Men and women are both capable of holding the title “Crazy Ex,” and for one young woman in the South East England county of Ken, her crazy ex ended up getting her and her family arrested.
Charlotte Clark-Hughes, 26, ended her years-long relationship with Tristan Smith, whom she’d met in January 2014 while they both attended the University of Kent. Clark-Hughes told The Mirror that Smith at first appeared to be the “perfect gentleman.”
“We were both in a Facebook freshers group and got chatting. He was lovely, friendly and we started dating months later,” she told the outlet.
About six months later, however, Smith became verbally abusive.
“We were arguing and he shouted that he wished my family dead. I was upset but hoped it was just a row,” Clark-Hughes said. She told the Mirror that Smith then “guessed my passwords and started to check my Snapchat and texts regularly, knowing I didn’t like it.”
About the time Smith started mistreating Clark-Hughes, he also started working with the Kent Police department as a volunteer special constable.
“He did 20 hours a week as he saw it as a potential career,” Clark-Hughes told the Mirror. “He talked a lot about what actions constituted crimes. Looking back, it’s sick.”
Nearly two years into their relationship, in December 2015, falsely accused Clark-Hughes stepfather of beating her disable mother. Two months later he claimed Clark-Hughes was cheating on him and told her to stop seeing her friends, the Mirror reported.
“My self-esteem was so low I did,” she says. “He always put me down. He’d scream, ‘I wish you’d die in a fire’ – then apologise with chocolates.”
In September 2017, Clark-Hughes tried to break up with Smith while visiting her family.
“He pinned me down, screamed in my face, then bit me on the shoulder and tried to set fire to the dog bed,” she told the Mirror. “I was terrified. The next day, he bought me flowers.”
Three weeks later, Clark-Hughes broke up with Smith by text and then fled to Spain.
“I had to get away,” she told the outlet. “He sent 50 voicemails begging me to come back. I ignored them.”
“A few weeks later he sent an email declaring his love for me. I replied saying if he contacted me again I would call the police,” she added.
Smith would tell his brother in October 2017 that he wanted to “tear apart” his ex’s family for revenge – and he attempted to do just that.
He claimed Clark-Hughes’ mom and stepdad (who were no longer together at that point) sent him a threatening text message, which Smith actually sent himself. Before it was discovered that Smith lied, Clark-Hughes’ stepdad was arrested and kept in jail for 20 hours, while her mom was taken the next day. Her mother spent 10 days in the hospital after the ordeal because the stress caused her neuromuscular disease to flare up, the Mirror reported.
The two were cleared after it was discovered they couldn’t have sent the text – since one of their phones was broken and the other was lost in Spain at the time.
Smith then accused Clark-Hughes of sending threatening messages to his former flatmate. Clark-Hughes was arrested but later released pending further investigation when she explained she couldn’t have sent the messages because she was not near her phone when they were sent. Police later determined Smith sent the messages himself after hacking into Clark-Hughes’ accounts.
After she was released from prison, Clark-Hughes found emails from Facebook warning her that someone was trying to access her account from a different location.
Smith then started to claim Clark-Hughes was stalking and harassing him. To really sell the lie, he installed a panic alarm and CCTV and told police he had to fight armed intruders in his home. Police watched the videos from Smiths home and determined he lied about the attacks. He was arrested on “six charges of perverting the course of justice, one of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and one of gaining unauthorised access to a computer with intent to commit an offence,” the Mirror reported.
He was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to more than four years in prison.