My Journey With FPR 9.9A: The High Bar Set Against a Victim the System Wasn't Ready to Fight

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from proving your own life. Not living it — proving it. Documenting it, indexing it, paginating it, cross-referencing it against the sworn statements of the person who caused you harm, and then handing the whole of it to a court and being told: this is still not enough.

That has been my experience of FPR Rule 9.9A.

What 9.9A Actually Asks of You

Rule 9.9A exists so that a financial remedy order can be set aside where it was obtained through fraud or material non-disclosure. On paper, that sounds like a safeguard. In practice, for a litigant in person, it is one of the highest evidential bars in family law — and it is a bar you are expected to clear alone, on a timetable set by people who assume you have a legal team behind you.

I was directed to file, by a fixed deadline, the full documentary basis for matters spanning my entire employment history, my financial resources, my homelessness, my health and disability, and the domestic abuse I have lived through — every one of it evidenced to the standard a barrister would produce it, while I had no barrister. No solicitor. No paralegal. No office. No admin support. Just me, a laptop, and years of scattered emails, payslips, and court orders that I had to find, verify, and organise myself.

I want to be precise about what that actually looked like, because "litigant in person" is a tidy phrase that hides an enormous amount of unpaid, uncredited labour.

The Bundle

By the time I filed, my evidence bundle ran to over 1,500 pages. Not because I padded it. Every page in it exists because the court directed me to prove something specific — my £150,000 salary and its cessation, my mortgage payments made alone since my exclusion from my own home, the diagnosed PTSD and anxiety caused by domestic abuse, the coercive and financial control I lived under, the prolonged pattern of it. Practice Direction 27A sets a 350-page threshold for bundles. Mine was more than four times that, and every page was necessary, because the scope of what I was directed to prove was that wide.

I built that bundle while homeless. I have not had a settled address since February 2025, when I was evicted from the home I bought before my marriage, using pre-marital funds, and remained the sole registered proprietor of throughout. I organised it, indexed it, and paginated it from wherever I could get a signal and a few hours of quiet.

Meanwhile, the other side had solicitors and specialist counsel from day one.

The Discrepancy the Bundle Exists to Prove

At the centre of this application is a company. Companies House filings — signed by the other party himself, as sole director, under his own name — show net assets ranging from £302,251 to £622,245 across the years this case has run, and dividends of £414,542 extracted during the very proceedings in which that same company was presented to the court as worth nothing. A district judge has already found, at an earlier hearing, that the company was his alter ego — a finding that has never been overturned, and yet was never placed before the judge who made the final order against me.

That is not a rounding error. That is not a difference of interpretation. Set against what was represented to the court, the minimum documented distortion comes to £648,803. I did not manufacture that number. It comes from his own signed, filed accounts, set side by side with what he told the court.

And still, the burden fell on me to prove it — to track down the payslips, the furlough certifications, the P60s, the bank statements, the Director's Loan Account records, and lay them all out in a form a court would accept, while unrepresented, while homeless, while carrying a diagnosis of PTSD from the abuse that put me in this position in the first place.

When the System Doesn't Answer

Some of what strikes me most, looking back over this bundle now that it's filed, isn't what's in it. It's what went unanswered.

I filed an urgent application for a same-day expedited hearing, with an immediate stay, warning of irreparable harm — the sale of the one property I owned, sole name, pre-marital funds, about to be sold out from under a live fraud application. Six documents. A draft order. Legal argument. A Help with Fees form, so cost could never be the reason it wasn't heard. It went in on the day it needed to.

No response. No ruling. Not even an acknowledgement.

That is not a metaphor for how the system treats women leaving abusive relationships without money or representation. That is, literally, what happened. An application marked urgent, same-day, warning of irreversible harm, sent to three different court offices — met with silence, while the clock kept running toward the deadline the court itself had set for me.

Why I'm Writing This Down

I am not writing this to relitigate my case on a blog. The Court will decide the Court's questions. I am writing this because I think the shape of this experience matters beyond my own outcome — because I suspect I am not the only litigant in person, and not the only victim of domestic and financial abuse, discovering that the system asking her to prove fraud is the same system that will not always answer her when the walls are closing in.

The bar set by 9.9A is high because fraud findings are serious, and they should be hard to obtain lightly. I understand that. What I don't accept is that the height of that bar should fall entirely on the person with the least resources to clear it, while the person who controlled the money throughout the marriage gets to answer through counsel.

If anything in this piece resonates with you — if you are somewhere in your own version of this bundle right now, at 2am, trying to work out where a payslip from six years ago has gone — I see you. This is what the fight actually looks like from the inside. Not a courtroom drama. A spreadsheet, an inbox, a deadline, and a refusal to be erased.

I built the case. I filed it. Whatever happens next, that part was never going to be taken from me.

— Samantha Avril-Andreassen

Copyright Notice

© 2026 Samantha Josephine Farlene Avril-Andreassen. All Rights Reserved.

My Journey With FPR 9.9A: When the Burden of Proving the Record Falls on the Person With the Least Resources is an original work by Samantha Josephine Farlene Avril-Andreassen.

No part of this article may be reproduced, republished, distributed, adapted, transmitted or commercially exploited, in whole or in substantial part, without prior written permission from the author, except where permitted by applicable copyright law.

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