Linda Williams, 60, attacked by serial sex offender David Carrick when he was a serving Metropolitan Police officer, has called for the force’s commissioner to resign after her civil claim against the Met was settled for an undisclosed six-figure sum.
Ms Williams, a detective constable with the force who waived her right to anonymity, said the way the Met handled her claim had been “devastating” and drove her to contemplate suicide.
Her case has now been settled without the force admitting liability. She argues that only a change at the very top of the Met can deliver the reforms victims need.
“For this to happen Rowley needs to go and we need a new commissioner,” she said, referring to Sir Mark Rowley. She wants the force to set up a unit overseen by victims with lived experience of sexual assault.
Attack in 2004 reported 17 years later
Ms Williams, from Hertfordshire, was attacked by Carrick in 2004. She said she felt unable to report what happened at the time, describing the force then as “like an episode of Life On Mars” and doubting she would have had the backing of her colleagues in dangerous situations. She reported the attack in 2021.
Carrick, 51, is now one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders, serving 37 life sentences after attacking more than a dozen women over nearly two decades, much of it while he was a serving officer.
At the time of her attack, Ms Williams had worked as a sexual offences officer supporting victims herself. “I say that as someone who was once a sexual offences officer, supporting victims myself,” she said. “Despite that experience and my understanding of the system, I still wouldn’t report it because of the complete lack of empathy and support I have experienced from the police.”
One of her starkest assessments of the process: “If I was raped tomorrow, I wouldn’t report it.”
She added: “The whole process has taken me right back to how I felt when I was raped by Carrick, controlled, abused and powerless.”
“Devastating” handling of her claim
Ms Williams said the Met’s conduct of the legal claim deepened her trauma. She said the force relied on the fact that she had continued to perform well at work to suggest she had shown no signs of psychological trauma.
“They used the fact that I just got on with my life as best I could after the rape against me,” she said. “I was an exemplary officer and continued to perform well at work, and they relied on that to suggest I had shown no signs of psychological trauma.”
She said she never felt the force sincerely acknowledged what she had been through, or its own role in it all. “At no point did I feel they sincerely acknowledged that I had been through a horrific sexual attack and that the trauma of that had deeply scarred me, or their role in it all.”
Her solicitor, Sophie Bullimore of Penningtons Manches Cooper, said the length of time taken to reach a settlement led Ms Williams to take long-term sickness from the police, and called on the Met to review how such cases are handled.
The Met’s response
In a statement, the Met said Carrick should never have been a police officer, acknowledged serious flaws in how such investigations were handled at the time, and said it deeply regretted missing opportunities to pursue him through the misconduct process.
The force said it recognised the particular impact on DC Williams, whose exposure to Carrick came about through her role as a Met officer, and said it had tried to reduce further distress during the proceedings and deal with her claim as quickly and compassionately as possible. It added that the Commissioner had met and spoken with Ms Williams on several occasions and had asked to meet her again in person.
What a settlement without liability means
A civil settlement of this kind ends the legal claim without the defendant accepting it was at fault. The sum remains undisclosed — described only as a six-figure amount — and no court made findings on the Met’s conduct of the claim.
Ms Williams said the process itself, rather than the outcome alone, had been the most damaging part. “Both the criminal justice process and the civil process have been so traumatic,” she said.
The case is the latest blow to public confidence in the Met following a series of scandals — the force recently saw a gun trafficking network dismantled in an operation that took 14 converted firearms off London’s streets, as it tries to show it is confronting serious offending head-on.
That effort includes visible enforcement elsewhere: officers made 42 arrests in a recent crackdown on retail crime across the capital, as the Met seeks to demonstrate it can act decisively against offenders in its ranks and on the streets alike.
