Constance Marten has told the jury at her retrial that she “absolutely” loved her baby daughter and she and Mark Gordon did everything they could to protect her.
She also said that her four other children had been “stolen by the state”, and described her family, which she did not want to be part of, as “bigoted”.
Marten, 37, and Mark Gordon, 50, deny gross negligence manslaughter and causing or allowing the death of a child.
They are facing a retrial at the Old Bailey. Marten had been due to start giving evidence on Tuesday but complained of a toothache and headache.
In their first trial, they were found guilty of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice by not reporting the death of their baby.
The couple’s baby Victoria, their fifth child, was found dead in a shed on a Brighton allotment, in a shopping bag covered in rubbish in March 2023. Her body was so badly decomposed that pathologists could not ascertain the cause of death.
Their four other children had previously been taken into care.
Giving evidence for the first time on Thursday, Marten was asked by her barrister Mr FitzGibbon KC if she loved her daughter.
“Absolutely”, Marten replied.
“Did you do anything to cause her harm?”, Mr FitzGibbon KC asked.
“Absolutely not. We did everything we could to protect her”, Marten said.
She was then asked how she felt now about her daughter’s death.
Marten said: “I don’t think this process has really allowed me to grieve properly. I still feel angry, upset. Still an element of shock”.
Asked about the couple’s four other children Marten said she “loved them extremely.”
“Not being with them is very, very hard”.
When Mr FitzGibbon KC asked if she agreed with the decisions made about taking the children away, Marten said “absolutely not… it’s an absolute outrage”, adding that her children were “stolen by the state”.
Marten told the jury that since she was little she always wanted to have a big family, adding “at least seven children would be my dream”. She said she would have liked to live on a farm.
She said she met Mark Gordon about 10 years ago in a shop in East London. “I sort of see it as fate,” she said.
Asked how she feels about him, she said: “I love him very much”, adding that he was “very dear” to her.
When asked about whether she would describe her background as privileged, Marten said “financially yes, emotionally not all”.
She said she tried to introduce Gordon to members of her family, but she found them to be “very cold” towards him.
“I have always had a frosty relationship with my family.
“They can be quite bigoted. I don’t really want to be part of it”, she said.
“I didn’t really grow up with them,” she said. “I went to boarding school when I was about eight.”
She said that when she got pregnant with Victoria, she and Gordon had at first planned to move abroad but her family intervened.
As a result, they left their home in London and lived in a series of hotels and bed and breakfasts, she explained, adding that in the week before Christmas 2022, they rented a cottage in Northumberland.
On Christmas Eve they went shopping for baby equipment at Primark in Carlisle where she started feeling that the baby was coming.
“I started having birth pangs pretty much as we started leaving Carlisle,” she said.
She drove back to the cottage and said she gave birth leaning against the bed upstairs without medical assistance. “It was a very quick birth actually, Very easy,” she said.
Two days later the family moved on again.
“Obviously it would have been nicer to have been somewhere stable and to have been able to properly relax… but we weren’t in that position”, she told the jury.
The couple travelled to Harwich in Essex, arriving in the early hours of 6 January 2023. When they checked into a hotel Constance Marten gave a made-up surname.
She said she did it because she did not want to be found by either the authorities or her family and “wanted to stay incognito”.
She said the couple wanted to be near a port where they could rent a place with cash while trying to find out how they could get abroad illegally. She said she thought there were travel restrictions against her.
Her barrister asked if she was thinking clearly at the time.
“We were in a set of circumstances that we couldn’t have planned for… our clarity came from a place of love and wanting to stay with our daughter”.
Asked if she would do the same thing if it happened again, Marten said: “If I had a crystal ball and could see into the future what could happen to Victoria because of my exhaustion of course I would have preferred to have made different choices, but we did what we could in the moment to keep her with her parents and protect her.”
Earlier in the trial Gordon declined to give evidence in his defence.
Opening the defence for his client John Femi-Ola KC said: “I do not propose to call Mr Gordon.”
The trial continues.
