Chapter 1: Preamble - Background

 

I met Gregoire Moinet in Japan, in late 2006 through a climbing group, whilst he was on a international secondment with his French company, and I was studying for my PhD at the University of Tokyo. We married in London 21^st November 2009. After our wedding Greg took up a job in Shanghai, with the same company he had worked for since graduation and I moved with him, I did not work whilst in Shanghai, aside from a little tutoring work and working on writing up scientific journal papers from my PhD research, and applied for a academic position at Imperial College (where I had completed my Undergraduate and Masters studies).

In 2011 I moved back to London to take up the academic position at Imperial College and Greg joined me a couple of months later – we stayed at my parents place whilst we found a place to rent. We chose to rent a house in Reading so that Greg could commute to Swindon for work and I could commute by train to London. Subsequently, we moved to Putney. In 2016 I gave up my academic job and we moved to Thornbury just outside of Bristol, buying our first house together. Greg’s company had closed down the Swindon office and all staff were made redundant or moved to Bristol. I found work at an engineering consultancy in Bristol in the same business park as Greg.

In November 2021, we sold our house in Thornbury to relocate to Lannion, France to help with the care of Greg’s Father (Serge, who had a form of dementia) and his Mother (Françoise) who was not coping with the care responsibilities.

Since moving to the UK in 2011, my parents helped provide Greg with the bills and documents in his name to allow him to open an individual bank account in the UK. Greg also requested to use £6000 of my savings I had accumulated whilst I was a student to buy our car in the UK (Honda Civic 2006) which Greg always too priority on and was the main user of. We also opened a joint account where we put in roughly equal amounts of money to cover joint expenses and bills, and our salaries were always paid into our individual accounts. Starting with the end of every year, and then gradually moving to every month, Greg would harass me to give him details of all my current, savings and pension account balances. But he would never show me his, I never asked because I didn't think it was any of my business, but he kept saying that I could ask him if he I wanted to know and he would show me - but never give me a copy to look at.

 

Dates where updates of my accounts were requested by Greg and sent via email
	Year	Month	Day	Time
20140605_1938_Gmail - (no subject).pdf	2014	06	05	1938
20140711_1714_Gmail - money!.pdf	2014	07	11	1714
20140918_1150_Gmail - money!.pdf	2014	09	18	1150
20150116_1312_Gmail - stuff.pdf	2015	01	16	1312
20150324_1848_Gmail - account.pdf	2015	03	24	1848
20150505_0918_Gmail - Morning Miaow.pdf	2015	05	05	0918
20150804_1429_Gmail - accounts....pdf	2015	08	04	1429
20151001_1639_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2015	10	01	1639
20160418_0952_Gmail - Waitrose.pdf	2016	04	18	0952
20160622_2317_Gmail - (no subject).pdf	2016	06	22	2317
20161111_0814_Gmail - money.pdf	2016	11	11	0814
20170103_2141_Gmail - (no subject).pdf	2017	01	03	2141
20170228_2300_Gmail - feb 2017.pdf	2017	02	28	2300
20170623_1146_Gmail - (no subject).pdf	2017	06	23	1146
20170911_1121_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2017	09	11	1121
20171211_2317_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2017	12	11	2317
20180104_1732_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	01	04	1732
20180320_1246_Gmail - account.pdf	2018	03	20	1246
20180501_1249_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	05	01	1249
20180531_1835_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	05	31	1835
20180615_1117_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	06	15	1117
20180827_2239_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	08	27	2239
20181009_2302_Gmail - accounts.pdf	2018	10	09	2302
20181203_1240_Gmail - Accnts.pdf	2018	12	03	1240
20190108_1358_Gmail - Accounts 2018.pdf	2019	01	08	1358
20190313_1840_Gmail - Accounts.pdf	2019	03	13	1840
20190601_2024_Gmail - Accounts.pdf	2019	06	01	2024
20190909_1216_Gmail - Accounts.pdf	2019	09	09	1216
after 9/9/2019 an up to date google drive file was made available to my husband.

 

Greg has never been the most empathetic person, for example: I have had a bunion problem for a while and it made walking long distances difficult and painful, and despite this Greg would still insist on going on "short walks", where a short walk is about 4 hours; my mother had inappropriate footwear for walking on rocky, uneven and narrow paths with steep slopes on either side (and had a stroke not long before so had low energy levels) but Greg's idea of a nice short stroll just doesn’t take that into account.

Greg also has a history of not listening to me: I bought a new electric bike 2019, but already had a small foldable e-bike that we bought from China and my old mountain bike. He insisted we sell the Chinese folding e-bike - despite me wanting to keep it and despite me spending £50 (and a good day of work) changing the tyres, chain and brakes. I told him if he had to sell it I wanted at least £150 for it, otherwise it really didn’t cover the money that I had spent on it. He sold it for £100 anyway and got annoyed that I kept complaining about it.

A similar story with a digital Japanese bidet toilet seat that I bought US $294.50 in March 2017 and we had fitted to our downstairs toilet in the house in Thornbury when we were refurbishing the bathroom and downstairs toilet. I insisted that we remove it and replace it with a standard toilet seat when we sold the house, but Greg insisted that it stayed in the house, so it stayed.

He also has a habit of asking "what do you want to do?" or "what do you want to eat?" and whatever I respond, it turns out that it wasn't one of the predetermined answers that he had selected and he will then give me two acceptable options to choose from.

He would also repeatedly tell me “if you get fat, I’ll divorce you” and more recently “you’re fat” or “you look pregnant”.