One Abuser, Three Wives and Zero Accountability

Lindsey met James* in 1992 when he was 21 years old—a hero soldier returning from the Gulf War. The Marine was cute, smart and funny, she remembers, and also a little bit dangerous. She was instantly smitten. There was just one hurdle —Lindsey was only 15, a high school student. Her mom forbid her from seeing him. 

(* Last names withheld for safety.)

But you know teenagers and first loves. The two met in secret, talked, kissed once. Eventually, Lindsey would leave Shreveport, La., for college in California. She chalked her first love up as “the one who got away.”

Two years later, she’d return home for a wedding and there he was. The two picked right back up where they left off, only this time, Lindsey’s mom couldn’t stop her. Their romance was a tidal wave of love-bombing that culminated with a beach proposal just a few months later. Lindsey was just 20. She took a chance, said yes. James moved out to California so she could finish school. Almost immediately, Lindsey could detect two things had shifted: James wasn’t happy in California and he was determined to take it out on her. 

“He was crazy possessive,” Lindsey, now 44, remembers. “I knew he had a little bit of that bad-boy edge, at the time, that was interesting to me. He was still clean cut enough and had that military background. I felt safe.” 

Except when James exploded, which he did often in anger. He said it was just California–too much traffic, too many people. Lindsey decided maybe it’d be better to move back to Louisiana. But it didn’t make much difference—James didn’t seem any less explosive there. 

Eventually, however, the two married. Lindsey was 22. The first year was tumultuous. 

“We would have a lot of arguments— he would just blow up in stores about whatever. He would say he was trying to embarrass me.”

He especially didn’t like Lindsey going out without him.  

“My friend—he was gay—lived upstairs in the same building. We were very close. I’d go out with him and his friends to gay bars and [James] would get really upset about that. He wanted me to stay home.”

Once, before she went out with her friends, James spotted sparkly glitter on Lindsey’s face, another infraction. He called his new wife a whore. 

No longer in the Marines, James couldn’t seem to hold a job, and if he did, it was fleeting–eight or nine months, tops. Lindsey was the breadwinner in the family and says James liberally took advantage of that, using her bonuses from work to buy expensive gaming systems, demanding the couple get a new car every year. When Lindsey tried to say no, the belittling began. 

“He’d call me a dumb bitch.”

When Lindsey’s job required them moving to Dallas, James’s abuse escalated. He would grab Lindsey by the arms, shaking her when he was angry. He slapped her across the face once when she called him a name. In another incident, he grabbed Lindsey by the neck, holding her down and strangling her. She couldn’t breathe. 

She told her mom about his abuse. Distraught, her mom demanded she leave him. She stayed with a friend for about a week and then returned home. She desperately wanted things to be normal again, when James was sweet. And, sometimes, he still was. He’d surprise her with flowers, a homemade meal, romantic gestures. But Lindsey was constantly walking on eggshells. 

“I wanted out, but I didn’t know how to do it.”

Then, Lindsey’s mom surprised her with a girls’ trip to Vegas for her 30^th birthday, which ended up being a turning point. “Something happened at home and James was psycho-dialing me the entire trip. He just wanted to ruin it for me.” Lindsey knew her marriage was over. 

“I couldn’t do it anymore.” She told James and, surprisingly, he seemed to take the news OK. Lindsey moved into the guest room. She began staying out late to avoid her husband. But one night, she came home to find him drunk and livid.

“He kept coming in [the guest room] all night long, yelling in my face drill-sergeant style, while I tried to sleep. He took my keys and wallet so I couldn’t leave. He broke my phone so I couldn’t call for help. He screamed at me all night long.”

When he finally passed out, Lindsey saw her chance. She hurriedly packed a bag, gathered up the pieces of her destroyed phone and left for a friend’s house. She took a risk, knowing her husband could easily find her. She jumped at every knock of the door, fearing he had come to retaliate. 

She stayed with a friend for a few weeks and gave James money to put down a deposit on an apartment so he would move out and she could move back in, alone. But for months, James would break into her house, leave creepy notes, destroy her belongings. When she changed the locks, he broke down the door. She called police and filed a report, but it did nothing. He stole her dog. (Lindsey says he eventually returned her.) He cleared out their mutual bank account. Lindsey says she couldn’t sleep. She lost 40 pounds.

It took several months after the 2007 divorce and Lindsey moving to the West coast, but James’s stalking stopped. After eight years of his abuse, Lindsey was free. But as she settled into a new life, James did too, with a woman named Robin* that he married just six months after his divorce with Lindsey was finalized. Lindsey found this out when James texted her. Things are just so good you wouldn’t even recognize me, he told her. 

Lindsey would find out only a few months later that James was abusing his new wife, too. She got a message from a mutual friend who knew Robin, asking on her behalf if James had ever abused Lindsey. She said he had, but that she couldn’t talk to Robin about it. She was too scared of retaliation. 

“To this day, I’m haunted by that choice,” Lindsey says. 

It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2013, when she got a strange call. An employee of an animal shelter in another state said they had her dog. The dog she used to own with her ex, the microchip still under her name, had run out the house after her ex-husband and his new wife were taken to the hospital.

Lindsey knew immediately: “Something had gone very, very wrong. A quick Google search confirmed it—Robin had shot him. In the face.”

Robin* met James* when he was technically still married to his first wife. That could have been a red flag, but the way James described Lindsey made her sound “crazy,” says Robin, and she had no reason not to believe this man who came off as charming and chivalrous.

“You’d never think he was a monster on the inside,” Robin remembers. “Then again, he’s had lots of years of practice.” 

Many survivors attest to the fact that abusers often start their abusive behaviors so slowly, so innocuously, that it’s easy to miss the initial red flags. This is how abusers entrap victims, just as James did to Robin and the woman before her. 

Robin was in her early 30s, had just gone through a divorce herself and had a 12-year-old son. She knew of James—they grew up in the same small Arkansas town—but they’d never really talked before. As soon as they did, things moved fast— he relied on love-bombing Robin to win her over.

Everything seemed OK until about three weeks after Robin and James said their vows. The couple was grocery shopping together and Robin wanted to buy whipped cream for a pie she was making. 

“He didn’t like whipped cream,” Robin says. He was angry she’d even suggest such an idea and yelled at her to “shut her smart mouth” in the middle of the store. Then he pushed her right into the store racks and walked out of the store, driving away in their car. 

“He left me there for hours.”

Robin thought maybe it was just PTSD. He had told her he was in the Marines a long time ago, and it was rough on him. 

“In reality, I found out he never even deployed,” she says. 

James’s physical abuse only escalated from there. Robin internalized all of it. “I went through this phase of, if only I could be a better wife. Then it was, if only I can just get through this week.”

James’s favorite thing to do, says Robin, was to strangle her until she passed out, ominously whispering “night night” as she lost consciousness. He also liked to humiliate her, one time pushing her face-first into a salad she was eating. Another time, he threw her up against the wall so hard he broke her tailbone.

“I had to stand at work all day long for the next six weeks because I couldn’t sit down from the pain,” she remembers. “You start to judge your own sanity and question your every decision. Like, how could I have picked this person to marry?”

James heavily gaslighted Robin throughout their marriage, constantly telling her certain events as she remembered them never happened, or that people said the exact opposite of what they really said, like the time he tried to convince her the marriage counselor they saw together had blamed his abuse on Robin.

“You just get tired of the everyday mind battles. I think it was just as traumatizing as the physical abuse. At least the physical abuse wasn’t all day, every day like the gaslighting.”

Robin grew up in a loving family. She never imagined she would become the target of an abusive husband. She tried desperately to hide what she was going through. Reporting to her job as a Realty Management Coordinator at Wal-Mart’s home office in Rogers, Ark., she layered on the makeup to hide the bruised eyes and split lips. 

One day, Robin’s friends showed up at her home with a U-Haul trailer and a shotgun, hoping to get her out. “I still didn’t go,” she says. “I thought, I’m not the one doing anything wrong. He should leave! Looking back, that was idiotic thinking.”

She filed a police report against her husband, but it had little effect. As James’ abuse continued, it dawned on her. “It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do. It [abuse] was going to happen. When he got to the explosive part of his abusive cycle, he was going to beat me, period.”

She recalls the day she went into work without makeup, the violence of home written all over her face, her last cry for help. Luckily, someone noticed. 

“Wal-Mart brought in a domestic violence counselor to help make an escape plan,” she remembers. But the plan was the furthest she could get. It wasn’t as easy to put it into action. Most survivors are trapped by more than one barrier to leaving—they’re being brainwashed, manipulated, threatened into staying. They know their lives are most at risk when they finally break free from the abuser’s control.

She began stashing away money in preparation for leaving, rerouting some of her paycheck into another account. She told her husband she was bringing home less because their health insurance premium had gone up. Her son, now 17, was going to graduate in less than two years, and that’s when they would leave. She would rent the two of them an apartment. 

“I felt like I could handle his abuse for two years.”

It was the morning after Thanksgiving, 2013, and Robin was due at work. James was especially heated that day, she remembers. “He had this demeanor that was scary. He was feral.”

She decided to go into work early to get away from him, but as she started heading down the highway, she saw his Jeep driving behind her. She pulled into a parking lot near her office, unsure of what to do. She didn’t want him to follow her to the entrance of her building and cause a scene. She decided to call her boss and say she couldn’t make it in to work. She turned around and headed home. 

“He’s calling me nonstop,” she says of her ex-husband, who was still following her. When she looked down at her phone to turn it off, she rear-ended the car in front of her. The damage was minor, but the police came to the scene. Robin knew her husband was nearby.

“I was just shaking. Everything inside of me was screaming out, please! Help me! If there’s anything you can do, help me!” But she was too afraid to say it out loud. There had only been one time previously that she’d called the police on her abusive husband. After filing the report, a detective called James at work and told him what Robin had done. 

 “I called the detective and said, ‘this beating’s on you,” Robin remembers. 

On this day, Robin was especially terrified to go home. She knew James would be waiting. Walking into the house, she ordered her son to go to his room. She went to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. 

“He walked in and hit me in the face,” says Robin. “It was more humiliating than painful.”

Then he picked up his wife and threw her into the bedroom where Robin’s head struck the footboard of the bed. She doesn’t remember if it was a kick or a punch, but she was hit in the stomach so hard she couldn’t breathe. She begged James to give her a second to catch her breath before continuing his beating. She looked over and saw a hatbox underneath her desk nearby. 

“That’s the last thing I remember.”

Doctors would tell her later about dissociative amnesia, a type of memory loss that can occur in moments of high-stress or trauma. Sometimes the memories come back, but in pieces. Later, through her husband’s accounts of events and her own memories returning slowly, she’d find out what she did. Hiding in the hatbox that day was her gun. A small .22 pistol she had hidden there months earlier, just in case. 

“Apparently, I crawled to the hatbox, got my gun and shot him in the face. I don’t have any visual memory of this. I just remember sitting in the bedroom and thinking, “Why is he talking funny?”

But the bullet didn’t kill him—it went into his jaw and out underneath his ear. And it didn’t stop him—he went for his gun. She screamed for her son to call 911 and to run and get help. Her next memory is of being in the kitchen where her brain told her to do something drastic. 

“All he wanted to do for five years,” says Robin of her ex-husband, “was kill me. Every time he threatened it, he would get this wicked smirk of a grin. It was evil. I thought, I’m not going to let him have that final say over how I die. At that moment, I decided that he would never have control over me again.”

So Robin stabbed herself in the neck with a knife. 

“I don’t remember feeling anything. I pulled the knife out and just waited.”

She knows it doesn’t make logical sense. 

“I think my brain was misfiring and shutting down because of the trauma from that day and the accumulated trauma from years of abuse and strangulations.”

She spent a week in the ICU, then voluntarily checked into the psychiatric ward. “I knew I needed help,” she says. She was diagnosed with PTSD, dissociative amnesia, major depressive disorder and severe panic attack disorder. After she was released from the hospital, she went to a woman’s shelter. Her son was staying with her parents. Her husband, now recovered, had also been released from the hospital. 

“I honestly thought that, maybe once this blew over, I could go back to work and start my life over.” She knew that wouldn’t be the case when she spotted herself on TV at the shelter. 

“On the news, they said police were looking for me, and that I should be considered armed and dangerous.” Only, Robin was at the women’s shelter police had sent her to.

“Throughout this TV interview with the detective, pictures of our wedding and us at the shooting range were being shown on the screen, pictures provided to the police by James. I knew I was already judged guilty by most of the general public.”

 She called a friend who worked as an attorney who notified police that she would turn herself in. The detective who’d informed her husband a month prior that Robin had filed a police report for abuse was now at the shelter, arresting her. 

She was taken to jail. 

“What was surprising about jail was that about a third of the women there were there for the same thing,” she says. They were survivors who had fought back against an abuser. “There was a girl there with staples down the back of her head and they had arrested her for scratching [her abuser].” 

Robin would end up spending three months in jail before her attorney was able to lower her bail from $250,000 to $50,000, allowing her to bond out. After 16 months of court hearings, Robin had run out of money and, frankly, run out of fight. She took a plea deal. Her previous criminal record consisted of two speeding tickets, but now, she was a convicted felon, sentenced to 10 years of probation. It’ll be up in 2025.

James was never arrested. 

Today, at 46, she’s still trying to process everything that happened. “I go from upset to angry to depressed. I have a degree in political science that I can’t use. No one’s going to hire a convicted felon. Now, I clean houses.”

She says she’s also grateful because she got out, “and that’s something a lot of women in similar situations never get the chance to say.”

She’s seen her ex-husband once, when he showed up to her parents’ house where she was staying with her son after getting out of jail. 

“My heart just stopped. He took one step toward me and I held up my hand for him to stop. I told him, ‘If I ever see you again, I’ll finish what I started that day.’ I’ve never seen him again.”

Her probation officer reminds her to “stay out of trouble,” she says. “Self-defense is not getting into trouble. It’s just another dig. Once you’re a felon, this is how you’re looked at.” 

She sees a therapist every month. For a while, she did therapy together with her son. He’s 24 now holds a steady job, but still deals with some “residual emotional scars,” Robin says, which he sees a therapist for. “That’s where my guilt comes in … because of what this did to him.”

Before Robin had even got out of jail, James had moved in with Kristina**, soon to become his third wife. She was pregnant with twins. (** Name changed for safety.)

Four years later, in 2019, Robin would testify against him on his new wife’s behalf so she could get an order of protection. 

“She reached out to me on Facebook,” Robin says of Kristina. “I knew it was only a matter of time before he started abusing her and that knowledge made me sick to my stomach, so I was proud of her when she reached out to me. I was determined to do anything and everything I could possibly do to make sure her story did not end like mine.”

The two women would talk for hours, day and night, which both helped Robin and simultaneously triggered her own terror all over again. 

“I was terrified he would take out his anger on me over Kristina filing for divorce.” Robin was convinced he waited around every corner, ready to kill her like he’d promised a hundred times before. She sought therapy to help her process those feelings. 

Kristina also reached out to Lindsey, James’s first wife. Lindsey says it felt surreal when she got the message. This is probably crazy, but I just need to know if my babies and I are in danger, Kristina wrote.

Still wracked with guilt that she’d never responded to Robin, Lindsey says she responded now to Kristina. Yes, she says, you’re in danger.  

“She [Kristina] sent me this tape of her an audio conversation with him and it was the same circular arguments, the same exploding temper and this victimhood,” says Lindsey. “I thought, wow, this person has not changed at all. He did the same stuff to her he did to me.”

Through Kristina, all three women finally connected, starting a group text chain, something that still continues today, along with a once-a-month call. Robin and Lindsey say that hearing about the other women’s experiences is retraumatizing to an extent, but also validating. And, in many ways, healing.

“Robin’s fixing up her back yard and has a new spa. I’ve been gardening a lot. This is what we talk about,” says Lindsey with a quiet laugh. “I call them sister wives.”  

“We are each other’s support team, confidant, advocate, friend and soul sister,” says Robin.

The three women have never met in person. It’s a club they don’t want any other women to join, for obvious reasons. But Lindsey says she knows James is using a dating app. Sometimes he reaches out to her, pretending like they can chat like old friends. Lindsey doesn’t respond. 

Kristina was 33 and a single mom working in IT for a medical clinic when she met James through an online dating site. 

“I had been alone for a while and one of my coworkers convinced me to join. They said I needed a date and helped me set it up. James was one of the first people I spoke to.”

She was surprised by how much they had in common. Practically everything. 

“I’m a geek,” she says with a laugh. “A gamer. I like alternative music, and this is a country music place,” she says of her small Texas town. James, too, apparently liked sci-fi culture and video games, which was immediately appealing. 

Looking back, she recognizes he was grooming her, parroting her every like as his own. She missed it, she says, calling herself a “naïve trusting person” with a “small-town mentality.”

“I’ve never really had exposure to anything other than good kind people.”

James was upfront about the fact that he’d recently been shot by his second wife, Robin. That was in November 2013. Kristina met him the following May, 2014.

“He gave me this whole sob story that his alcoholic ex-wife, who he wanted to help more than anything and whose son he loved more than anything, how, when he tried to get her help, shot him in the face.

Kristina says, “It hurt my heart that this man loved this woman and kid and it had gone so badly.” She had no reason to doubt his side of the story in the beginning, especially after he sent her links to news articles about the incident, which failed to mention any details of domestic violence. 

“It doesn’t say that it was self-defense. It doesn’t say anything other than, basically, Robin shot him,” remembers Kristina. 

James told her that Robin was in prison and that he was afraid for when she got out, that she might come and kill him. He told Kristina he had PTSD. He also said he’d “never really experienced love.”

“Coming from a dysfunctional family myself, I thought, I could love him better.”

Later, her boss would tell her, fixer-uppers are for cars, not for people. 

“I think that’s a very good bit of advice we should all take to heart.”

In the beginning, “Everything was just really fun,” she says of their relationship. James started coming over to her house frequently—he had moved in with his parents after the shooting— and seemed genuinely devoted to bonding with Kristina’s then-9-year-old daughter. 

“He showered her with adoration and attention,” she says, though in hindsight, she recognizes it as love-bombing, a term she didn’t know then. 

She started having high hopes that her and James would work out. After two failed marriages, Kristina was ready to find that “hopelessly romantic love” she says she knew must exist. 

“Less than six months later, we got pregnant. It wasn’t necessarily on purpose, but if it happened, it happened.” Eight weeks in, they were told it was identical twins. Kristina was over the moon, but she says something changed in her once-devoted boyfriend. 

“He let his mask start to slip a little bit. He began getting really frustrated, really angry, easily. I chalked it up to the stress.”

James was unemployed, waiting for his disability claim to go through after the shooting, and the couple didn’t know what they’d do for money once the babies were born and Kristina had to take an extended leave from her job. 

“I began pressing him to look for a job—anything we could do to save money—and I would get frustrated that he just didn’t seem to have any desire to help with that.”

When she was four months into the pregnancy, James moved in. Kristina paid all the bills while James stayed home, spending copious amounts of her money on things like computers, video games and clothes. Even when Kristina was relegated to bedrest near the end of her pregnancy to prevent complications before birth, James wouldn’t care for her. She still had to get up and make food, do the laundry and dishes, and pick up her daughter from school. 

James was approved for disability two weeks before she delivered, but it didn’t ease the tension. When he got mad at Kristina, he’d throw things in the house.

“He didn’t actually put his hands on me,” she says, “but he’d get close and block me with his body to keep me from leaving.”

When the twins were six weeks old, Kristina booked a cabin as a getaway for her, James and the kids. One evening, she left James with the babies while she and her daughter ran to the store. But when the GPS in her car malfunctioned, they found themselves lost. It was two hours later, nearly 10 p.m., when they walked through the cabin door to fussy babies and an irate James. 

“My daughter went to bed and as soon as she shut the door, he just lost his mind,” says Kristina. “He pulled out his gun and said he was going to kill himself.” Kristina went for the phone to call the police, but before she could dial, she saw James go outside. He threw himself down a nearby embankment. When he stood up, his clothes and hair a mess, it appeared like he’d been in a fight. 

“Go ahead and call the police,” he challenged her. “I’ll tell them what you did to me.”

That’s when Kristina knew she needed to formulate an escape plan. When they got home, she reached out to a friend who worked at a domestic violence shelter. Surprisingly, her friend was expecting the call—she had been waiting for Kristina to come to terms with the fact that James was abusive. 

“I was floored. It was literally to the point where I was convinced I was the crazy one,” says Kristina, before she started googling words like “gaslighting” and “narcissist.” When she landed on the latter, she found herself glued to the computer for nearly three nights straight while James slept. 

“I thought, oh my god, this makes sense! I called my friend on the way to work and just cried and cried. I realized… I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.”

One barrier Kristina faced was that she relied on James to care for their twins while she worked and was unsure how to leave him when she couldn’t afford daycare. At the same time, she knew he wasn’t doing much more than keeping the children alive during the day. She eventually installed cameras in her house and saw James lock himself in the toddlers’ bedroom, falling asleep on the floor of the room while they entertained themselves. 

She says she soon felt herself on the verge of a nervous breakdown, working up to 20 hours a day and dealing with the tumultuous homelife. When his mom passed away, James abuse ramped up.

“He would say the most terrible things. [In the car], he once turned to my 2-year-old baby girl and screamed in her face, ‘Shut up, stupid!’ It was all I could to not open up the door to the minivan and push him out the door.”

She also found out he was talking to other women online, trying to garner sympathy. He would tell them he couldn’t speak because he was shot. 

“When we were home, he could yell at me just fine,” says Kristina.

While she was at work, James would often try to pick fights by texting her repeatedly, sometimes upwards of a few hundred times a day. Kristina decided she couldn’t take it anymore. After safety planning with her friend at the shelter, she put her plan into place. She told her friend she was going to end it with James and if her friend didn’t hear from her in an hour to call 911. 

“I told James, ‘Your anger is not my responsibility. And I’m done. I’m out of empathy for you.’ He just kept screaming, ‘My mother just died!’” He threw his e-cigarette at Kristina’s head. He went outside, picked up a porch chair and flipped it over. He accused Kristina of cheating, which was a common accusation. Kristina ran inside the house, locked the door and called the local sheriff’s department. By the time they arrived to her rural home, James was gone. 

“The officer said, ‘Well, there ain’t no blood on you,’ and wouldn’t help me,” remembers Kristina. “I was hysterical, sobbing, with my small children at home, terrified he’d come back and kill me.” She had recorded their earlier fight, for evidence. The officer refused to listen to it, telling her it was a civil matter, not a criminal one. 

Distraught, Kristina says she reached out to a former friend of James that night, via social media. She told him what was going on. He connected her with Robin, James’ ex-wife who had shot him. He also gave her Lindsey’s number, James’ first wife. 

“I made a group text and said, I’m really scared. I just need to know the truth.’ They both told me, ‘You’re in danger. You need to be careful.’ It was instant.”

From there, the three women began to form a bond. 

The next day, Kristina took her children to her mom’s house in Houston some 250 miles away—she had to fly to a work conference that had been booked months prior. James tried to apologize via text for the evening prior and said he was going to get help. Except he didn’t get help—he reported Kristina’s mom for kidnapping his children. Police came looking for them at the church where Kristina’s mom worked as a preacher. 

“I told her to go to a hotel. I flew home at 2 a.m., got my kids and went to a friend’s house and hid.”

Her boss gave Kristina a gun. She filed for an order of protection. She didn’t go to work for three weeks. Finally, she had her day in court. 

“I pulled out all of this evidence [of abuse]—phone calls, threats he’d made, a Facebook post where he showed woman getting hit by a bus and saying, ‘This is going to be you.’” But the judge was hesitant to rule against James, Kristina says. “James was a former Marine and I had purple hair. That made me a horrible mother. I was under fire the minute I walked into that courtroom.”

Robin was willing to give Kristina evidence from her court case to use against James. “She met me in the middle of the night to bring me the box. She was so empathetic. I could tell that her heart was just broken.” She told Kristina that she’d wanted to warn her about James so badly, but that James had blocked her on all social media. 

Still, James was never charged with domestic violence. Two years of court hearings and custody battles ensued. The first year, James was granted supervised visitation with the twins, every other Sunday. The second year, Kristina ran out of money trying to fight for sole custody, even after taking a second mortgage out on her house. James wanted a jury trial, but it cost $50,000, which she didn’t have. 

“I had to give him everything he wanted. He gets them two weekends a month.”

She says she fell into a “very, very dark place” sending her kids to James the first year, in 2020. “I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, just cried.”

She started going to counseling at her local domestic violence shelter and doing EMDR therapy, which helped. Her night terrors dissipated. She’s still always worried, though, that he’ll hurt her children. 

“The girls idolize him. I’ve never spoken ill of him. I can hear the things that he’s groomed them to say. He has them ask me why we’re not together. That’s hard. I feel like they’ll see through that eventually.”

James still tries to tell Kristina he loves her and wants them to try again, even though she’s in a new relationship now. She commiserates with Robin and Lindsey, the only two who really know what she’s going through.

“Whenever James gets drunk, he sends all three of us the same email,” says Kristina with a laugh. “It just helps to know it’s coming in all directions. It helps me feel like I’m not crazy.”

If you're experiencing abuse or think you might be, there is help for you. Use our Get Help tool or Hope Chat in the bottom corner of your screen to find a domestic violence advocate in your area who can help. Advocates have experience dealing with abuse and are familiar with resources available to assist you.