With a cheery kids TV show playing in the background, there is something particularly unsettling about the voice recording that brought Lamarr Manning to justice.
“I don’t wanna have sex,” says a woman’s voice. Manning spits back: “So what, I have to grab you and that. Is that what you’re saying?”
The Manning heard on the tape appears manipulative – a bully whose nonsensical language is meant to confound, while conveying a singular horrifying desire.
“Free it up,” he demands, “Free it up when I ask. You told me no, how the f**k is that gonna make you do anything you want to do. Instead of telling me no, don’t tell me no bro. Why are you telling me no?”
There is a sinister pause from Manning as the playful music flutters on. Then the woman sighs. When she finally builds the courage to say ‘You’re pushing me, I can’t lie’, Manning explodes.
“What?” he snarls, “You’re pushing me though. You’re gonna get me mad fam. You’re actually gonna get me mad. Like you don’t understand, and then there’s no talking. So just hurry up, before I get mad… I wanna f**k, bruv.”
The door slams and Manning’s muffled roars are cut short by the end of the tape.
‘He raped me while I was miscarrying’
“He has raped me about 100 times,” Aria, not her real name, tells MyLondon, one of two female survivors who want to share their stories after Manning was jailed for 24 years at Inner London Crown Court this month. The chef, who worked at a middle eastern restaurant in Stoke Newington and on a Caribbean market stall in Peckham, will spend at least 16 years in custody.
With five rape convictions and a long criminal record – including for violence against women, drug dealing, robbery, and knives – Judge Darren Reed would have put the 24-year-old away for life, if not for the concept of legal immaturity (mitigation given to defendants under the age of 25 whose brains are not fully formed).
For Aria, Manning’s reign of terror began when they met when they were young and his odd behaviour quickly escalated into dreadful abuse. Aria claims he used violence to control her and repeatedly raped her, holding her at knifepoint and refusing to let her leave unless she had sex with him.
In an incident that stands out, even amongst the hell she endured for many years, Manning discovered Aria was spotting blood and might be miscarrying their baby. Rather than show compassion, Aria says Manning ‘went mental’.
“He ended up raping me while I was miscarrying,” she recalls, choking on her words. After the rape, Aria had a stillbirth in her mum’s bathtub and was rushed to hospital with a resting heart rate of more than 100 beats per minute.
Over the years that followed the ‘miscarriage rape’, Aria says Manning remained ‘obsessed’ with her and picked up convictions for false imprisonment, assaults, and smashing her mum’s window. Even after she moved back home, Manning continued to make Aria’s life miserable until he was finally sent to prison for assaulting her in 2022.
By this point, Aria was seeing another man but had to keep it secret from Manning or risk being attacked. In prison he was able to call her from a burner phone, and even threatened to douse one of her children in acid and shove drugs down her throat.
“He had me convinced that I was the problem, that something was going on with me,” Aria says, “What took me so long, is that who is going to believe all this is going on? It just sounded not-believable.”
When Manning was released from prison in 2023, he made it clear the abuse would not stop, even in the face of a restraining order. But Aria had already started making a record of his abuse, and handed over an audio recording to detectives.
By the time Manning was free to resume his tyranny, Aria had already been interviewed by police over the rape allegations. When he was arrested for breaching the restraining order December 2023, Manning was also charged with multiple rapes.
In a risk assessment ahead of the trial, seen by MyLondon, the Met identified Manning as ‘one of the top high-risk and high-harm domestic violence offenders within the BCU’. The officer writing the report also said the case was ‘one of the most high risk cases I have dealt with within my career’.
‘He then proceeded to rape me’
In the same period, another survivor, Zuri, not her real name, reported Manning to police for raping her when she was a young teenager.
Zuri told MyLondon Manning bombarded her with messages and demanded she visit him in Peckham, allegedly ‘kidnapping’ her and stealing her shoes so she could not run away.
On the day she was raped, Manning used Aria’s phone to message Zuri, sharing her address and claiming she wanted a fight. Zuri fell for the hoax, but when she arrived at Aria’s home, it was Manning waiting there instead.
Zuri claims Manning threatened to beat up her friends if they did not leave, then grabbed her and flung her over his shoulder. I was a young teenager and I did not know how to deal with the situation,” Zuri says.
“He basically raised me up and took me into his room, holding a knife to me. He said ‘Take off your clothes now’. I froze, kind of. He was like ‘If you do not do it, I will stab you’. I was rushing to take off my clothes, panicking. He then proceeded to rape me.”
After briefly retiring to another room to play video games, Manning dragged Zuri in there too and forced her to rub his hair as he fell asleep in her arms. This gave her the chance to find his phone and message her friends for help. When her friends arrived: “They wanted to beat him up. I just wanted to go.”
Zuri was desperate to tell people what happened, but Manning used lies to play women against each other, creating a group chat of friends and victims so he could defend his threatened reputation. This backfired though, because for the first time it showed Zuri she was not alone. “That’s when I heard he’s done it to so many other people,” remembers Zuri, “That’s when I went to report it.”
‘If we can report it, so can you’
So how did Lamarr Manning get away with the most horrendous sexual abuse for so many years? Ask Aria and she will say she was badly let down by the people who had the power to stop him – including family and friends.
“He has hit me and dragged me around in front of his friends and family. Not one have done anything. They will say ‘It’s because you’re running your mouth too much’, but it was me saying ‘I want to go home’. He will slap and they do nothing at all.”
Manning also used social media to spin lies about his victims, turning the world against them to keep complaints at bay, and make any allegations against him appear vexatious.
“There was a time when a group of girls in the area came up to me and one of them tried to fight me and stab me because of him,” Zuri claimed.
She would later learn Manning had created a fake Snapchat profile, using her likeness to insult people in the area so they would come after her in revenge.
While fear and social manipulation would play their roles, one of Manning’s best ploys was to make Aria and Zuri believe his cruelty was tolerable.
For Zuri it took an adult guardian to tell her what Manning did was wrong. For Aria, she thinks many teenagers have no idea they are victims of domestic abuse. “When you’re young as well, you do not recognise certain things,” Aria said, “I thought it was normal.” Both women are now encouraging anyone who has been a victim or rape to come forward. “If we can do it, they can do it too,” said Zuri.
Manning was convicted of four counts of rape against Aria, plus one multiple incident count that included no less than five occasions. Against Zuri, Manning was convicted of rape, sexual activity with a child, and controlling and coercive behaviour. Manning also received an indefinite restraining orders in relation to both women and one other person.
Got a tip, a court date, or some gossip? Please email [email protected] or WhatsApp 07580255582.
Don’t miss out on the latest crime stories from across London. Sign up to MyLondon’s Court & Crime newsletter HERE.
