How an abuse survivor made it her mission to get her rapist behind bars – decades after attacks that her mother ‘told her to get the morning after pill for’

When Daniel Bottger took 11-year-old Jamie Mckenzie to her parents’ outhouse to rape her, her mother gave her the morning after pill the next day.

Her stepfather then punched the creep – ‘it was their form of protection’ after all.

But when the monster was released early from prison for raping a little girl twice, Jamie, by then a mother of three, knew she had to get him off the streets.

She began a fearless campaign to get him back behind bars, which saw three other women to come forward with tales of abuse.

‘It was bloody horrific – there’s no sugarcoating the event,’ the 32-year-old told the Daily Mail.

Bottger, from Hull, was found guilty in 2023 of 11 offences against four girls between 2000 and 2008, including two rapes, attempted rape and indecent assault, and sentenced to a ‘spectacular’ 24 years in jail.

First introduced to her family ‘as a babysitter-slash mutual friend’ when Jamie was eight, she said they bonded because they both came from broken homes.

‘It was like this coexistence of dysfunction,’ Jamie explained.

Bottger was ‘calculated’ in his approach and managed to ‘weave his way in like a serpent’ – at first, it was ‘like flirtation and an invitation to connect with him, and interact with him, and play with him’, Jamie said.

It quickly became predatory, which Jamie now believes was targeted as he knew she came from an unstable family life – her biological father had not been around when she was born and Jamie experienced several stints in foster care – leaving her vulnerable.

When she first alerted an adult to Bottger’s ‘tickling’ – without understanding that he was inappropriately touching her – and that she ‘didn’t like it’, she was told she should just tell Bottger to stop it.

But this meagre advice was not enough to stop him grooming her: ‘I recall Daniel putting me on his knee when I was eight, nine, 10 and he would stick his tongue inside my mouth.

‘He would pry my jaw open with his hands, and squeeze the side of my jaw, just next to my ear so I’d have to open my mouth. I remember very distinctly he would brush my teeth with his tongue.

‘The only way I could get him off me was to tell him that I was going to wee myself.’

It was ‘years and years of kissing me, touching my thighs inappropriately, telling me how pretty I am’ which were all forms of attention – something that Jamie felt she was in a ‘deficit’ in due to her home life.

At 11, Bottger would ply Jamie with alcohol, making her so intoxicated that she could not stand and carry her from her family’s kitchen to the toilet outhouse in the garden and raped her.

The brute left handprints on Jamie, searing deep indents on her thighs despite her body freezing from the panic.

‘I told my parents straight away, thinking, “Oh my god, like… I felt dirty”,’ she said, adding that ‘it hurt’.

Their response was practical: a punch and a pill.

He wasn’t invited back to the house – but it seems he wasn’t reported to the police.

There was almost a sense of anticipation for Jamie, she said that ‘all of these years have been leading up to this moment’ and felt that she subconsciously knew that this ‘was always going to happen’.

‘And part of me just let it, so that it would be over and done with quickly, then it’s done,’ she said. ‘How crazy is that?’

She saw him only once after the rape, some years later, when he brought a girlfriend and a baby girl round to the house.

‘I just thought, “please don’t hurt that baby”, but then I was like, “surely you wouldn’t. Don’t just presume, because he’s raped you, that he’s gonna hurt her too”.’

In 2013, he was jailed for 14 years after being found guilty of two counts of rape of a child aged under 13, in a shocking case that left the jury in floods of tears.

He had been babysitting the child for a mere two and a half hours, and despite insisting nothing sexual had happened, there was scientific evidence of the assault and the girl left with injuries, immediately telling her mother Bottger had hurt her.

The girl then told a specially trained police officer ‘I have been brave at hospital, they gave me medicine’ in a recorded interview shown to the jury, with the child clutching a Disney Princess Belle doll while she played on a sofa.

Bottger, who had no fixed address at the time, was referred to the safeguarding authorities so that he could never work with children, while also being placed on the sex offenders register for life.

His imprisonment left a 17-year-old Jamie feeling that she could bury the painful memories of what he did to her, knowing that she would still be safe with him behind bars.

But when he was released early for good behaviour, Jamie’s ‘happy bubble’ of her growing family of four was quickly popped – and something in her broke.

‘Someone threw a match into my life and my whole world was set on fire,’ Jamie said, quickly developing severe insomnia and stopped eating, or vomiting when she binged.

‘I wasn’t trauma-informed and I wasn’t in intensive therapy, so I thought I was losing my mind. I’m going crazy. Certain colours would make me feel sick, I couldn’t let my kids kiss me.’

Quickly, she felt the ‘only thing to do now is die’.

‘I was crumbling, questioning, and physically exhausted. I could feel it in my bones that I honestly could not go on anymore.

‘I thought the best possible thing for me to do would be to not exist. I didn’t want to take up any space.’

Victims of child sexual abuse are believed to be up to six times more likely than the general population to attempt suicide – while Jamie’s attempt on her life left her in a psychiatric ward, it also provided an opportunity to speak with a professional about what had been the origin for her despair.

Once Jamie came forward with her devastating story, three other women also contacted the police with allegations of abuse against Bottger.

‘I’m really proud of the girls that found the strength to come forward,’ she said.

But, connected by the most devastating of violations, Jamie wanted the first little girl to know that she was sorry and that ‘she never leaves my mind’.

‘I felt so guilty for many, many years because of that little girl who he’d harmed.

‘I thought, “did I not shout loud enough? Did I not tell people loud enough? Did I not run fast enough? Did I not scream that I didn’t like Daniel enough for people to even listen to me?” And because I didn’t do all of those things, he went on to really seriously harm an innocent little girl who never leaves my mind.’

She paused: ‘She never leaves my mind… but I was a child too.’

Jamie added that ‘I don’t know how many more children he could have hurt if I didn’t speak out when I did. I’m glad that I got to put him in prison for life.’

Years on from the destructive crimes, it might look like Jamie has put her life back together: a loving family home, speaking on panels about sexual assault, an understanding about mental health.

But she can still be violently affected by the memories – ‘nobody’s seeing you at 3 o’clock in the morning, hyperventilating, taking a cold shower, because you need to regulate your nervous system or having to talk yourself through flashbacks’.

‘I’m not superwoman, this still happens,’ she adds.

When Jamie gives talks about her experience – where she says at least one woman every single time will come up to her afterwards to speak about their own stories of abuse – she hopes sharing her experience will change the way these crimes are investigated.

Like many victims of sexual assault who have to undergo the gruelling process of cross-examination in court, cruelly dredging up some of her most painful memories and finding ways to smear her, the trial left Jamie shattered.

‘It was the most traumatic experience of my life, and then it was rehashed in a way that villainised me, and made me question the legal system, and the way that it holds victims of serious crime,’ she said.

The gaudy yellow of her victim room became a flashing reminder of some of her darkest months, causing her to throw away toys and clothes which could set her off.

‘It has that ripple effect which is very suffocating,’ she explained.

And yet, she still has faith in a system – one that could be improved if it was centred around supporting victims throughout.

‘I want people to trust the law, to trust their detectives and trust the police force. I want them to feel encouraged to run towards legal systems that are there to protect the innocent,’ she said.

‘I just want better. I want better for other women, and I want them to care about intricate things you might not consider.’

As well as modernising the justice system, she believes sex education must be compulsory to all children at school as it would give them the words and the knowledge to communicate should they be abused.

Up to 80 per cent of paedophiles know their victims before assaulting them – a reality that Jamie finds counter intuitive to the current standard of sending consent forms home to inform children about sex education.

‘If a child is being sexually groomed and conditioned, you’re not going to want them to learn about consent, are you?,’ she said

She added: ‘I wish I’d known that at 10 my body was mine and that I had the right language to say “don’t touch my vagina”.

‘As a child, you’re so vulnerable anyways, because you see the world so innocently and that’s why it’s so important to give yourself the tools to protect yourself.

‘It is statistically way higher for your child to see a domestically abusive relationship than to be in a car crash.

‘Why then are we telling our children to buckle their seatbelts, but not be aware of coercive control? And abusive situations? Why are we not teaching it in school?

‘This stuff isn’t just happening in the Epstein files, it’s on your estate, it’s two doors down, it’s someone you used to know from school.’

‘You think, “oh, surely this isn’t real”. And then you live it,’ she said bluntly.

Once allegedly described as a ‘promiscuous child’ by her parents – ‘two words that should never be in the same sentence’ – Jamie said the assault contributed to a lifestyle of hypersexuality when she was older.

‘I felt like I was conditioned to believe it was the only way I could get validation or affection.

‘It was so normal to me to be hypersexual, and to be encouraged to be that way, because you’ve got to think, if my attention is in a deficit and I’m not getting what I need at home, but if I act in a certain way…I get lots of attention.

‘I even remember being 14, and this boy being like, “I really like you, will you be my girlfriend?” And I was like, “no, but we can have sex if you want”.’

She added: ‘Sex was a transactional thing and physical touch felt great, right? It was connecting with another human. But the aspect of it… was… toxic.

‘And then once the act was complete, I was again in a deficit.

‘There was this big, gaping wound that could not be filled – and it was because I’d been harmed as a child.’

And yet, despite being victim to the worst of humanity, Jamie managed to find an optimism in life that feels contagious.

‘I keep reiterating, there’s joy, there’s love, there’s such a profound level of peace.

‘And there are so many good men out there too, my delivery driver who always makes a joke with me, the man in our local corner shop who gave me his coat when it was raining, you can have joyful, beautiful, sensual, open consensual relationships.’

The bleak statistics can sometimes feel like a prophecy – child sexual abuse victims are twice as likely as the general population to be depressed, 73 per cent suffer from PTSD, half of victims self harm and they are five times more likely to be charged with a criminal offence – but Jamie hopes her story can inspire other survivors to see that there is a future that can be joyful and fulfilling.

‘It’s so surreal to live a happy, a very happy and contented life when you think about everything I had to go through,’ she said.

‘I’ll always be in intensive therapy, I’ve made peace with that. This road will never be done, and that’s okay, because if it’s never gonna be done, that means that I’m living it. 

‘That means that I get to find joy, I get to love endlessly, I get to be authentic, I get to be listened to.

‘My message is just to hang on, because life is full of so much joy.’

For confidential support, call Samaritans on 116 123, visit samaritans.org or visit https://www.thecalmzone.net/get-support