She has also driven herself to near madness over whether their sex life itself should have acted as a red flag.

‘Again, I just don’t know, but what I can say is that my first husband and my present husband [Rosie remarried in 2024] were both turned on simply by me taking my clothes off, which is entirely normal, I think. Pete never was.

‘I do look back now and wonder. I wasn’t enough. Of course, I was never going to be enough, if his preferences were for children.’

Every aspect of Rosie’s life was affected when Pete left it under such a cloud.

She was diagnosed with PTSD and developed a stammer. She has had extensive therapy.

‘I don’t think I can stress enough how lonely you feel,’ she says. ‘Your emotions are overwhelming – and conflicting.

‘You are dealing with a break-up, the bereavement of a relationship, but it’s not like your partner has died. You can’t grieve them. You can’t even say you miss them – which I did.

‘I’d be thinking inside, ‘I miss you, I miss you’ and remembering the kind and gentle Pete. But at the same time people were saying, ‘He’s a monster’, and I would be agreeing.

‘But he wasn’t a monster, even though he did monstrous things. I’d known the part of him that was tender and lovely, and I suppose I felt the loss of that, rather than of him. It’s hard to explain, though, because it’s so complicated.’

How does she feel about Pete today? ‘My son and I call him Paedo Pete because that’s easier. I just feel very sad. And repulsed, obviously, because he touched me. You want to scrub your skin when you think of that.’

How does a woman trust again, having come through this?

Rosie has learned to. She married again 18 months ago, though she doesn’t want to name her new husband and admits that at first she struggled to know how to be in a relationship.

‘I shut him out. I wouldn’t let him properly into my life at first – emotionally, financially. I held a lot back. I even went to the police to check him out.

‘I used both Clare’s Law and Sarah’s Law on him, without even telling him,’ she explains, referencing the police procedures under which histories of domestic violence and child sex offences can be divulged.

‘It took me a long, long time to trust him, but from the off he understood, and he was patient with me. He is a good man. They do exist.’

After all she has been through, it’s a welcome reminder.