According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 4 women have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
One woman shared how her marriage took an abusive turn after her husband got into porn and “Fifty Shades of Grey”-style BDSM.
“My husband changed. And he changed for the worst. He got involved in porn very badly. After those movies came out, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” my husband got into all that stuff and, of course, I kept saying to him, ‘I’m not into that.’ My husband pinned me against the wall in the shower and he put his hands on me, and I kept screaming at him and yelling at him to stop. He didn’t until he was finished, and there was no way of me getting out of the shower.”
“I did leave once. I left in November of last year and I was gone for two months, maybe. And when I left, he kept promising that he would change, and I think at that point he wasn’t hitting me. He said, ‘We should be back together, we’re family, we’re married,’ and he gave me all the sob story. I said, ‘If you get help, I’ll come back.’ So he did go to a psychologist. He went two times by himself and then the psychologist said, ‘I want to see your wife.’ So I went with him, and she said, ‘I want to hear your story,’ so I explained what was going on, and she looked at him and she said to him, ‘Mr. Morris, you have not been very truthful to me. We have a big problem here. I can fix this if you are willing to come to therapy and we can straighten this out.'”
“After he was confronted by her, he refused to go back, and by that time, I moved back thinking he was going to therapy and then it got worse. It was like double worse. And it took me from November to February to get back out of there. You go back thinking that you know they’re going to change. He didn’t change. When I went back, they said to me, ‘Will you do a protective order?’ and I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to hurt us or anything like that.’ Love is blind.”
“He got to the point that he would leave handmarks on my backend, and if he wasn’t doing that, it was mostly on my breasts. He would slap me, and I mean slap me, and I would stay red for two or three hours after. He never would hit me in the face. It never really did come to the degree, but it was getting to that he was hitting me harder and harder every day.”
“When I walked up the stairs and he was walking behind me, I walked up the stairs sideways because I knew he would slap me or he would use that because he really tried to do it when I was off guard. I’d be cooking in the kitchen and he’d come up behind me and he would whop me right in the backend and I would be working with grease or something and I would yell at him, ‘You know I could get burned,’ and he would say, ‘You either listen to me and you submit to me or it’ll get worse.’ So the more I took and rejected him, the worse it got. The more I would say anything, the worse it got. So I learned that I should just shut my mouth up because otherwise it wasn’t so bad when I wasn’t saying anything to him. But he even to this day he still thinks that he’s all right in everything he does.”
“So this time when I left, I said, ‘I will do a protective order.’ And then when we went into court to get the protective order, he said to the judge, ‘She wanted it. That’s why I did it.’ The judge said, ‘If somebody is screaming at you and somebody saying ‘No’ or you’re hurting them, that tells you to stop.’ He just said, ‘But that’s why I married my wife.’ Well I never even knew to be honest, what “50 Shades of Grey” was until I’d seen the movie. I had no idea about any of that stuff. I said, ‘I want to file for divorce,’ and they said, ‘Well you need to think about what you want to do.’ And I said, ‘I don’t need to think about it. I’m the type of person that gives somebody a chance once and he was worse.’ So now we’re just waiting for our divorce to go to the judge.”