A WOMAN who was pregnant with twins when she found out her husband was a paedophile has admitted she scrubbed herself with bleach after the shocking discovery.
Lynsey Crombie, a social media influencer known as the ‘Queen of Clean’ to her fans, said she was so ashamed after learning the truth about her spouse that she was “afraid to leave the house”.
So instead, she threw herself into cleaning – covering everything, including herself, with bleach.
“I remember pouring it all over the work surfaces, and over my own hands and arms and I scrubbed,” she told the Daily Mail.
“I scrubbed everything – myself included – with a scourer.”
She added that she was desperate to get “all his germs to go”, and said: “It was a coping mechanism rather than normal behaviour, but when you are married to a paedophile…”
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Lynsey, who was 28 weeks pregnant with daughters Mollie and Olivia at the time, admitted she was also unsure whether she “could have his children” – but didn’t have a choice.
The shock of police knocking on her door at 5am was enough to start premature labour, with the girls weighing under 3lbs when they were born.
They had to be flown to a special care unit in Edinburgh for treatment and, once discharged, lived in Lynsey’s parents’ spare room for the first few weeks of their lives.
And despite her initial worry that she couldn’t go ahead with the pregnancy, she credits her girls for “saving” her, as she added: “I don’t think I’d be here without them.”
Lynsey chose not to name her ex-husband, instead referring to them as “The Freak”, and also didn’t go into details about his offenses.
Instead, she said it was “Category A stuff, the worst”.
He’s not in their daughters’ lives, and they consider Lynsey’s second husband Rob – with whom she also shares a teenage son – their “dad”.
They have also been aware of their biological father’s crimes since the age of nine – they’re now 22 – with Lynsey showing them a box of “self pitying” letters she’d received from her ex during his multiple prison stints.
“He got two years last year, it’s the third or fourth time he’s been in,” she sighed, adding that police found “content of children and animals on his computer” this time around.
“It’s disgusting, isn’t it?” she said.
Lynsey, now 46, married the “vile man” at the age of 23, and on her wedding day was told by her soon-to-be sister-in-law that her new husband had been in jail.
And while Lynsey said that she did, he had told her he had served time after being in a fight, with her response being “boys will be boys”.
I slapped his mother across the face as hard as I could
Lynsey Crombie
With his sister not correcting her and “just walking off”.
Lynsey said that if she’d known that the prison stint had been for sex offences, she would have “run a mile”.
Not only that, she remains angry over the fact that his family didn’t tell her the truth.
“Because they all knew,” she said.
While she wasn’t given any details about his arrest at the time, his in-laws filled him in – with Lynsey’s response even leaving her shocked.
‘I’m not proud of this because she was an old woman even then, and I don’t know if she’s even still alive, but I slapped his mother across the face as hard as I could,” she said.
She also can’t believe that she didn’t realise something was going on with her then-husband, as she called him “secretive” and “quite aggressive”.
“I used to go into the office and he used to always pull the plug out of the wall where the computer was,” Lynsey said on the podcast Life, Interrupted.
“So rather than just closing the laptop down or letting me see the screen, he’d actually pull the plug out of the wall.
“And it’s only when I look back – and I spotted this three or four times in the relationship – I think “what was he doing on the computer to actually physically pull it out of the wall?”
Following his arrest, Lynsey ceased contact with his family – meaning her daughters have cousins they don’t even know.
And her ex’s crimes also meant Lynsey and her family were put under the attention of social services, who she felt were “watching” her.
“I feel social services encourage you to stay with the man because then the wife can watch and make sure they aren’t re-offending,” she said.
But she was understandably unwilling to give her spouse another chance, and admitted she even went through a period where she “didn’t want to live”.
She went to see a counsellor at one point, but eventually found that her “therapy” was actually through cleaning.
Lynsey first found fame on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, and has gone on to build up an impressive social media reputation – with just short of a million followers on Instagram.
“I still think that when you have anxiety, when you can’t get out of the house, it’s better to clean than to fester,” she concluded, adding that her priority now is to show other people that they can “not just survive, but thrive” if they ever find themselves in similarly life-shattering situations.
