Luke Ford's obsession with the movie branded 'the most sexist, violently misogynistic film ever' led him to abuse nine women. His victims reveal their horrifying ordeal at the hands of..
.the real-life America Psycho By Annie Brown For The Scottish Daily Mail Published: 20:34 BST, 9 August 2024 | Updated: 20:34 BST, 9 August 2024 e-mail View comments Aspiring actor Luke Ford’s infatuation with the movie America Psycho was fanatical. He had watched the film hundreds of times and could quote, verbatim, chilling dialogue from the titular character Patrick Bateman.
Even on his social media profile picture, Ford replicated the movie poster – his head thrown back in the same demonic scream as in the promotional image of Bateman, played by Christian Bale. This obsession with the horror movie dubbed ‘the most sexist, violently misogynistic film of all time’, reflected Ford’s own pathological hatred of women. Today, Ford, 34, is in a cell in HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow , awaiting sentence on 18 charges of abusing nine female partners, including raping five of them and the attempted rape of another.
Luke Ford was obsessed with Patrick Bateman’s character in American Psycho and even mimicked him in his social media picture Charges were dropped in relation to the abuse of two more women. Ford used dating apps as a hunting ground to target professional women he could exploit sexually and financially. The women he persecuted included a scientist, a doctor, a brand executive and a PR consultant.
Julie, a luxury fashion buyer who was in a relationship with Ford for a year, said he was clearly adept at finding women who met his needs. She said: ‘All the women were educated, with our own homes and good jobs. He could live off us.
‘Perhaps one of our greatest vulnerabilities was that we were naïve enough to think abuse doesn’t happen to women like us. But it does. ‘We are taught that successful women are strong and in control, but life didn’t prepare us for Luke’s feral cunning.
’ Ford had starred in Deacon Blue’s This Is a Love Song video and boasted he was a stand-in for Brad Pitt in World War Z, but his acting career was sporadic, and his parts were small. Having left school at 16 with no qualifications, Ford rarely worked and so used the women to support him. He quickly moved into their homes, paying no rent or bills, and enmeshed himself in their lives while subjecting them to heinous physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
At a recent pre-sentencing hearing, forensic psychologist Marc Kozlowski described Ford as a narcissist and psychopath. Indeed, his victims are convinced he would have gone on to kill. The serial abuser was only snared after a partner he had attacked in her home managed to text a friend, who then alerted police.
So began an intensive investigation by Police Scotland which unearthed a 12-year history of domestic terror perpetrated by Ford. Julie, who met him online when Ford was a teenager, told the Mail that she is convinced his brutal treatment of females began even earlier. She said: ‘Luke was already a fully fledged predator and abuser by then and his behaviour only escalated.
’ When Ford contacted her, she was 26 years old and rebounding from the heartache of a previous relationship. She said: ‘Luke could sniff out vulnerability like a hunter. I was at a low point and he was so confident and charming.
‘He told me I was amazing and he love-bombed me. I latched on to how good he made me feel.’ Looking back, she can clearly recognise the red flags, including his fixation with American Psycho.
Julie said: ‘He quoted whole scenes. At first, I thought he was just entertained by Bateman but Luke actually wanted to be him. 'If I could go back, I would tell the girl I was then to run as far from him as possible.
’ It was only when Ford was sure that she was deep in the mire of the relationship that he allowed his true and twisted character to emerge. Piece by piece he crushed Julie’s confidence, with violence, gaslighting and insults, until she lost all sense of self. Ford had lied to her, that he was 24, but by the time she knew the truth she was already terrified of him.
She said: ‘He radiated anger. It was like seeing a train coming towards you and trying not to get hit by it. There were many times I thought he would kill me.
’ He derided her as a ‘washed out old hag’ and sneered that she was a ‘social experiment’. She should be grateful, he told her, that he had chosen her, when he had his pick of women. As he did with several of his victims, he undermined her looks, telling her she was ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’.
‘You can always be thinner, look better,’ says Bateman in American Psycho. Julie was a slender size eight, but Ford demanded she lose weight and placed her on a gruelling exercise regime, running circuits of the local rugby pitch. Ford dictated every element of his victims’ appearance: their clothes, down to the detail of their underwear; he inspected their hair and make-up before allowing them to leave the house.
He insisted Julie wear the underwear he chose and told her she needed breast implants. She found herself appeasing him, growing increasingly deluded by his insistence that she was responsible for his explosive behaviour. Ford was convicted of two counts of raping her, of pinning her against a wall by her throat, shaking and hitting her.
On one occasion when they returned drunk from a night out, he flew into a tempest of rage and threw Julie against a glass cabinet and raped her. She said: ‘I just lay there wishing it would stop. In court I was asked by his defence why I didn’t just run when he raped me but that suggests you have a choice.
There is no choice with a man like Luke. Whatever they want, they take.’ Like Bateman, Ford was fixated with extreme pornography.
In a horrific incident he forced her to watch violent sexual videos, gripping her head to stop her turning away in disgust. Ford was convicted of possessing large quantities of obscene, illegal footage and images and in one day alone, he searched ‘forced sex’ on a porn site 15 times. In evidence, he told advocate depute Leanne Cross it was ‘just morbid curiosity’ but she responded: ‘Actually, you enjoy seeing women in degrading situations, don’t you?’ Just like Bateman, Ford filmed and photographed women in degrading sexual encounters with him, often covertly.
When Julie split from Ford, he bombarded her with hundreds of calls and messages and threatened to share the images with her employer, friends and family if they didn’t reconcile. She said: ‘I have lived in fear for years of those images coming out. The humiliation of it would be unbearable.
’ In texts Julie shared with the Mail, Ford appears unhinged, oscillating between abuse and declarations of love. He rants that he had planned his violence, the ‘punching of walls and kicking of doors’, to intimidate her into leaving him. ‘I almost went too far with the acting there,’ he writes.
‘But hey it worked, babe.’ In one rambling sentence, he tells her that he hates her and loves her, that he doesn’t want her to be with anyone else, then boasts he has had sex with multiple women since the split. ‘Looking like Brad Pitt really helps,’ he says delusionally.
In another bizarre rant he referred to any future man she might date. ‘I hope they are not as cruel as me. Oops.
I mean as cool as me.’ Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport Advertisement With the help of therapy, Julie has come to understand why she stayed. ‘I was living in fear, and I had no sense of who I was any more,’ she said.
‘When someone tells you enough that you are worthless, you start to believe it. Your threshold of what is acceptable changes. Being with Luke I developed something akin to Stockholm syndrome.
’ After Ford’s arrest, the Police Scotland Domestic Abuse Task Force used a well-practiced technique of tracing former partners to build a case of serial offending. When officers contacted Julie in 2021, she told them: ‘I have been waiting for this.’ She always knew there would be other victims, she says.
In multiple interviews with women, police found evidence Ford repeated the same pattern of abuse, honing his skills of manipulation across the years. Sophie, who worked in public relations, was 39 when she met him and he was 26. At first, she found Ford loving, attentive and chivalrous and she was longing for a meaningful relationship and to become a mother.
‘I fell in love with him,’ she said. ‘But it was like trying to love a poisonous snake.’ Soon he moved into Sophie’s apartment in an exclusive part of Edinburgh and gradually began undermining her confidence, criticising her on everything, from how she looked, what she wore to how she did her job.
Sophie had come from a loving, middle-class family so Ford told her that given her privilege, she had a duty to ‘pay it forward’ to him. He pleaded poverty, did not contribute to bills and would expect her to pay for everything. To humiliate and control women, Ford often gave them ‘self-improvement’ lists.
Sophie was dictated ‘things to work on’, a few months into their relationship, which included ‘be less selfish’ and ‘stop being a bad person’. ‘That was the beginning of Luke trying to break me,’ she said. Aware of Sophie’s dream of having a family, he taunted that she would make a ‘terrible mother’.
Throughout their three-year relationship he grew increasingly controlling and violent. Ford monitored her social media and gradually isolated her from her friends and family. Sophie said: ‘Every element of my life and who I was, was under attack from him.
I became a shell of who I had been. 'I hated myself. I didn’t tell anyone because I was ashamed and embarrassed, and I felt so alone.
‘The emotional and psychological abuse was even more damaging than the physical violence.’ Ford attempted to strangle her on numerous occasions. He often stopped her leaving her apartment and even attacked her in public.
He left her permanently scarred when he pounded her head off a car window, in a frenzy in 2016. Sophie had black eyes after he smashed her face into her apartment window and her body was often covered in bruises where he had attacked her. She said: ‘I think the only reason he didn’t kill me was because he thought he was going to be the next Brad Pitt or Christian Bale.
‘He didn’t care about hurting women but he did care about the consequences for his career.’ As Sophie was to discover after his trial at Glasgow High Court, he brought other victims to her flat while she was working away. She said: ‘I am convinced he was using my flat as some kind of rape lair.
I am sure there are many more victims we may never know about.’ The serial predator was only stopped when he was arrested for attacking a 22-year-old partner in 2020, in her home. Susan, a highly successful academic, had just moved from abroad to an exclusive part of Edinburgh when she met Ford through a dating app.
She said: ‘I was young and didn’t know anyone. Luke seemed interesting and he love-bombed me.’ He quickly moved himself, his TV and clothes into Susan’s home, without discussion.
She was not assertive enough to question him. Once embedded he set about psychologically undermining and manipulating her. When she threatened to leave him, he emotionally blackmailed her by threatening to kill himself.
Luke Ford inveigled his way into his victims’ lives Much of their year-long relationship was in lockdown and it only compounded Susan’s isolation. His rages terrified Susan: he punched walls, threw things and man-handled her. She said: ‘I felt I had no power to remove him.
He terrified me. Even when I left the house, he would follow me.’ The end came only when he flew into a fury after she had removed pictures of him from her Instagram account.
Susan said: ‘He went dead in the eyes. He lunged at me and grabbed me by the throat. He pinned me down.
I went limp. I thought I was going to die.’ When he eventually let her go, she says it was ‘fight or flight’.
Susan ran into her bedroom, grabbed her phone and frantically texted a friend in England to call the police. When officers arrived they found her distraught with bruising across her neck. A sharp-thinking female police officer seized Ford’s phone, which was to be the key to finding other victims and unlocking the truth of his brutality.
Susan and the other victims bravely gave evidence against Ford at his trial last year and now her greatest hope is that his sentencing, due in the coming weeks, will be harsh. She said: ‘Fundamentally he is a psychopath, and he will never stop. I think that someone like him should never be released.
‘I am grateful that he is locked up. But I will always be fearful that he will kill a woman if he ever gets out.’ ■ Names have been changed.
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