The Story of Stephanie Anne Lloyd
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"It turned out we were very wrong. Instead of the standard fine of £500 and a warning from the judge, the company was hit for £6,000 - and both Raiko and I, as directors, were sentenced to a year in prison. It wasn't so much justice as revenge."
The police had ensured that the trial centred on the 'perversion' of transvestism, based on their hardened belief that all TVs were gay and worse besides. As a convicted promoter of such perversions, Stephanie was sent to a remand centre and put in with a group of mentally ill inmates.
Risley Remand Centre at Warrington - known as 'Grisly Risley' - is a hideous place wherever you are, but the most depressing and claustrophobic section of all is the basement, where Stephanie was locked away with just a mattress on the floor and a plastic pot in the corner. Here was a sophisticated and intelligent business woman, who had been expecting to be dining out with her husband that night, the court case behind her. Instead, she was trapped behind bars with a group of women who were, to say the least, mentally unstable.
"It's hard to describe how awful it was to be locked up in that place. I was in total and utter shock" she said.
"The women in there should have been in a psychiatric hospital, not just shut away in prison. One of them really had the devil in her and wasn't even trusted with a knife and fork in case she attacked someone. It was very, very frightening."
Stephanie was kept there for three days, the longest and most tortured 72 hours of her life, before being moved to a women's open prison near York. Open prisons often have the reputation of being little more than just holiday camps - at least amongst those who have never had to be in one. The reality is very far from that.
Stephanie found herself suddenly having to share her days and nights with convicted murderers, thieves and drug dealers. She had never come across illegal drugs of any kind before, but in prison they were rife, as was violence and intimidation amongst some of the inmates. She kept herself to herself as much as possible. She was different to the others, partly because hers was a technical offence that hadn't harmed anyone, but mostly because of her history. She was the only prisoner there who hadn't been born a woman.
"The worst part of it was the feeling that I was trapped in that place and there was absolutely nothing I could do to get myself out and away. We were appealing against the sentence, of course, but that seemed to be taking ages and was out of my control. "So I just had to make the best of it while I waited. And, although it was a painful experience overall, that period in my life did have its high points that I can look back on with affection."
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