“For me – right up until, I suppose, the day before he admitted what he’d done – it was the best relationship of my life.”
Stephen Yuden, with whom Adele Overton had been together for 13 years, seemed like the perfect partner.
They met on the set of a zombie film and shared many interests. According to Overton, Yuden was kind and caring and even gave up his job to look after her when she became disabled.
“He was brilliant. I loved him very much and I think I still do,” says Overton, sitting on the sofa in her home in Derby.
Overton trusted Yuden, but that trust was shattered when he admitted to raping her whilst she was asleep.
“I immediately felt betrayed. Up until that point, I’d never felt so safe in a relationship,” says Overton.
Yuden looked after Overton whilst she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, but he later told the police that he had raped her whilst she was under the influence of medication.
“I feel betrayed because I thought I knew him, but in reality I didn’t know who he really was,” says Overton. “And the thought that he lived with me for 13 years, helping to bring up my children.”
“I thought I was safe with him, but I wasn’t,” she adds.
Yuden is now in prison, and Overton has decided to speak out about what happened, in the hope that it will help others.
Overton and Yuden met in 2009 whilst filming a zombie film in Nottingham. She was 29 at the time, and he was 27.
Yuden worked as a make-up artist and actor, whilst Overton was also one of the actresses.
At the time, both were in relationships with other people, but remained in touch as friends.
Eventually, they became a couple on 13 January 2012. Overton remembers the date because they had a ‘Friday the 13th’ film marathon.
Overton says that her relationship with Yuden was different from any she’d had before.
“He was fun to be with, he was caring, and I felt that he loved me,” she says.
Photo credit: Adelle Overton
They met under unusual circumstances, and their life together was unusual too.
They worked as professional zombies for a company that organised zombie survival adventure days.
The role of a zombie required Overton to be physically active, but she eventually had to give up the job in 2017 after being diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
In early 2018, Yuden became her carer.
“He did almost everything for me,” she says.
Looking back, Overton says that Yuden began to control her.
‘He liked telling everyone else what I was capable of doing,’ she says. ‘Someone might suggest doing something, and he’d say: “I don’t think Dell can manage that, let’s think of something else.”’
Photo credit: Adelle Overton
But Overton now realises that Yuden’s behaviour was far more sinister than she could ever have imagined.
Her suspicions arose in 2020, whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.
‘I don’t know, I just felt a stronger sense of discomfort in my body, but I woke up whilst he was doing it,’ she says. ‘He came up with all sorts of excuses, like: “I thought you were awake and making all the right noises.”’
‘I was thinking about all the stress we were under, and he said he’d done it by accident,’ she adds.
Overton dismissed her own fears.
‘I think it was easier to believe the lie than to face up to what the truth might have been,’ she says.
But Overton began to have trouble sleeping.
“I think somewhere in there, in my head, my brain just didn’t feel safe when I was asleep,” she says.
According to Overton, she also found it difficult to be intimate with Yuden, and she began to have increasingly frequent nightmares linked to the sexual abuse she had experienced in the past.
“At the time, I thought I was linking it to my trauma and that, because of it, I was judging him and what he’d done more harshly,” she says. “I started to feel guilty and blame myself for all of it.”
Yuden’s confession
Yuden only confessed five years later, in 2025, whilst he himself was undergoing treatment for bowel cancer.
“I think something must have been weighing on his mind, because now he could see from the other side what I’d been through,” says Overton. “He clearly spoke a lot about how he hadn’t looked after me very well whilst I was undergoing treatment.”
This took Overton back to a memory from five years earlier, when she woke up to find Yuden having sex with her.
“I started pressing him: ‘What do you mean? What do you mean you didn’t look after me properly? In what way?’” she says.
Photo credit: Derbyshire Police
At some point during this conversation, which Overton says lasted two days, Yuden rang a friend and confessed to what he had done, then returned home and confessed to Overton.
She felt betrayed and repulsed, but did not end the relationship straight away.
She felt dependent on Yuden and also loved him.
At that point, Overton was already attending group therapy for past experiences of sexual abuse and spoke about it at her next session.
‘It was one of the counsellors, one of the therapists, who helped me pull myself together, because I was completely shattered; I was sobbing and saying: “What should I do? How can I make him stop this?”’ she recalls.
And she said: ‘Kick him out and call the police.’ Later that same day, she said they’d held a meeting to discuss my safety and that they would report everything to the police themselves. ‘At that moment, I realised it was no longer up to me,’ Overton added. – It’s perfectly understandable that she was extremely distraught by what had happened.
Following Overton’s interview, the police arrested Yuden.
“When I questioned him, he immediately admitted what he’d done,” she says. “He immediately admitted that he’d raped her. It’s very unusual in our investigations for a case to unfold so quickly in this way.”
Yuden was charged with two counts of rape, to which he later pleaded guilty in court. He was sentenced to six years and eight months’ imprisonment. He helped protect other women.
“Her courage and resilience mean that we have been able to protect many other people against whom this man might have continued to commit such crimes,” she adds.
“If anyone feels that something similar might be happening to them, I would strongly advise them to contact us and talk about it, because we can take action, and this case proves it,” says Kirtons.
Photo credit: Adelle Overton
But Overton still finds it hard to understand why her supposedly loving partner, with whom she had lived for 13 years, raped her whilst she was asleep.
“I don’t understand how anyone can derive pleasure from the fact that another person isn’t reacting in any way. That’s exactly what I couldn’t understand,” she says. “He preferred – I don’t know how to put it – women who were asleep.”
“He wanted me to be asleep, and he wanted me not to be aware of what he was doing,” she adds.
Overton suspects that Yuden was giving her excessive doses of the medication she was taking, which he controlled entirely.
“I had little pill boxes, and he would sort out all my medication for me,” she says.
“I now have far fewer sedatives compared with my other medicines, so I strongly suspect he was giving me an excessive dose to keep me asleep,” adds Overton.
Kirtons says this was a case that the police describe as ‘old’, so forensic and toxicological tests would not be able to confirm whether this had happened.
Furthermore, no evidence was presented in court.
However, Yuden told the police that he had raped Overton on one occasion whilst she was undergoing chemotherapy, which causes people to feel extremely tired.
“I think he recalled it himself at the time, saying that she was undergoing chemotherapy, and he admits that on that occasion she was under the influence of the medication,” says Kirton.
Although Yuden has been charged with raping Overton on two occasions, she believes he did it more times.
“He told me he’d done it to me seven or eight times,” says Overton.
Her daughter, Shari Overton, says it was difficult for her to see how Yuden’s crimes had affected her mum.
“She’s a completely different person now. I can see that her self-confidence has been severely shaken,” says Shari. “I’m also incredibly proud of her for going through all this, speaking to the police and in court, and standing up for herself.”
Overton hopes that her story will show other vulnerable people that they should not put up with abuse at the hands of those who are supposed to be looking after them.
“I feel I have to speak out about this because it’s made me wonder how many other people with disabilities are in situations where someone else has control over them,” she says.
“For several months after I found out everything, I thought that perhaps this was a kind of price I had to pay for his looking after me. Perhaps I owed him that intimacy. But no, I didn’t. And no one else is to blame either,” says Overton.