I WILL SURVIVE

As a child, Jeni Haynes developed multiple personalities to protect her from her father's sadistic abuse. Now, after bringing her father to justice in a historic court case, Jeni and her 2500 alters have found freedom.

-  ALLEY PASCOE

There's a photo of Jeni Haynes from that day - September 6, 2019the day her life began at age 49. In it, she stares straight ahead, her shoulders are back, and her head is high. She's wearing a pair of purple-rimmed glasses and a sparkly butterfly-print top. The woman in the photo might be 49 years old, but when she opens her mouth to speak to the pack of reporters outside of the Downing Centre Court in Sydney, a teenager's voice comes out. The teenager's name is Linda, and she is one of Jeni's 2500 multiple personalities. Linda hasn't prepared a speech, but the words flow out of her like they've been rehearsed a hundred times. "My life begins today," she says.

That day, a judge had sentenced Richard Haynes to 45 years behind bars for the sadistic abuse he had inflicted on his daughter, Jeni, when she was aged between four and 11. Earlier in the year, he had pleaded guilty to 25 charges including rape, buggery and indecent assault. In her sentencing, the judge described the offences as "extremely grave" and the abuse as "completely abhorrent and appalling".

The crimes Richard Haynes committed against his daughter were so abhorrent, in fact, that Jeni's police statement took four years to write and was 900,000 words long. As a result of Richard's abuse, Jeni was left with irreparable damage to her eyesight, jaw, bowel, anus, and coccyx. She also developed multiple personality disorder (MPD, now called dissociative identity disorder) as a defence mechanism to survive the torture.