Jeni Haynes experienced a childhood characterised by abject terror.
The abuse she suffered has been described by Australian police as one of the worst cases in the country but, far from blocking out what happened to her like many abuse survivors, Jeni remembers in minute detail every moment of it.
Her brain developed an incredibly complex way to cope and, in the years since, it’s provided the key to jailing her abuser and father, Richard Haynes, for a record 45 years.
“Symphony was the first ‘alter’. The original child was terrified and Symphony sang for her,” Jeni, now 56, tells Woman’s Day, explaining how, throughout her childhood, her mind used an extraordinary tactic during her abuse.
It created new identities for her, who would experience and contain each incident, ultimately generating 2500 distinct personalities.
COPING MECHANISM
The condition, known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a coping mechanism developed in early childhood, commonly to endure and dissociate from trauma.
But while highly unusual, Jeni believed everyone lived like she did.
“I can pinpoint the first time I found out this was ‘not normal’,” she says, remembering seeing a neurologist at age 14 after an epileptic seizure.
The “voices” she described hearing were connected to her seizure though, and she only discovered what MPD was when she was studying psychology at university.
Far from seeing it as a “disorder”, she feels blessed to have developed it and was glad to finally understand what had happened.
“MPD kept me safe when my entire world was not safe. It made my life better,” says Jeni, who lives in Deception Bay, Queensland.
“Some alters knew what was happening to us was wrong and helped us remember and communicate this later.”
This was key, and in 2009, Jeni, with the help of all her alters, wrote a 900,000-word statement for police recounting every instance of her years of abuse.
With the amount of detail included, police were able to corroborate her story, and when they told Jeni they believed her it was the moment of validation she never believed possible.
“I’d been holding myself together through gritted teeth for 39 years thinking no one would believe me. I was so ready to not be believed. I cried for about two hours,” she says of the watershed moment.
Jeni explains that by using her DID in the witness box and testifying as different personalities she was fully expecting to be “the laughing stock of Australia”. But the opposite happened.
After a decade, Jeni finally walked into court in March 2019 “terrified” to see her father, who’d been extradited from the UK.
“I was expecting him to look how he looked the day he did it,” she says.
“But then an old man came in. He wasn’t wearing a suit – he wasn’t in his respectable mask. I was nervous until I saw him.”
Haynes initially faced 367 charges, among them multiple counts of rape and indecent assault of a child under 10.
Jeni was allowed to testify as Symphony and five other personalities, who could provide detailed evidence on all offences.
“He didn’t last an hour and a half,” Jeni says.
“He rolled over and said he was guilty. It’s one thing hearing an adult in the witness box saying, ‘When I was four this happened,’ but quite another to hear from Symphony, who is a four-year-old, saying what happened to her like it was yesterday. It wasn’t retrospective. It was present tense.”
JUSTICE FOR JENI
Haynes changed his plea to guilty on 25 charges and was jailed for 45 years.
While the verdict was the justice Jeni so needed, there was another, more unexpected result that came from the trial.
“Seven people in Australia and two in New Zealand have got justice after me with DID,” she says. “It’s incredible.”
The precedent set by Jeni’s case has been groundbreaking and still now she says she receives emails every day from abuse survivors and those with DID.
“I try to reply to all of them,” she says.
“We are a highly ethical and moral people and have an obligation to other survivors of abuse and DID.”
It was one of the reasons she wrote her book, which then led to the documentary, We Are Jeni.
“We want to use our story for others to get justice if they want to, and it’s my chance to say the words I wanted to hear, to survivors with MPD/DID,” she says.
“Justice is possible. Your diagnosis is no longer a barrier to justice. If you want justice use my case as precedent. Go for it. For all survivors of child sexual assault, I hear you, I see you, I believe you. What happened to you matters. You matter.”
We Are Jeni premieres Sunday 7 June at 7:30pm on SBS or stream on SBS On Demand
