A bride was reduced to tears after her sister-in-law hurled black paint over her wedding dress moments before she was due to walk down the aisle.
Gemma Monk, 35, was forced to change dresses at the last minute after Antonia Eastwood launched the ‘revenge’ attack on May 24, 2024.
She carried out the spiteful act after Mrs Monk claimed her relative wrongly accused her of ‘trying to trip her up’ during her own wedding to the victim’s brother Ashley in September the year before.
The bride, from Herne Bay, Kent, was left in floods of tears as Eastwood fled the scene at Oakwood House, a Victorian mansion in Maidstone.
She walked down the aisle to marry Ken Monk, her childhood sweetheart of 20 years, two hours after her £1,800 dress was drenched in black paint.
At the time she had just had a cancer scare, which Mrs Monk said Eastwood knew about but ‘still decided to ruin the most important day of my life’.
The mother-of-two, who is a mental health worker, scrubbed herself clean as the paint covered most of the left side of her face, arm and chest. She borrowed another dress fetched by an usher.
Eastwood launched the cruel paint attack after an ongoing family feud which flared up after her own ceremony the previous year.
The relationship between the two couples had soured since the wedding between Eastwood and Mrs Monk’s brother Ashley, when the victim was accused of trying to trip her up.
Mrs Monk told KentOnline: ‘We had waited for that day for so long. Nothing was going to stop me. She was determined that the wedding was not going to happen.
‘I did not think twice, I would have walked down the aisle in my knickers and with black paint over my face if I had to.’
Eastwood was handed a 10-month sentence, suspended for 12 months, in addition to 160 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to two offences of criminal damage.
Since her wedding, Mrs Monk has suffered depression and is unable to work.
In a victim impact statement, the 35-year-old told Maidstone Crown Court the incident ‘changed my outlook on life and made me question whether I had done something really bad’.
She said it has had a ‘dramatic impact’ on her life, adding that she became ‘extremely emotional and started crying’ while providing a police statement following the attack.
Mrs Monk said she would have struggled to ‘get out of bed’ without the support of her husband and children – and that she has lost her dignity.
The victim added that the incident ‘turned the most special day of my life into the worst memory I will never forget’.
The couple cancelled their honeymoon to the Maldives as a result.
Prosecutor Pietro Matarazzo told the court on Tuesday: ‘Her wedding dress turned black. It was splattered with paint, as were her eyes, face, and skin.’
Eastwood admitted it was a revenge attack to the author of a pre-sentence report and pleaded guilty despite answering ‘no comment’ to all questions put to her by police during a voluntary interview three months after the incident.
Defending, Clement Idowu said Eastwood ‘wished to apologise’ to Mrs Monk.
He told the court of her depression, adding that the case had ‘taken a toll’ on her mental health – however no details about why she launched the revenge attack were revealed.
He said Eastwood was ‘fearful’ of a custodial prison sentence.
Judge Oliver Saxby KC said the defendant had turned Mrs Monk’s wedding into a ‘nightmare’, adding that Eastwood ‘wanted to wreck her day’.
He described Eastwood’s actions as ‘horrid and nasty and mean’.
In addition to a suspended sentence and unpaid work, the defendant was handed a 10-year restraining order.
She was told to pay £5,000 in compensation, split between £4,000 to Mrs Monk and £1,000 to Oakwood House.
After sentencing Mrs Monk said she will never accept her sister-in-law’s apology, adding that she believed the punishment was ‘too light’.
The victim told KentOnline she and her husband do not celebrate their anniversary after what happened but that they plan to renew their vows on the same date to create new memories.
