Former St Kevin’s College student Damien Carew jailed for bashing his wife
Damien Carew, a graduate of the elite St Kevin’s College in Toorak, has learned his fate over charges for repeated domestic violence against his Russian wife.
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Exclusive: A Melbourne man was sentenced to a year in prison by a court on the French Riviera on Monday for repeated domestic violence towards his Russian wife that put her in a coma and left her requiring brain surgery.
The court in the city of Nice heard that Damien Carew twice strangled Ana Polianski (also translated as Anna Polianskaya) and on one occasion bashed her head on the side of a bathtub.
“We would be drinking all day and sometimes we would start an argument and there would be violence from me … We were fighting all the time about whose fault it was that we lost the kids,” Carew told the court through an interpreter.
The real estate entrepreneur said he took full responsibility for his violence and expressed regret.
He was arrested in April 2023 and charged with attempted murder after assaulting Polianski at their family home in the pretty hilltop village of La Turbie near Monaco, where he worked.
The charges were later reduced to repeated domestic violence towards a spouse and for that crime he was sentenced to a year in prison.
But Judge Edouard Levrault ordered that instead of going to jail he should serve the sentence wearing an electronic bracelet at his home in the nearby town of Antibes.
The judge took into account the 16 months Carew, who appeared in court in a blue jacket and trousers and espadrilles with no socks, had already spent in detention while he awaited trial.
The trial, which lasted just one afternoon, heard in grim detail how the couple’s once blossoming romance turned into an alcoholic nightmare.
Photos of Polianski’s bruised body and her face with black eyes were shown to the court.
“We had a fight and I punched her in the face,” Carew, a graduate of the elite St Kevin’s College in Toorak in Melbourne, said of one incident.
He told the court that things turned sour in his family and business life when Covid struck and he lost his real estate business in Monaco and the couple were cooped up in their isolated house in the hills above Nice.
“I understand that having three dogs and two kids is a lot to take after being in prison but it is no excuse” for violence, Polianski said, also speaking through an interpreter.
Carew said that it was after his business went under that he foolishly was found drunk in a street with 200,000 euros in cash on him. He was charged with money laundering and kept in detention for a year from October 2021 and then released on bail.
His lawyer told the court that Carew, who had a glittering career in real estate in Australia and Dubai before moving to Europe, was only a bagman in the scheme that spanned several countries and that his job was to deliver money to people in Paris hotels.
The money laundering investigation is continuing and Carew is barred from leaving France until the case comes to court.
The judge in the Nice trial also ordered Carew to pay initial damages of 30,000 euros to his wife, with the sum to be evaluated at a later point, and banned him from any contact with her for three years.
Their children, a girl born in 2017 and a boy born in 2019, are in the care of Polianski’s mother after their school teachers and locals in La Turbie alerted the authorities about the couple’s heavy drinking.
When Polianski was taken to hospital after the April 2023 incident, a medical examination found bruises on her eye sockets and chin, five on the chest and abdomen, six on the right arm, three on the left arm, six on the right leg, five on the left leg, seven on the back, a brain injury, damage to the shoulder blade and the pelvis.
Carew told the court that while he admitted hitting her regularly, she was also prone to falling when drunk and bruised easily because she was anaemic.
Polianski denied that she was prone to falling over.
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Originally published as Former St Kevin’s College student Damien Carew jailed for bashing his wife
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