A Met Officer Raped by David Carrick Says She Would Not Report a Rape Today

On Friday the Metropolitan Police paid a six-figure settlement to a serving detective raped by David Carrick. The claim closed without the force admitting liability. The woman at the centre of it, Linda Williams, 60, waived her right to anonymity to call for Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s resignation. She said that if she were raped tomorrow, she would not report it.

The settlement ends a civil claim in which Williams sought damages from the Met for failing to protect her from Carrick. The payment is undisclosed. What the force would not put in writing was any acknowledgment of fault, and Williams said that absence mattered more to her than the money: “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.”

Williams was attacked by Carrick in 2004 and reported the rape in 2021. She has had no relationships since. “Carrick stole the future that I wanted,” she said. She has post-traumatic stress disorder, and the civil case drove her to contemplate suicide. She was once one of the officers who took rape reports. “I say that as someone who was once a sexual offences officer, supporting victims myself,” she told the Press Association. “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.”

She described the defence tactics as the second injury. The force, she said, “used the fact that I just got on with my life as best I could after the rape against me”. It pointed to her continued strong performance at work to argue she had shown no psychological trauma. She named him directly. “As far as I am concerned, it is Mark Rowley, the Commissioner, saying these terrible things as he was the defendant in the case.” The claim was brought against the Commissioner in his official capacity. The legal arguments that distressed her were made in his name.

Rowley spoke about the case publicly in January 2023, after Carrick was sentenced. “We have failed and I’m sorry. He should not have been a police officer.” This week the force said Rowley has met Williams in person and emailed her several times. He has now asked whether she would be willing to meet him again. The force said he had repeatedly acknowledged her courage in speaking out. A Met spokesperson said the force had “tried to reduce further distress and re-traumatisation” for Williams and aimed to deal with her claims “as quickly and compassionately as possible”. It recognised, the spokesperson added, the “unique and additional impact” on an officer whose exposure to Carrick came through her work.

Williams wants the support systems rebuilt around people like her. She wants a unit for officers “overseen by victims like me who understand what it is like to be raped”. She said officers trying to build such support had met resistance inside the force, where the existing provision was described to them as “enough support”. Her answer is a change of leadership. “Mark Rowley will say they are doing everything they can to stop violence against women and girls, I disagree. For this to happen Rowley needs to go and we need a new commissioner.”

The Centre for Women’s Justice says it is representing eight of Carrick’s victim-survivors in litigation against the force. Four officers and a police employee face misconduct proceedings over alleged failures to act on serious allegations against Carrick between 2002 and 2021. Carrick, 51, is serving 37 life sentences. In 2022 and 2023 he pleaded guilty to 71 sexual offences, including 48 rapes against 12 women over 17 years. Last November he was convicted of molesting a 12-year-old child in the late 1980s and repeatedly raping and abusing a former partner.

Her solicitor, Sophie Bullimore of Penningtons Manches Cooper, said the time it took to reach a settlement had left Williams on long-term sickness from the police. She asked the Met to review how it handles cases like hers in future.