Only with the benefit of hindsight can Sarah Strutt now see that she missed a key warning sign of the horrors to come.
She’d been invited to a final portrait sitting at her beautiful, artist-daughter’s studio, only to find that on arrival all she could talk about was her new therapist.
“She told me she only took the really special people and that while she charged $200 for the hour, they would then chat for three hours non-stop,” Sarah recalls.
“And that’s when my red light should have come on.”
Yet even if it had, what could she have done about it? Sarah did not know it, but her daughter, who was in her early 20s, was already in the grip of a self-styled ‘healer’ called Anne Craig who would, over a matter of months, separate her from everyone she loved in the world.
Within two years of coming into Craig’s orbit, the young woman became convinced she had been sexually abused as a child and cut off all contact with her family and friends for six long years.
The portrait she had lovingly painted of her mother was burned at Craig’s suggestion.
For much of that time, a despairing Sarah, now 69, together with her daughter’s father, stepfather and siblings, had no idea where she was, an experience she describes today as like “drowning in a vat of black oil”.
It ultimately took the help of a private detective and even an expert in cults to get her back.
Although perhaps, most of all, it was the fierce love of a mother who would never give up on her child, that has resulted in their reunion today.
A constant reminder that things will never be the same, however, is illustrated by the fact her daughter has now changed her name by Deed Poll, to distance herself from her old identity and past.
Now going by the name of Hui Hue, she’s a happy mother of two boys, aged three and five, and a regular visitor to the beautiful Suffolk home Sarah shares with her second husband, Henry.
To her family, it’s a small price to pay. Sarah knows how close she came to losing her, although her relief is accompanied by visceral anger at the freedom given to unqualified ‘coaches’ who remain largely ungoverned by any current laws.
“We can never get back the years we lost,” she says.
“I have to get beyond that, but I know how much we suffered — and how others are still suffering — and I don’t want anyone to go through the same agony.”
Her determination to raise awareness of unqualified practitioners is one reason Sarah took part in a compelling six-part investigative podcast, Dangerous Memories, which features women whose lives have been affected by Craig.
Most were from privileged backgrounds, a description that certainly applies to Sarah’s vulnerable, youngest daughter.
Her maternal grandfather, Sir Charles Smith-Ryland, was a former Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire and owned the Grade II-listed Georgian manor house Sherbourne Park, where Hui, now 37, and her elder sister Sophie, spent their early years running free in the grounds of the sprawling estate.
Her father Timothy was an old Harrovian stockbroker.
Sarah, an engaging and charismatic blonde, was close to her clever and artistic daughter, who showcased her talents while at the private Tudor Hall school near Banbury.
After sixth grade, she began a three-year course at the prestigious Charles Cecil School of Art in Florence, where Sarah believes she got to know Anne Craig’s daughter, who was in the city at the same time.
Sarah admits she initially didn’t bat an eyelid when, in around 2010, her daughter, recently returned from Italy, told her she was seeing a therapist who “healed from the heart”.
Nor did she know she was one of several young women, all from the same social circles, who had started to see Craig — who was not registered with any recognised body — at the home she shared in Battersea with her former Royal Navy commander husband.
“She said she needed time and space as she was going on a journey,” Sarah recalls.
“I trusted her. She was an incredible young woman, and while we saw her a bit less, she hadn’t cut off contact.
“I remember she came to a family party and said she’d forgotten how wonderful family were.”
They spent Christmas 2011 together – one which Sarah latterly learned Craig had told her daughter would be “the last with her family”.
“Can you believe how chilling that is?” she asks.
It was certainly prophetic in the short term; Sarah would not celebrate Christmas with her daughter again for many years. She detached herself not just from her mother but nearly everyone she knew, breaking up with her boyfriend of four years and cutting off old friends and closing her Facebook account.
By 2012, she stopped taking her mother’s calls. “I tried calling her from another line, but when she heard my voice she slammed the phone down,” Sarah says.
“She was actually living close by at the time and I ran out to the flat and hammered on the door. She looked startled to see me and then her eyes glazed over and she jumped on her bike. She rode off with me screaming after her, ‘Don’t cut me out of your life”.
Sarah pauses. “That was the last time I saw her for six years, apart from the occasions we ambushed her.”
Sarah uses the word “ambush” to describe desperate attempts to track her daughter down and try to reason with her, among them an occasion in November 2013 when she waited with Henry outside an art studio where her daughter was teaching to tell her they were marrying the following month and would love her to come to the wedding.
“She replied saying something like, ‘Oh, it’s all about you, isn’t it?” Henry then asked, very calmly, whether he or Sarah had done anything to upset her.
“She replied no, so Henry suggested that if I had done nothing, shouldn’t we all go home together?’”recalls Sarah.
“She had no answer, but then suddenly the brainwashing must have kicked in, because she put her shoulders back in the air and said, ‘It’s not for me to tell my mother what she’s done, it’s for my mother to find out’.”
A couple of months later, in early 2014, Sarah received a letter saying her daughter was ‘disinheriting’ her family and cutting all ties to her past.
She changed her phone number and moved to an encrypted email server.
A complex and labyrinthine series of events followed. Months turned into years, and milestone events came and went, including Sarah’s 60th birthday, as she and Henry continued their desperate attempts to reach her absent daughter.
At one point she even resorted to writing a direct appeal to Craig herself.
“Sophie was getting married. I knew Anne had a daughter of her own and I wrote to her, mother to mother, begging her to tell my daughter that she’d worked hard on her path of self-discovery, but it was time to come home,” she says.
She received no reply, and later learned that Craig had apparently suggested to Hui that Sarah was making threats against her (Craig’s) daughter.
“Everything was twisted,” Sarah says. So twisted that it was only in 2017 — four years into their estrangement — that Sarah learned from a journalist that her daughter was claiming she had been sexually abused by her mother.
“Bear in mind that until then I had no idea what I was supposed to have done wrong,” she says.
“I almost laughed because it was so absurd. I just couldn’t even imagine it. I just . . .” she trails off.
She was not the only one to stand accused of heinous acts: a member of another family also learned their daughter had been ‘brainwashed’ into believing her parents were guilty of horrendous abuse. they had attempted to pursue Craig through both the criminal and civil courts, and in November 2014 she was arrested and charged with fraud.
Part of her bail conditions prohibited her from seeing her clients, but in April 2015 the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute, and the civil case was also unsuccessful.
Her relationship with both Hui and another young woman with whom she had been involved immediately resumed. only now does Sarah know that this marked the start of what would, ultimately, be a parting of ways for Craig and her daughter.
Sarah says she has since described how at the time of Craig’s arrest her daughter had seemed “6ft tall, and a goddess” but when she came back she was “just this tiny little woman”.
Her separation, however, was not easy. Hui first moved to Brighton to live in a caravan and then after she was evicted slept rough in the woods for two months. throughout all this Sarah had little idea where her daughter was.
At one point she employed a private detective who tracked her to Spain, only for her to go missing again.
“All I could do was just pray every day that she was safe,” she recalls.
She also sought counsel from Steve Hassan, an expert in the influence of cults. “He told me that you can put a bullet through the person you think has taken your child, but you still won’t get them back: their light bulb has to come on.
“And of course, although it was gradual, that’s what happened with my daughter. His insights helped me understand what I should and shouldn’t do.”
As it was, fate intervened: in June 2018, Sarah received an email from a former school friend whose son had come across her daughter, purely by coincidence, in a Brighton cafe.
“She told me she was pregnant, which was quite a lot to take in.”
Within hours, a private detective had an address. But Sarah knew she had to tread carefully.
“I had Steve’s advice in my head, not to be too pushy.”
In the end she sent a postcard, saying, “I hear you are having a baby in October. I love you very much. this is my email.”
Ten agonising days later, an email arrived, late at night saying she was “predisposed to see” her mother.
“I knew I couldn’t expect too much, but my heart was in my mouth,” she says. that first tentative meeting, in July 2018, took place at a bus stop in Brighton.
“There she was, my darling pregnant daughter. She looked quite drawn, and very pregnant,” Sarah recalls.
“I shook her hand as I didn’t want to invade her space and we walked up into the hills. I felt incredibly calm.”
Mother and daughter talked for four hours, tentatively filling in the gaps of the past.
“At one point she said something about sexual abuse, and I told her she had to accept she’d had false memories planted, at which point she started screaming at me,” Sarah recalls.
“And I can’t even remember what I said, but whatever came out of my mouth calmed her down and we sat and talked for another three hours.”
When they parted, it was with an unspoken understanding that they would see each other again.
“She hugged me, and I can’t explain it, but I just knew everything was going to be all right,” Sarah says.
Indeed, it would prove to be the start of a gradual but intense reconciliation during which Hui and her partner became parents to their two boys.
“It’s been an incredibly long process,” says Sarah.
“For the first three years after I got her back, slowly by slowly, we just spoke for hours at a time as she told me all these awful things that she’d been made to believe.”
Curiously, it was the suggestion that Sarah had murdered the family’s beloved labrador, Bella, that Hui struggled with the most.
“She said, ‘Mum, I never accepted it, I never accepted that you would murder Bella’,” says Sarah.
Over time, Hui was diagnosed with PTSD, and has undergone extensive therapy.
“I would say it was four years before she was able to accept that she had false memories,” Sarah says.
“The most horrendous thing was that at one point she said, ‘Mum, I know these things didn’t happen to me, but they might as well have, because Anne made me believe it’. She made her live through it.”
Watching what her daughter has endured — and the agony she, too, has been through — has made Sarah determined to campaign for changes in the law to make sure what has happened to them cannot happen to others.
Craig’s whereabouts are unknown, and in the eyes of the law, she remains an upstanding member of society and free to counsel whoever wishes to employ her.
Daniel Jennings, partner at law firm Shakespeare Martineau, who represents Craig, said: “Ms Craig believes this is yet another round of nefarious allegations indicative of those put to her previously, to cause her harm and damage.
“These allegations, and those of a similar nature, have continuously been presented to Ms Craig but, to date, have failed to be substantiated with factual evidence. For the avoidance of any doubt, Ms Craig vehemently denies all allegations that have been presented to her, and it is her position that there is no truth in any of the allegations.”
But Sarah takes a different view: “what happened to Hui was coercive control,” says Sarah.
“If I did something similar as a mother, that is a crime and that is jail time, but if I did it to someone else’s daughter, it’s legal — and to me that’s not British justice,” she says.
Her champion is the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Marks of Henley, who is pushing for an amendment to Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act — which covers coercive control — to ask for the removal of a clause which states that the law only applies in “an intimate or family relationship’”
“All we want is the removal of that phrase,” Sarah says.
Whatever happens, it will not give Sarah and Hui back the years they missed.
“I can’t think about that, just as I cannot think about that woman,” she says, refusing to name Craig.
“Anything negative you carry only punishes oneself, so I’ve tried to let it wash away.”
Not least because she has other things to focus on — her grandsons, and her daughter’s now thriving life as a portrait painter and musician with a new set of close friends.
“She recently saw an old photograph of herself on the fridge, laughing and looking really happy,” Sarah recalls.
“She told me that during her time with her ‘teacher’, she had been led to believe that she had never had a happy day in her life.”