Oliver Dudley found it tough to watch the Netflix documentary, Tell Me Who I Am, made by his elder twin brothers, Alex and Marcus Lewis. During a private screening by producer Simon Chinn at a London cinema before it aired in October, it dredged up so many painful memories he asked for it to be paused.
"It was shocking, distressing and I had an uncomfortable feeling in my body watching it," he says. "It's a good film, but I don't agree with it."
Twelve years younger than the twins, Oliver, 43, knows the story all too well – when Alex lost his memory in a car accident at 18, Marcus walked him through the story of their life, teaching him everything from how to brush his teeth to who his family was. Then it emerged his twin had held back a dark secret; their mother, Jill Dudley, had sexually abused them throughout their childhood.
But there is another side to the story missing from the film: Oliver’s.
In 1998, three years after Jill died, it was Oliver, then 22, who first confessed to his siblings that their mother and one of her many male acquaintances, whom he knew as Steven*, had separately raped him multiple times. They reacted only with stunned silence.
“The crazy part is [my brothers] have [made the film] to get people to open up and talk about abuse,” says Oliver, “but they have never done that with their own family.” Now, he adds, “I’m finding things out from a Netflix documentary about my family. How is that even possible?”
Oliver and I made contact after the twins’ documentary was released two months ago, following my interview with Alex and Marcus. He had watched from the wings as they went public with their own story of abuse: first in a 2010 newspaper article, then a book written with Joanna Hodgkin in 2013, then the Netflix special. After almost a decade spent feeling like a side-note in the twins’ story, he is finally ready to share his own.
“I’ve been invisible,” says Oliver. “Shame is one of the most horrific things a human can go through and I’ve had it for most of my life.”
At our first meeting at a cafe in Battersea Power Station, Oliver is nervous. A tall, broad-shouldered former rugby player, he has been in the press before, when he won a Guinness World Record for the fastest oar-powered crossing of the Atlantic – 33 days, seven hours and 30 minutes – with the crew of La Mondiale, in 2008. But his real journey has been decades-long.
Oliver was the youngest of four siblings born to Jill, a debutante and antiques dealer, whom he remembers as “embarrassing, loud, and [with] inappropriate boundaries”. Her first husband, the twins’ father, John, died in a car accident soon after they were born. She went on to have a daughter, Amanda, with her second husband, Jack, who was 67 by the time Oliver was born.
With the twins over a decade older than him and his sister doted on as the only girl, Oliver grew up in almost isolation in the sprawling cottage in Rudgwick, Surrey. “My parents used to joke that I was the ‘deliberate mistake’,” he recalls. “I used to play cowboys and Indians in the garden on my own and I would play both parts.”
Scared of the dark, Oliver would seek refuge in Jill’s bed – his father slept in a separate room – but at roughly six years old, the sexual abuse began. “Talk about a lose-lose,” he says. “I have awful memories of lying on my front, being touched, sobbing and feeling powerless.”
Around the same time, Jill began taking her youngest son to Steven’s house and leaving him overnight. “He was a through and through paedophile,” says Oliver. “This wasn’t a one-off thing, it was dozens of times. He groomed me with toys, trips to Thorpe Park, rides on the back of his motorbike.”
Oliver’s memory is patchy, but he says the abuse stopped suddenly one day after he cried in the car on the way home from a “sleepover”. Jill didn’t ask him what was wrong, but never took him there again. She had stopped abusing him herself, he says, by the time he started boarding at secondary school.
When I interviewed the twins back in October, they told a similar story. From the age of six to 14, Jill would “take us into her room, take us into her bed…” and sexually abuse them, said Marcus, then “passed us around to her friends.”
If that was the case, Oliver wonders, why did they leave him behind? The twins went travelling as soon as Alex had recovered from his motorbike accident, eventually setting up a successful boutique hotel in Africa.
Oliver once confronted Marcus, who ended up in tears on the end of the phone. “I know [he] feels very guilty,” he says. “That’s part of the reason he wouldn’t want me to speak [publicly], because you can’t leave a six year-old in a house if that is what happened to you. You have a moral responsibility.”
The rift between the brothers that began when the twins first went public - and Oliver suffered a breakdown - has now become a gulf. “Their behavior has had a horrific impact on my life,” says Oliver, who barely speaks to either of them, astonished they would rather discuss the family history of abuse with the world than with him. “I didn’t even know the film had been made it until I was told by the producer.”
He is also shocked the twins have never reported their abuse to the police, as he did at 22 (the investigation stalled because of insufficient evidence). “Why was I doing that on my own?” he asks, voice cracking. “Here I am, on my own, still.”
A week after our first meeting, Oliver invites me to his south London flat. At the entrance, is a black-and-white photo of him as a grubby child on Portobello Road, where he used to earn pocket money dealing antiques with his mother. “This is the little guy I’m really proud of,” he says. “He survived all that horror.”
The police have never brought charges against Steven, who must now be in his sixties, though Oliver reported him for a second time in 2012. “It’s not so much about revenge, it’s about moral responsibility,” he says. “He could be out there abusing more children.”
His feelings towards his mother are more complicated: “Strangely, I don’t think she was an evil person. She did show us great love, she just didn’t know where the boundaries were.”
When she died, her children discovered a picture of a young Alex and Marcus, naked with their heads cut off, next to her bed. In the attic, were years’ worth of gifts to the children, which they had never received.
Life has dealt Oliver countless blows. After breaking his neck in 2000 shattered his dreams of becoming a professional rugby player, he beat the Atlantic rowing record, before becoming the first person to run an ultra marathon on every continent. “As a non-runner, it was sheer bloody-minded determination,” he says. “I’ve spent my life running away from pain.”
He has a partner of six years and a 12 year-old daughter from a previous relationship, but his success working in the property industry has fluctuated with his mental health, which has left him suicidal, more than once.
After rowing the Atlantic, he launched Think Possible, a motivational coaching service, which has been defunct since his breakdown. But speaking openly about his “dirty secret” has visibly lifted him; he now has plans to revitalise it and write his own book.
He and the twins have “done two extraordinary things in our own way to tear up this b------- we were given as children,” he says. Despite everything, he believes the brothers still share “a story of hope.”
*Name has been changed
Tell Me Who I Am is available on Netflix
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