Martine McCutcheon Martine McCutcheon has opened up about a personal matter.

But she's done it for a good reason.

She's spoken about her abusive childhood to encourage victims of domestic violence to come forward.

Mart revealed that her dad, Thomas Hemmings, once dangled her over a balcony when she was just two years old to blackmail her mother into having sex with him.

Martine told This Morning: "He knew that I had become the thing she loved the most. In a way I was a saviour but in another way he'd found her weakness.

"My first memory of my dad is him hanging me over a balcony. I remember just hearing the voices and feeling scared.

"I can remember hearing my mum reassuring him and him threatening to drop me if she didn't do what he said."

Also on the show, Mart’s mother, Jenny Tomlin, revealed: "Eventually a friend stepped in and managed to grab Martine. I don't know if he would have dropped her.

Then Martine added: "It's made us really close. In a way we were too close for a while, we didn't trust anyone else. I was frightened if she was out of my life and she was frightened if I was out of her life.

"In a way we just pushed each other to the hilt to be whatever we wanted to be, which in my mum's case was a writer. With my first cheque from EastEnders I bought her a PC and she wrote her first novel on that PC."

Martine’s mum eventually left her dad and got an injunction against her dad, ordering him not to come within a certain distance of her.

Martine concluded: "For a long time we wanted to talk about this, but we found ourselves apologising for what had happened.

"Up until about a year ago, I still thought I couldn't talk about it and it's only recently I stopped feeling like it was our fault."