Ulrika Wendin—Karl Lundström

Ulrika Wendin—Karl Lundström is a relationship of sexual violence whose effects persist long after the assault itself. Ulrika’s account connects Lundström not only to the rape but also to the bodily distress, loss of agency, and distrust that shape her later encounters with the authorities. The case against him reopens the question of what justice could mean for her, while exposing how the earlier investigation compounded the original harm.

The earlier complaint and its rejection

Seven years before Jeanette Kihlberg speaks with her about Lundström, Ulrika reported him for rape. The preliminary investigation was dropped, and nobody believed her; Ulrika doubts that even her mother did. Instead of being treated as a credible complainant, she recalls being framed as a teenager seeking attention and told that she needed psychological help. The language of support offered by the prosecutor did not translate into belief or effective action on her behalf.

The defense statement deepened that rejection. Ulrika read that the lawyer had described her as lacking credibility and listed problems in her life, including difficulties at school and with alcohol. He had never met her, yet his account reduced her to those supposed failings and, in her eyes, made her seem worthless. Ulrika responded by promising herself she would never forget his name, a resolve that links the dismissal of her complaint to the wider legal history surrounding Lundström.

The assault’s continuing bodily aftermath

In her later conversation with Sofia Zetterlund, Ulrika describes the rape as an injury that continued to organize her experience of her own body. She explains that vestibulitis made intercourse painful and that she could relax in a later intimate situation because she was not the person who had to lie there. The distinction is stark: closeness becomes bearable when she can imagine herself outside the body being touched. Her account does not present this as a free choice but as a way of enduring desire after Karl Lundström’s violence.

The memory returns through an image of prolonged washing. Ulrika recalls scrubbing for hours in a steaming shower with a coarse sponge, trying to remove a smell that soap could not erase. The effort to cleanse herself becomes a repetition of the assault’s aftermath: her body is treated as the place where the event remains, even as she tries to make it feel her own again. Sofia connects the vestibulitis to excessive washing and understands the physical pain alongside Ulrika’s lasting shame and estrangement from her body.

Ulrika says that after the rape in the hotel she drank every day for four years. Attempts to pull herself together did not hold; she felt repeatedly returned to the same destructive circumstances. She describes a body that seems to send others permission to hit or sexually use her, while her words that it hurts make no difference. Sofia knows that Ulrika had been drugged in the hotel room with a substance that paralyzed her lower body and caused incontinence. In Sofia’s assessment, that assault may underlie Ulrika’s possible anorexia, self-loathing, relatively low-level alcoholism, and history of abusive, exploitative boyfriends. The relationship’s consequence is therefore not confined to a past crime: Lundström’s rape shadows Ulrika’s bodily autonomy and her later efforts to approach intimacy.

The case reopened, and its legal shadow widened

When Jeanette Kihlberg later summarizes the evidence against Karl Lundström, Ulrika Wendin seems to relax: the case is strong enough, Jeanette tells her, that a conviction is likely. Jeanette also says Ulrika’s rape complaint from seven years earlier could be reopened and that she would have a good chance of winning. But the prospect of a legal victory does not feel like repair. Ulrika does not want to begin the process again, and her reluctance follows years in which her original report was dropped and her credibility was attacked.

The cigarette conversation makes the earlier institutional failure specific. Ulrika recalls that no one believed her, perhaps not even her mother; the prosecutor’s talk of a social safety net had, in practice, meant treating her as an attention-seeking teenager who needed psychological help. She had also read a defense statement portraying her as unreliable and defining her through problems at school and with alcohol, although the lawyer had never met her. Her promise not to forget his name shows how a document meant to defend Lundström became, for Ulrika, a lasting record of her own degradation. Jeanette’s thoughts turn to Viggo Dürer and Kenneth von Kwist, placing Ulrika’s account within a wider network of legal encounters rather than treating the abandoned complaint as an isolated mistake.

That network becomes more troubling as Jeanette investigates Lundström’s circle. She knows that half a million kronor has entered Annette Lundström’s bank account, though the source cannot be traced, and suspects the payment may be a bribe. Ulrika has also been seen with more cash than her unemployed circumstances seem to explain; Sofia Zetterlund has implied that Dürer may be behind it. Separately, a letter Karl Lundström wrote to Linnea Lundström names the lawyer as a possible paedophile, a suspicion Jeanette also sees suggested by Linnea’s childhood drawings. These details do not establish Dürer’s guilt or prove that the money was connected to Ulrika, but they enlarge the significance of her testimony: the failure to protect her sits beside unresolved suspicions about money, lawyers, and the treatment of abused children. The relationship between Ulrika and Lundström therefore persists not only in her bodily memories, but in a legal history whose abandoned questions continue to shape the investigation.

The legal record and the limits of resolution

Jeanette’s inquiry also leads her to examine how Kenneth von Kwist recounts an earlier interview with Per-Ola Silfverberg. He gives the details without checking notes: Copenhagen police had called him to attend, former commissioner Gert Berglind conducted the session, and Viggo Dürer was present as Silfverberg’s lawyer. The episode does not establish a connection between that interview and Ulrika’s assault, but it places Dürer within the legal network that Jeanette is scrutinizing after Ulrika recalls the lawyer’s degrading account of her. The contrast is consequential: the professionals’ roles in the proceedings are readily recited, while Ulrika’s own report was abandoned and her credibility reduced to a list of personal difficulties.

Ulrika’s relationship to Karl Lundström thus remains unresolved even when the case against him appears strong. The possibility of reopening her complaint offers a legal route that had been denied before, but her reluctance makes clear that a renewed process cannot simply undo the disbelief, bodily consequences, and years of distress attached to the original assault. Her testimony gives the investigation a human cost that its files and financial suspicions cannot settle.