Prosecutor apologizes for not investigating domestic violence report against Wim Hof
The Public Prosecution Service (OM) has sent a letter to the ex of health guru Wim Hof, apologizing for never investigating the domestic violence report she filed against the “Ice Man” in 2010. The OM said it is impossible to determine why the report was never investigated, acknowledging that it should have been. The case has passed its statute of limitations, the Volkskrant reports.
In the letter to Caroline, Hof’s partner until 2010, the OM wrote that her report should have “provoked at least further investigation, or a more extensive and critical interrogation of Hof.”
In 2010, Caroline reported years of domestic violence by Hof to the police following an incident in which the police caught Hof in the act of assaulting her eldest son at home. The teenage boy suffered two black eyes and a bloody nose in the assault. Caroline, who was there when Hof attacked her child, testified to the police about what happened in the house. She also told the police about the nine preceding years of physical and psychological violence, describing how he assaulted her while she was pregnant, threw a cast-iron pan at her, and choked her until she nearly lost consciousness.
Caroline never heard anything further about her report, and her lawyer did not receive a letter about the case being dismissed, as is customary. When the Volkskrant wrote about this abuse last year, the OM told the newspaper that the case had been reviewed and dismissed for lack of evidence.
But the letter Caroline now received indicates that this was not the truth. The case was never dismissed because it was never registered and never investigated. “That should not have happened, and we regret it,” the OM wrote in the letter.
Caroline told the Volkskrant that this has seriously damaged her trust in the justice system. “It was a huge step to file a report,” she said, telling how the female officer at the time told her that she would take the report very seriously. “But then there was no protection.”
Hof publicly denied the domestic violence and claimed that Caroline was the aggressor in their relationship.
