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At lunchtime, when she is working at her barristers’ chambers in central London, Charlotte Proudman, a specialist in family law, faces a confronting choice. Should she nip around the corner to Pret a Manger or join her colleagues at the Middle Temple dining hall? It’s not so much a question of whether she feels like a sandwich or a sit-down meal, but a more existential decision, requiring her to analyse who she is and where she belongs.
It is 15 years since Proudman qualified as a barrister, but she still feels a sense of alienation when she walks into the formal dining halls. “It’s largely a sea of male, pale, stale figures sitting there, all in their suits. They all look identical, and are probably from similar demographic backgrounds. As a woman, you already stand out,” she says when we meet at her deserted offices on Good Friday. “It feels like a pocket of establishment elitism. In Pret you’ll have a mixture of solicitors, some paralegals, maybe some judges popping in and out; it’s more cosmopolitan.”
Since she started eating at Middle Temple, Proudman, 36, has repeatedly been surprised by the questions the mostly male diners lob in her direction. When she began her career at the bar, she found that it was “by some distance, the most male environment I had ever encountered”. Often the men begin by remarking that she has an accent, and start hazarding inaccurate guesses about where she’s from.
“They suggest Leeds or Yorkshire and I’m not from any of those places – but it’s almost as if they’re making a point of the fact that I don’t belong, that I’m an outsider,” she says, adding that almost no one has heard of Leek, the market town where she grew up, near Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.
When she first qualified, she would be asked where she had studied at university; older barristers, she says, were nonplussed when she said Keele. Occasionally they asked her what her father did for a living; she avoided saying that he was an alcoholic who died in a car crash when she was four. She was unsettled by their shared cultural reference points. “I know it sounds funny, but everyone’s gone skiing, everyone goes to the opera. They have these extracurricular activities which I’ve just never done.”
You can understand why Pret might begin to seem the logical choice.
Proudman’s unease echoes that felt by Brenda Hale, the first female president of the supreme court, when she moved from Yorkshire to London to start at the bar, and found herself surrounded by men she privately called “quadrangle to quadrangle to quadrangle boys” – lawyers who had been at independent boarding schools, then Oxbridge and the Inns of Court in London, their lives bounded by similar architecture and privilege.
Instead of bowing her head and quietly assimilating, Proudman has spent the past decade calling out misogyny in the legal world, managing in the process to alienate many of her male colleagues as well a number of female newspaper columnists, while also triggering a career-threatening disciplinary tribunal. This week she publishes a book on the work to which she has devoted her professional energies: supporting women with violent or controlling partners as they navigate the family courts.
Proudman’s achievements in this sphere are notable. One campaigner for greater openness in the notoriously untransparent family system (where critical decisions are made about how to organise care of children after divorce) pays effusive tribute to her work, characterising her as a “brave and persistent disruptor”. A senior colleague at Proudman’s chambers, Goldsmith, describes her as an excellent barrister who has achieved remarkable results by championing difficult issues such as coercive and controlling behaviour, by challenging the notion of parental alienation (a claim often used damagingly by fathers against mothers in response to accusations of domestic violence) and focusing attention on marital rape.
But Proudman’s book, He Said, She Said: Truth, Trauma and the Struggle for Justice in Family Court, is also a memoir that attempts to understand the sea of acrimony that she has provoked.
“Why do they dislike me so much?” Proudman wonders, laughing but sounding momentarily puzzled. “They think I’m rocking the boat, maybe, causing trouble, pushing the boundaries of the law. Or maybe it’s something about exposing the misogyny within the legal system, especially in criticising judges.”
The bar has yet to have a #Metoo reckoning. Proudman describes two occasions when she was groped by male barristers, one of whom had been assigned to her as a professional mentor. She cites research indicating that four in 10 female barristers have experienced sexual harassment and sees this as the direct result of a “predominance of men and male attitudes”.
Although more women than men now study law at university, the bar has been slow to catch up; 41% of barristers are women, but just 21% of KCs (senior barristers). Junior women at the bar earn on average 77% of what junior men earn; female KCs earn on average only 67% as much as their male colleagues. In 2024, 62% of court judges in the UK were men, rising to 69% in the high court and 75% in the court of appeal.
Proudman, who completed a doctorate at Cambridge, says: “Women have to work much harder to stand out and show that we are very good at what we do. Look at how many mediocre white blokes there are that seem to be doing just fine.” Comments like these have not won her allies.
She emerged into public consciousness a decade ago, when she called out a much older lawyer, a senior partner at a London solicitors’ firm, who sent her a message on the business network LinkedIn, complimenting her on her profile picture. “I appreciate this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture!!! You definitely win the prize for the best LinkedIn picture I have ever seen,” Alexander Carter-Silk wrote. She replied that she found his message offensive, and that she was using LinkedIn for professional reasons, “not to be approached about my physical appearance or to be objectified by sexist men”. She took a screenshot of his message and posted it on Twitter, asking other female lawyers if they were getting similar messages.
Within 24 hours her face was on the front of the Daily Mail, flagging an article by columnist Sarah Vine addressing the “glam lawyer and the Feminazis who hate men who praise their looks”. Vine’s article said: “Heaven help the poor man who actually tries to ask her out on a date, let alone try to get her into his bed. He’d have better luck propositioning a porcupine.” She was on the Mail’s front page for two days in a row.
The online abuse this unleashed was standard, depressing mid-2010s fare for Twitter (as it then was): she was swiftly dismissed as “rabid”, “humourless”, “dumb”, “a blockhead”, “whiny”, “malicious” and “batshit insane” by anonymous trolls.
But she was surprised to find some of the worst comments came from male barristers, tweeting under their own names. One wrote: “If you want to be a shock jock, apply to a radio station. If you want to be a barrister, stop being a cunt.” Another described her as a “self-publicist who cynically uses women’s suffering to promote herself”. Others called her mentally ill and a “wanker”.
She removed herself from social media, but later returned because she recognised that her online profile helped her reach clients in areas she was interested in. For a while she was hurt by the criticism she provoked, but she says she no longer cares very much, having mostly worked out a way to divert the hostility into positive attention for causes she feels strongly about.
Along the way, Proudman has concluded that likability is an overrated character requirement unhelpfully foisted on women and girls. “I think I’m quite a likable person, when you get to know me,” she says. She spends some time amiably attempting to get the coffee machine started, and when this doesn’t work she sets off to search the building for glasses of water, determined to be hospitable. “But as young girls and young women, we are taught to want to be liked, and, for me now, wanting to be liked has largely gone by the wayside. I’m aware some people don’t like me and I don’t care. I’d rather be understood than liked.”
In 2022 she typed a 14-part Twitter thread expressing frustration about a judgment by Sir Jonathan Cohen – who, like a handful of judges and dozens of senior barristers, was a member of the then men-only Garrick Club. Proudman felt the judgment had not taken the allegations of domestic abuse sufficiently seriously; she wrote that she was troubled by Cohen referring to the relationship between a woman and her ex-husband, who was a part-time judge and barrister, as “tempestuous” and describing the alleged domestic violence as “reckless”. She wrote that the case had “echoes of the ‘boys’ club’ which still exists among men in powerful positions”.
The Bar Standards Board responded by launching disciplinary proceedings, on the grounds that the thread “inaccurately reflected the finding of a judge on a case in which she was instructed”, and that Proudman had behaved in a way “which was likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public placed in her and in the profession”. She faced a 12-month suspension and £50,000 fine, but in December, after three years, all charges against her were dropped and the case was dismissed. The panel ruled that her tweets were protected under freedom of expression rules, and that they did not “gravely damage” the judiciary.
She has since launched proceedings against the Bar Standards Board. “Frankly, I’d like an apology and a sum of money to reflect the pain and distress that I’ve been put through,” she says. She would also like to understand why her male colleagues who abused her online have not been subject to similar proceedings.
Proudman only has just over a decade’s worth of career to cover, so her book doesn’t have the heft of solicitor Harriet Wistrich’s excellent recent memoir Sister in Law, which also tackles the need to remodel the legal system to offer better justice to women. But He Said, She Said is revealing about the hidden world of family courts, where she argues attitudes lag behind other courts because of the absence of routine scrutiny. She wrote it because she wanted to “expose how the family justice system is failing women and children”, and because she felt frustrated at seeing the same systemic failings repeated in case after case.
“A broken relationship and a family court case can happen to anyone,” she writes, “and almost no one is prepared for what that is like. Nor is there nearly enough recognition of when and how the family court gets it wrong, and the shocking consequences of those decisions on the lives of women and children.”
She has acted in cases where a judge has dismissed domestic violence, shrugging it off as “just a bit of DV”, and she has heard judges indulge in victim blaming, diminishing the significance of rape. One judge described an incident of strangulation as a prank, she says. She has secured judgments that recognise gaslighting as a form of domestic abuse, and that acknowledge the dangerous tactic of “darvo” (deny; attack; reverse victim and offender) that perpetrators use to avoid being held accountable.
“It is women who make up almost three-quarters of domestic violence victims in the UK, and who will more often be asked to recall the painful details of how their partner verbally abused, coercively controlled, physically assaulted or raped them,” she writes. “It is women who are mostly bringing forward the most serious allegations and who must prove what they are saying, while male respondents can sit back, poke holes in their arguments and cast doubt. And it is women who must face judges who are predominantly male, relying on their understanding of the nuances of domestic abuse and coercive control. Frequently, this feels like a game that women cannot win.”
Not that it is a game, as far as Proudman is concerned. She is disparaging about colleagues who have “jocular conversations” about their cases over lunch before moving on to the next job without a second thought. She dislikes the legal profession’s readiness to view wrongdoing as a “matter of technical debate” that should “never be viewed through the lens of fairness or justice”. If her passion gets under some people’s skin, so be it.
The same goes for her high public profile: she sees self-promotion as an important part of carving out her practice. She takes care not to look too formal and stuffy in photos, occasionally posing in legal gowns and bare midriff, in order, she says, to show younger women that there is a place for them at the bar, in deliberate opposition to “all these male, crusty white barristers”. She wants students to look at her and think: “She looks cool. She’s a barrister. I could do that.”
