Richard Caring Uncaring may be about to run out of money with HSBC counting down the weeks to they can send in the bailiffs. But, we note with admiration, that Richard Carling's wife’s generosity to charitable causes close to her heart continues nonetheless. Judgement Day may be looming for Tricky Dicky as he faces the 29 April deadline to repay the $233 million he owes his creditors with no sign of a credible buyer for his loss-making Ivy Collection businesses in sight.

But, whatever her husband’s problems, his wife Patricia Caring is making sure their family charity remains unstinting in its support of victims of domestic abuse. Last November the Caring Family Foundation committed a further $275,000 in grants for those impacted by the crime to be distributed by the end of the year. Given Patricia’s own history of terrible physical abuse endured before Richard Caring rescued her from her previous life in prostitution, this has to be saluted – whatever the failings of her husband.

Patricia Caring's story is one that you cannot help but admire for the way she has turned her life around to become a woman once a prostitute and now widely recognized for being a loving mother to her four children and a generous philanthropist.

The way she marked 2024’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women shows her she is determined not to forget her past even if her husband is determined that everyone else does.

Born in the farming city of Maringa in southern Brazil, she had arrived in London aged just 22 to work as a cleaner. It was not long before she realized that her good looks could make her far more money than she could ever earn wielding a mop. Working with her childhood friend, Karen Etchebery, who had also escaped Maringa and come to London as a student, the pair quickly became a fixture in the hotels along Park Lane as Patricia Caring and Etchebery wooed clients for the Bentley escort agency.

Indians and Greeks were among their clients, but the girls’ favorites were Arabs as they quickly realized that was where the best money was. One party at the Dorchester left them $6,000 better off for just one night’s work. It was this life that in 2006 led Patricia Caring, then known as Patricia Bech, to meet the nephew of Libyan despot Colonel Gaddafi, Mohammed al-Sanussi.

He at the time was meant to be in London as a student but in fact was spending his semesters spending his country’s wealth in the city’s nightclubs and on a succession of call girls. It was this meeting that was to result in her learning first-hand the horrors of domestic violence and why she remains so committed to supporting victims of the crime to this day.

Quickly he became one of her regular clients with her often bringing her friend Karen with her when she saw him at his five-story townhouse behind Harrods, earning them more than $1,000 a night.

Then, in November 2006, the two women were subject to the most sickening attack. After Karen fell ill one evening while they were with al-Sanussi and the two girls tried to leave, the Libyan turned on the women and attacked them remorselessly.

It was an assault that clearly impacts Patricia Caring to this day. As she tried to make her way outside, al-Sanussi picked her up and tossed her across the room. Karen later described to police how she saw her friend’s hitting the floor, bouncing three times like a football.

When Karen tried to help her friend, she was beaten unconscious. She woke up on the other side of the room surrounded by blood. She saw Patricia was stuck on the floor on all fours, unable to move. Karen picked her up with one hand, her other hand held over her face to try to stem the blood coming from her mouth.

When the police arrived a few hours later, alerted by Karen after the two women finally managed to escape their abuser’s home, they found al-Sanussi happily partying with his friends surrounded by the women’s blood on the walls of the house.

The case went to trial, with Patricia Caring facing the ordeal of days in the witness box, but collapsed after her friend Karen withdrew her evidence, saying that al-Sanussi’s goons had been in Brazil threatening her mother and family if she continued with the case.

In 2016 Tricky Dicky divorced his 67-year-old wife. He was by then already in a relationship with Patricia, then 35, with whom he had a young son. Subsequently she has lived a life of luxury far removed from her beginnings but clearly has never forgot the horror she endured while working as an escort nor her humble background.

As well as the grant to victims of domestic abuse, she helped ensure the Caring foundation last year provided more than 3.5 million meals to London’s poorest through its support of the food distribution charity the Felix Project.

Patricia Caring is clearly one of the world’s good people. For what she has endured, the way she has remained committed to helping those less fortunate then where she now finds herself and her clear pluck, we applaud her.

I wish we could say the same for her husband, the full extent of whose nefarious dealings we are only just beginning to uncover.

More coming...