A Family Affair: `I just had to ask her to forgive me'

Patrick

When I got the call telling me I was being promoted I was deeply honoured. I was informed that I was the youngest senior magistrate in the world. It is a very privileged job and one with awesome responsibility - the power to deprive a man of his freedom has repercussions for the rest of their lives. I was totally married to my job. I never did anything about building up relationships with my daughters - I showed my love to them by providing them with a beautiful house, vacations and the best schooling.

The events leading up to the bribe were long and drawn out. It started one night at a dinner party when a businessman started talking to me about a case that was about to come before me. He didn't offer me a bribe there and then, but just planted the seed in my mind.

I was not familiar with the way one went around accepting a bribe so I took a cheque - a million Trinidad and Tobago dollars - and deposited it into my account. It was ludicrous. Obviously someone in the bank worked out that it was a cheque made out to a magistrate from a man who had a case before him in court. Trinidad is a very small country; it wasn't that hard to work out. The police started making investigations and I was charged.

I didn't feel like I had the strength to go through with the judicial process. Every time I went to court the TV cameras were there and I was all over the newspapers, it turned into a very big scandal in Trinidad. I thought about suicide, my life had finished, it seemed like the only option.

When they sentenced me to 19 years my knees buckled. I had believed God was going to help me but now I believed it was the end of my life. When I was a magistrate, men had often complained to me in court about how they were raped and beaten up in prison by other men. I thought my life was going to end.

At the prison I was placed in a cell with 15 men. They were glad that a magistrate, particularly one that had sent many of them to prison, had been sent down. They were rejoicing. I really thought this is it, I'm going to die. One night a man said to me to pay for all the magistrates who had taken advantage of prisoners over all the years, they were planning to strap me up and kill me. Then one man looked at him and said, "To do that you have to go through me." And then another man stepped to my defence as well. I had no idea why but I subsequently found out that one of those men had come before me years before and I had given him a second chance.

After serving two years of my sentence I was miraculously released on a technicality, by this time Penny had gone abroad. I heard nothing from her until I had been out for a couple of years and we slowly started to communicate. By this time I had realised I had never been a father to her, I never once had tried to establish any sort of friendship with her.

She was very angry with me. I just had to ask her to forgive me. I knew all I had done is cause her humiliation and pain, pain, pain. It was a very slow process of healing.

When Penny came back to do cricket promos in Trinidad last year she gave me my first proper job since my release. She trusted me to work with the crew, it felt tremendous. I am very proud of her and so grateful I had an opportunity to ask for forgiveness for failing her as a father the first time round.

Penny

As a child I felt very removed from my father. He was incredibly larger- than-life - good-looking, charismatic and always in the newspapers - the kind of dad every girl should want. But because he was such a bad father, I felt extremely removed from him. My whole life I've been defined as Jagessar's daughter - people don't know my first name but they remember my second.

Part of me hated him. I was very resentful of the fact that I'd done everything to be a good daughter - I'd done very well at school and I was well-behaved but he didn't care. I'd have a ballet recital and he'd give away the ticket or he'd forget to pick me up after my class and I'd be stuck there. Nothing I could do could make this man love me, and I blamed myself totally.

When he got charged I couldn't believe it. I thought someone had got it all wrong. The mind boggles how he could have allowed himself to get caught so easily. Once we realised it was true and the scandal hit it was awful. It's such a small community we felt like everyone was looking and whispering. Conspiracy theories started flying - that he was a drug dealer, or a murderer. I was 16 at the time, and trying to defend him, yet trying to work out how it all happened.

In the end it got too much and I had to leave. We had no money left and I was sent to London and arrived at Heathrow with pounds 100. My early years in London I totally freaked out, it felt very alien. I got attacked and robbed and ended up in a hostel for homeless women. I remember spending one Christmas Day sitting on a bench on Oxford Street and it was absolutely dead, I sat there and thought I had totally failed. It was the darkest time in my life; I tried to commit suicide twice.