When she married at 32, one-time It-Girl Lady Isabella Hervey dared to believe that her ‘fairytale dream of a happy family life’ was finally coming true. But now, a decade later, it’s bitterly apparent that it was never more than a mirage.
Indeed, her union with Belgian millionaire Christophe de Pauw heralded, instead, the beginning of a descent into appalling physical and psychological trauma.
The story is disclosed in graphic and unsparing detail in a 38-page judgement just delivered in a court in Portugal, where Isabella, 42, lives in the Algarve with her three children by de Pauw: Victor, who was named after her late father, the thrice-married 6th Marquess of Bristol; a younger son, Patrick; and a daughter, India.
The judgement should bring her some peace of mind, a year after her older sister, Lady Victoria Hervey, 48, drew attention to her plight by posting a series of photographs online, each of them showing Isabella with severe facial bruising.
‘Christophe is indicted for domestic violence and child abuse,’ Isabella’s Portuguese lawyer Patricia Cipriano discloses to me, adding that the judge has issued a restraining order against de Pauw forbidding him from coming within 300 metres of his estranged wife or seeing their children without third party supervision.
Isabella tells me: ‘It is a big relief the restraining order is put into place, for me and for my kids because it means we can be in our garden.
‘Before we literally barricaded ourselves in our house when we’re alone. So now I don’t feel like we are prisoners in our own home.’
She adds: ‘However, I’m still scared. Restraining order or not, I don’t think that’s enough to stop the guy.
‘So in one way I’m relieved, but in another way I’m always still watching my back. I’m often still in fear and I don’t go outside with the kids after dark.’
It’s a crushing end to Isabella’s hopes for a happy family of her own – hopes perhaps largely inspired by the death of her father just a day after her third birthday.
By the time she met de Pauw through mutual friends in London in 2011, her glamour and athleticism had earned her an appearance on Celebrity Love Island and the accolade of being voted one of the world’s sexiest women by lad mag FHM.
But this masked the eating disorder bulimia, for which she had just completed three months treatment.
The court judgement discloses that de Pauw had also been undergoing treatment – a full year for ‘addictive behaviour with alcohol and drugs’.
One can only hope Isabella’s nightmare is now at an end; her husband declines to comment.
