Trigger warning: I really can't hold back on this, so I recommend thinking hard about whether you want to read my take on a particularly disgusting and violent attack.
Being in a volatile relationship does not excuse going around to your ex-girlfriend's home, into her bedroom and stabbing her over 200 times with a kitchen knife that you brought with you. You do not get to plead to manslaughter for attacking her in the very parts of her body that you verbally abused her about while in said volatile relationship, and continuing that attack after she has bled out on her bedroom floor.
I don't care if she was promiscuous (it has no bearing on the 'incident' in question). I don't care if your friends thought she was a "psycho bitch" and she was prone to temper tantrums.
There's all sorts of red flags here: the university tutor and the student; the screaming, yelling, throwing items; physical, verbal and emotional abuse. The repeated visits to each other after breaking up. Guess what? None of it excuses the act that took place.
I was reasonably calm about this trial until today, when the character assasinations started. I lost a bit of hope or something when I saw the defense basically fall back on the "but she was a bitch" line. Clayton's a grown man, in his thirties, university degree. Did he really think that the only course of action open to him was to kill his ex? Can he really claim that it amounts to manslaughter when he took the weapon with him, barricaded the bedroom door and effectively tortured Sophie to death?
I really hope the jury sees through the posturing. I want them to be able to focus on the events of the last day of Sophie's life, not the months prior. Sophie Elliott may not have been a 100% stable, angelic human being, but nobody deserves to go like that, and her killer needs to be held accountable.
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