A 26-year-old British prison officer got herself into a clandestine six-month relationship with a convicted rapist while working in a men’s prison in the UK. She then got caught and let out of prison with a suspended sentence for attempting to smuggle out the rapist’s semen in an empty medicine syringe meant for children.
Cherrie-Ann Austin-Saddington was working at HMP The Verne, which is a Category C prison in Dorset. All hell had broken loose in the summer of 2022. The prisoner, Bradley Trengrove, was already serving a 13-year sentence for his rape of a child and having sex with a child. It all started innocently. He gave her a folded piece of paper, which was placed inside a magazine cover of Farmer’s Weekly, in which he had written the number of the smuggled phone that he had managed to get his hands on. She never reported it. She kept it.
What followed was a whirlwind of texts, late-night calls, exchanged photos, and stolen moments that dragged on for half a year. They’d meet up in prison workshops when no one was looking. She even started showing up on her days off just to see him. She knew exactly who he was a registered sex offender but it didn’t stop her. Court heard they had sex as many as 40 times, though she later insisted it was far less.
A tweet from X.
The whole thing went further than anyone could have predicted. Austin-Saddington actually got pregnant by Trengrove during the affair, but she miscarried. Their messages were full of intimate stuff, some of which prison security eventually spotted.
Once the bosses found out, she resigned on the spot. Trengrove got shipped off to another facility to break the connection.
Then came the bizarre twist in May 2023. She turned up at his new prison with an empty Calpol syringe stuffed in her bra. The plan was for him to fill it with semen wrapped in cling film so she could try to inseminate herself again and have his baby. Staff caught her straight away.
They seized the secret phone and all the messages. Police from the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit got involved. She pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office. Trengrove admitted he’d encouraged her.
Judge Fuller KC sentenced her to two years suspended at Bournemouth Crown Court in May 2025. No jail time, just conditions like rehab and staying out of trouble for the next couple of years. Trengrove received an additional two years and three months tacked onto his existing sentence.
The judge was blunt: without one big factor, she’d have gone straight to custody. That factor? In February 2024 after the offences but before sentencing she suffered a spinal stroke that left her paralysed from the chest down and confined to a wheelchair. It tipped the balance toward leniency.
This isn’t some one-off. Ministry of Justice figures show dozens of prison staff have faced dismissal over similar relationships with inmates in recent years, with female officers making up a growing chunk of the cases. Watchdogs on both sides of the Atlantic point to the usual suspects: chronic staff shortages, low pay, poor training on boundaries, and the pressures of working in under-resourced jails. You see echoes of it in American prisons too officers crossing lines they know they shouldn’t. You see echoes of it in American prisons too officers crossing lines they know they shouldn’t.
The story exploded online after a viral post on X. Plenty of replies called her paralysis “karmic justice,” slammed the idea of mixing male and female staff in men’s prisons, and blasted the suspended sentence as far too soft. Others reckoned her health problems were punishment enough already. That’s just public venting, though not the court’s official view.
In a Guardian interview last November, Austin-Saddington opened up about her own past, including a history of sexual abuse. She said she felt groomed and taken advantage of.
“He took advantage of me… there was a lot of pursuing there,”
She told the paper. She says that although it might be called crazy love by some, it was more like holding on to the only bit of support that she had at the time. Now at the age of 29 and married with a home in Weymouth, she is in a wheelchair and wants to get involved with domestic abuse charities such as Refuge.
“I never thought I’d be that person,”
she says.
“I feel like a massive fuck-up.”
