Juliana tells me that whenever she tried to break up with Greliak, he would convince her to give him another chance. “He was a master manipulator,” she explains. “I would block him. He would get another number. He would show up at my house. It was pretty much harassment to the point where he isolated me from my friends.”
Eventually, in December 2019, Greliak moved in with Juliana. While she hoped letting him move in would calm their relationship, things got dramatically worse.
“He convinced me to record us having consensual sex, which I was completely against,” she says. But he continued to insist. One day, he suggested filming it on Juliana’s computer so no one else could access it. She reluctantly agreed. He also recorded a video of Juliana after giving her “a huge amount” of ketamine. “I didn’t even know what ketamine was at the time,” she reflects.
“In the video, he says: ‘You’re in a state where someone could rob you or rape you and you wouldn’t even know,’” Juliana tells me. “He thought it was funny to ‘torture’ me by telling me to wake up as I was late for a meeting – I would wake up terrified and he laughed saying, ‘I found the things your body is afraid of’.
“The next morning, he recorded himself assaulting me; then he recorded himself waking me up and showing me the video to see my reaction,” says Juliana. She had no memory of the assault – largely due to the ketamine in her system and the fact that she was asleep. The video remained on her computer, unwatched.
A month later, Juliana discovered that Greliak had stolen £300 from her PayPal account. This marked a turning point. “It hit me that he wasn’t a good person. I couldn’t trust him,” she says, adding, “abusers operate in a way where they’re very slow in their acts… you can’t notice this until you’re entrapped.”
After that, Juliana kicked Greliak out of her apartment. Later the same night, she says, he messaged her asking for her dad’s mobile number under the guise of wanting to send him a video for his 80th birthday. “That’s when I remembered there was a video,” she says. “I found it on my computer. I was in complete shock. I knew he was blackmailing me. He never even met or spoke with my father. He knew I was very close to him.”
The video was eight minutes long. “I am unconscious in it,” Juliana explains. “I’m tied up. You can hear him say in the video, ‘I’m completely raping you while you’re asleep and unconscious and making a video of it as well’.”
Greliak was arrested and charged with sexual assault on the 8th of March 2020, which is his birthday and also, as Juliania notes, International Women’s Day. “Poetic justice, I guess,” she says.
Juliana’s relief was fleeting. A month after his arrest, Greliak was bailed. “I’d thought that when he was arrested, I could move on with my life. But when he was bailed, I had to move to another apartment; I didn’t feel safe where I was.”
Greliak was arrested twice for breaching his bail conditions.
In 2021, during the lead-up to and during Greliak’s trial, Juliana was highly distressed. While he’d initially been charged with sexual assault by digital penetration, she later discovered that he’d also raped her.
“I was preparing to write my victim’s personal statement and was reviewing all the videos. In one of the videos, he admitted to raping me as well as the sexual assault. He laughed as he described how I woke up during it. In the video, he looks for the video of the rape to play it to me but realises he must’ve not recorded it. That’s when I realised he had, in fact, raped me, and I sent the video evidence to the police.