Case No. EWFC-48

[2011] EWCA Civ 12 in which Munby LJ said this:“Any judge who has had to conduct a fact-finding hearing such as this is likely to have had experience of a witness – as here a woman deposing to serious domestic violence and grave sexual abuse – whose evidence, although shot through with unreliability as to details, with gross exaggeration and even with lies, is nonetheless compelling and convincing as to the central core… Yet through all the lies, as experience teaches, one may nonetheless be left with a powerful conviction that on the essentials the witness is telling the truth, perhaps because of the way in which she gives her evidence, perhaps because of a number of small points which, although trivial in themselves, nonetheless suddenly illuminate the underlying realities.”36.In this case, I acknowledge that the father did not assert that the judge made his decision exclusively based on the mother’s demeanour, but rather that he relied unduly on her oral evidence and did not evaluate the matters drawn to his attention by Mr Latham from the documentary evidence. In my view, the judge did not need to address each of those issues in detail although he clearly had them in mind when formulating his overall assessment of the mother’s credibility. His assessment was not based solely on the mother’s demeanour, but also on the consistency of her evidence as opposed to that of the father which the judge found concerning and less plausible. 37.