So it’s kind of a long story, but I did leave him three years ago after a decade of physical, sexual, emotional abuse. The man is more than a decade my senior. He meet me when I was still in college and he was a fully established adult in his 30s.
At the time I didn’t even realize the things that were happening to me were sexual assault or physical abuse. He set the tone when I was still pretty naive and so thrilled that an older man found me mature and interesting. Eventually after years of being refused sex only to find that he had masturbated on my face while I was sleeping, or violated me when I was too drunk to consent, I knew I didn’t like it and needed to get out. After lots of therapy and realizing a lot of my encounters with him weren’t consensual, the divorce proceedings were well under way and changing the custody schedule was next to impossible. It was stuck at 50/50, my state is very weird in the courts that way. If I rolled up with, “I was abused!” the judge was kind of like, " well then why did you let the kids hang out with him in the first place?"
During the divorce proceedings, I discovered that during the years of marriage, he had arranged the finances in a way that (completely unbeknownst to my cause I was fucking stupid enough to trust my husband) so that I was essentially dicked out of all of the money we received during our marriage. It’s complicated but without me knowing he exercised stock options with his inheritance and passed it off like we were using money from our joint accounts. As a result, a hefty fortune was exclusively his. And I know I’m a fucking idiot for not being more diligent and suspicious of him, but I never thought up until that point that someone’s husband would want to manipulate their spouse’s reality.
Then the abuse started to turn towards my kids. They’d come back to me and explain that their father was terrorizing him. Screaming at them constantly. Standing in front of them naked, restraining them and tickling them until they peed their pants, holding them upside down and forcing their head under water if they refused to wash their hair. Locking them out of the house if they didn’t cooperate. They started to display signs of hyper sexualized behavior for small children.
Again, I tried to go through the courts, it didn’t work. This past fall the school started contacting CPS, my kids were reporting neglect and abuse to their teachers on the part of their father, CPS investigated, and while they concluded that something likely was going on, absent of bruising and broken bones and a friggin meth lab in their house, it’s pretty difficult to have a children removed from a parents house.
After that, he only became both more brazen and more secretive at the same time. My daughter has reported that he has forced her to show him her developing pubic hair, that he’s constantly rubbing and groping her. She fears him but is confused, why would her father make her feel so uncomfortable? She doesn’t understand. I talked to the police and they said these things, while troubling, didn’t cross the boundary completely, and that this could be considered concern for his daughter’s sexual health or just showing affection.
I know that’s not what’s going on. My history with the man is more than enough to demonstrate that he is a monster. But the problem is he’s a clunky white guy monster who seems unassuming, makes 250k a year, has millions of dollars at his disposal, and I’m just his young ex-wife who got pregnant right out of college.
My kids are afraid of him, our futures are only going to be focused on healing, but I don’t believe that can begin while he is still involved in them, polluting our minds with his manipulative, abusive bullshit.
huge difference