Beth MacDonald remembers looking at a clock on the wall, counting down the hours until she felt she would be able to escape her rapist.
Punched, pushed, choked, threatened with a saw and subjected to humiliating sexual assault by her then-partner in an ordeal that lasted almost 24 hours, after he finally fell asleep, she calmly descended the stairs of their home, naked apart from her socks. Stopping to put on his clothes, to cover himself, would take too long.
While most of the doors were locked, she found the conservatory entrance open and ran out. That was in August 2018. In December of that year, Vincent Grieve, now 33, was jailed for eight years at Preston Crown Court after pleading guilty to rape and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Warning – this article contains imagery and descriptions of physical and sexual abuse that some may find disturbing
Image: Photo: Mark Ashworth
Beth, 32, is a musician who fronts rock band Beth Blade And The Beautiful Disasters and says if it wasn’t for her music, she thinks she would have tried to kill herself after her attack. Now she’s gearing up to release her band’s third album, which features several songs about what she’s been through.
However, just four years after the attack, she is also preparing for Grieve’s release on licence. She is scared. The indefinite restraining order issued at the time, she says, was “just a piece of paper”; as a musician with a public profile, she knows where she’ll be easy to find when she’s performing.
But she’s proud of her album and says she wants to speak out to potentially help others who may be facing similar situations, trapped in abusive relationships. “If it can help one person, then it’s worth feeling scared every time you speak,” she says. “And as time goes by, it gets less and less.
“I want people to know they are not alone. And that it’s okay for them to go through these horrible things and that they have someone—they might not even have met me—but they have someone who understands and is in their And that might just make them feel brave enough not to have to to suffer more.”
Beth met Grieve as a teenager and they rekindled their relationship in February 2018, officially becoming a couple the following month.
She says he “love bombed” her – meaning showing extreme displays of attention, affection and flattery, often seen as a manipulative tactic in abusive or coercive relationships – and she decided to return to her hometown of Blackburn from Cardiff, where she had studied at university and formed her band, to move in with him.
The abuse began with him trying to dictate her work hours and the way she looked, telling her not to dye her hair when she wanted to, she says. She soon became estranged from some of her friends.
Grieve first became violent after he took her to a festival performance with her band and saw her hug a promoter, she says. When she got into the car to talk to him, he drove off with her for about two hours, hitting her everywhere, including with a bottle. But then she says he apologized and burst into tears.
“I just gave up on myself”
Image: Beth says her band mates have been a great source of support. Photo: Megan Jenkins
Beth covered her bruises with makeup and agreed to give him another chance. “I just gave up on myself … my confidence was non-existent. I didn’t have any faith in myself and the only thing that kept me going was the band and the music, that was it. I had to do concerts because I was committed to them. I had to make the album because I had paid for it. And really, that’s what kept me alive. Because if that wasn’t there, I’m absolutely 100% sure I would have tried to kill myself or he would have ended up killing me.”
She says she was ashamed and embarrassed to talk to her family and friends about what she had been through. “I have a wonderful relationship with my parents…they raised me in a loving, wonderful home. I didn’t want to admit that I had allowed myself to be put in this situation. I felt like a complete failure. “
Grieve became violent again, she says, after the band won a contest to support Kiss on their annual Kiss Cruise, a cruise from Miami to the Bahamas. Since she couldn’t go, she didn’t want to either. She says he threw a glass at her in a pub, in front of others, but she missed; another man she knew hit Grive in retaliation.
He attacked her a few days later, on a bank holiday afternoon in August 2018, while drinking rum at home, demanding to know the identity of the man who had hit him.
“He started punching me in the face, headbutting me and putting his hands around my throat and squeezing me pretty hard, throwing me around, throwing me into doors.” After several hours, she says that he grabbed an electric saw. “He said to me, ‘As soon as I get to the bottom of that bottle of rum, I’m going to smash it over your head and then I’m going to use this.’ I accepted that because he was going to use the saw to hurt me, whether it was my fingers or toes or anything else.”
“I knew this was my only chance”
Beth then tried to escape but the door was locked and he caught her.
“He picked me up from behind with his arm around my neck and held me down for a good, I’d say, 60 seconds. And I got to the point where I felt like my brain was going to shut down and I was going to pass out. And I was just thinking: you’ve got to stay up, you’ve got to stay up.”
The attack continued throughout the night, with Grieve headbutting her, “stepping” on her and at one point biting her scalp, she said. After he finished the rum, she says he took her upstairs and made her undress before hitting her with a belt.
He then raped her, telling her he had never been intimate with someone with an “open head wound” before. Beth says she was “paralyzed” with shock and fear. Eventually around 6 or 7am the next morning he fell asleep.
“It was bright outside. I had this internal monologue, this conversation with myself. “Beth, he really sleeps a lot”—and there was a clock on the wall—”wait till 9 a.m. and he’s snoring deeply, you can make a run for him.” I knew that was my only shot, so I didn’t put on any clothes; I was just my socks, that was all. I calmly walked into the hall, calmly went down the stairs. The key was missing from the front door, locked. The back door was locked. The kitchen windows were locked. But luckily he had left the conservatory door open.”
Once outside, she ran away bleeding. There weren’t many people early on a holiday Monday. “A gentleman saw me and the look of horror on his face. I tried to talk to him, but he was in such shock that I just kept going. I ran for about two or three more minutes until there was a main road shop on the street. And I saw, that someone was standing by the ATM, two women and… at that moment my legs started to buckle.”
The women helped Beth, covered her, and called the police and a taxi to take her to the hospital. She says she suffered a concave skull fracture as well as cuts and bruises from the belt and the impact. “My eyes were completely black and the inside of my mouth where he had put his fingers was torn open.”
“I chose to live my life”
Image: The band played the Kiss Kruise after the attack. Photo: Will Byington
She saw Grieve again at his sentencing, standing before him in court to tell the judge how the attack had affected her. Now she is preparing for his release.
“I believe he is a danger,” she says. “What he did, and it comes down to the legal terms, but he tried to kill me. To me, this is attempted murder. And the prison sentence does not fit the crime at all. It’s going to affect me for the rest of my life. When he gets out of prison, I have to worry about him, retaliating, attacking me in some way… but I chose to live my life anyway.”
After the attack, Beth suffered from terrifying nightmares and panic attacks and went on to therapy, which she says helped, as well as writing poetry and verse about her experience.
“I needed some outlet through which I could channel all this pain. At that time I felt I had no one to talk to. My parents, I didn’t want to give them the horrible details. My friends have been amazingly supportive and my band mates have been amazing, but I just didn’t want them to have to deal with the graphic nature of it.
“[Music] is the only thing that made me feel a bit like myself. It felt like everything else, my self-esteem, my identity, everything was taken away from me, piece by piece.”
Beth showed one song, Sacrifice, to the band’s guitarist and he encouraged her to record it. Recalling the final hours of her attack as she awaited her escape: “I watch the clock tick down, tick down/ The blood is dry/ No tears in my eyes/ I’ve saved my last breath for this moment, I can’t make a sound/ Or I’ll face your sorrows.”
“I didn’t want people to think I was weak, and I didn’t want to feel embarrassed and ashamed again,” she says, admitting she was initially wary of making the words public. “Then I stopped and said to myself, ‘I have nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about.’
“It was a moment for me that if these songs can help people, then yes, I should do it… I’m not going to let what he did to me define me. In fact, he will be as brave about it as possible. It’s important for people to know that it can happen to anyone.”
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