I recently had a tweet about domestic violence go viral. I’ve gotten questions about why I stayed for so long, and, more importantly, how I escaped.
I realized that it could be helpful if I put together an outline of how I was able to run, with my child. My story has many unusual elements, but I think the general mechanisms of abuse will be familiar to many.
This was the tweet in question, and I think it perfectly illustrates the irrational nature of DV. DV = life in a hall of funhouse mirrors, where your sense of reality is constantly being altered.
PLEASE NOTE: Statistically, leaving is the most dangerous time for a person experiencing DV.
When the ultimate goal is control, an escape = total loss of control. There is a very twisted “bond” that usually exists in these relationships, a dark matrix, and one person breaking free can plunge the other person into a state of lunacy.
THIS IS WHY WE DON’T SAY, “JUST LEAVE.” INSTEAD, WE LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN. “IF YOU DECIDE YOU NEED TO GET OUT, I WILL BE THERE, LET ME KNOW.” MY FRIENDS DID THIS. IT SAVED MY LIFE.
Furthermore, leaving is never the first step. First you go through the trials and tribulations of realizing that you cannot stay.
Because abusers are controlling, they create a kind of “infrastructure” around your mind. It’s like prison. You’ve been told over and over, what a piece of garbage you are, so you don’t think you can be in charge of yourself, and the idea of facing the future on your own terms can be absolutely, pants-shittingly terrifying.
Remember Shawshank Redemption, and how confused and upset Red was when he first got out? Freedom can mess you up at first, because your life is now on you.
This can be a reason why some people go back. That’s on top of the hopefully understandable problem with finances. If the abuser controls the finances/assets — going back can be the difference between sleeping outside and sleeping at home.
My story is not a story of courage. I WAS STUPID AND LUCKY. I HAD HELP.
And you will see how and why:
Step One: Realizing I fucked up.
My son was the best decision I ever made. Saying “yes” to his father was the worst.
Crucially, I was assaulted in between our first meeting and our first date.
I was in deep denial after the assault, perpetrated by a friend I looked up to. The fact that I fell into a relationship with a man who would go on to bounce my head off a wall if he decided that my smile at a waiter was too warm for his liking is not surprising.
I had to accept that I made a mistake.
Step Two: Realizing I fucked up more than once.
I had the perfect opportunity to run in 2014, when Russia first attacked my native country of Ukraine. We were living and working in horrible Moscow, and had been for several years. Nobody would’ve judged me. I was being hassled by FSB douches. Dmitry Kiselyov, then Russia’s chief propagandist, told a colleague he had me “on a list.” My marriage and life were out of control. Filthy Russians were killing my compatriots.
Finances were a big reason as to why I stayed. My then husband’s financial decisions had put me into serious peril. Then he came into an inheritance, got some help for his drinking, and told me he wanted a “fresh start.”
Another thing that kept me in place was this: My then husband and I were working on our second documentary. The first one, an arthouse project about rural poverty, had been a success, netting us some prizes. The new project explored the world of shamans and gurus. I was the producer, very involved with filming. And I unwittingly let a guru hypnotize me as part of an on-camera experiment.
It induced terrifying visions. I don’t remember most of it, but I remember waking up, screaming in a bathroom as water ran down the drain. The guru who did this then told me, “Now do you see, why you can’t leave your husband, and why no one will love you like he loves you? You have so much darkness in you.”
There was one person on set that day who did not agree with what was done. He was a shaman, his name was Yura, he wore a Metallica tank top and had come from Siberia. When I was drinking green tea at the end of the filming day, my teeth chattering, Yura put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “What happened today was unethical. You’re not full of darkness, you’re brave, you’re a lion. Your husband does not know you’re a lion. This will be useful to you some day.”
Thank you, Yura. Your words echoed for me later. I hope you didn’t get conscripted.
Step Three: The moment I came to my goddamn senses.
Fast forward to 2017. We’re still a family, if you can call it that. I work like a horse. My husband’s outbursts are infrequent, but terrifying.
In the spring of 2017, we travel from Kyiv to Moscow in order to finish some of my husband’s filming projects.
We had been staying with my father in my beautiful native Kyiv. My father’s strength and authority kept my husband quiet. My father hated Moscow. He hated my situation. I should’ve listened to you, dad, when you told me not to go.
In Moscow, all hell breaks loose. Away from my father, my husband is drinking again, and having doubts about his career. I am the more successful one, even the unethical guru who hypnotized me says as much (think of me as a golden egg-laying goose). Doubts = rages.
One night, I wake up to the sound of my child screaming, “Daddy, you’re hurting me.” I run into his room. My husband is drunk and tossing my little boy around like a rag doll and trying to choke him. I try to pry the kid away. I get thrown into a wall. I get up. I try again. I get thrown much harder this time, but I hear a phone clattering. I grab the phone, crawl under the bed, and scream that I am calling the police. He stops, as if switched off. He shambles off to bed. I hold my crying son in my arms, and try to get him to sleep
The police will be useless by then. Russia has decriminalized DV. Crossing the border as an American woman with my kid in tow might mean getting stopped.
But the scales have fallen from my eyes. I know, in the deepest part of myself, that my marriage is over. For years, I had absorbed my husband’s rage and violence, but now he has come for the child. This is the turning point.
And what the hell am I doing in this godforsaken place anyway? I ask myself as I rock my boy to sleep. I am in the den of the enemy. How foolish have I been?
My husband asks for forgiveness in the morning, as he often does. I pretend to forgive. But a pocket of silence has opened up inside me, and is growing bigger. All the things I do not say are stored there. Things like: “This is unforgivable.” “There is no going back.”
Step Four: Getting the paperwork done.
A few days after the attack on my child, we make it to the U.S. Embassy. I let the Marines on duty distract the boy while I fill out paperwork for a new passport for him. I am in pieces. It’s hard to write. My hands are shaking. They don’t feel like they belong to me.
Should I have told embassy staff what was happening? Maybe. Or maybe not. They hadn't been very helpful the night a Russian businessman with beef tried to pay off a bunch of cops to try to detain me years earlier. Diplomacy makes things complicated. I don’t risk it.
Step Five: Leaving to the U.S., then coming back.
I have to convince my husband that I can travel back to the United States and return without running off. I had made those trips before, but his attack on the child has changed things between us. He senses that gears are turning in my head.
So I make one more trip, to see a dear friend in New York, one of those friends who has left the door open. “Get the kid and yourself here, you’ll have a place to stay, we’ll figure out the rest” is what she tells me on this trip. This is crucial. I know I have backup.
While I’m gone, my brother-in-law and nanny are supposed to be making sure that my son is safe. Things go sideways when I’m headed to JFK and get a call from my brother-in-law: My husband had wandered off, taking our son to a party with some actors, got drunk, and broke his face open on the pavement outside. My son was terrified. Some random women helped them.
I am furious and guilty. Years later, I tell my son of the plan, and how it went tits up. I ask for his forgiveness.
When I get back to accursed Moscow, my husband opens the door with one side of his face completely swollen up. He is contrite: “Babe, I made a mistake. This will never happen again.”
When I get to my son’s room, he says, “Mommy, please don’t ever leave me alone with daddy again.” It is May. It is snowing outside. I remember watching that snow spiraling down, knowing what I had to do, and how I had to push my guilt to the side for now, how we will deal with all of this later, the important thing is a clean break.
Step Six: Leaving for Greece.
We have a place in Greece we bought at the height of the crisis (remember my husband’s inheritance? That and my money landed us a sweet deal).
Greece will be my waypoint. We have spent a few relatively quiet months in Moscow, aside from my husband telling a journalist friend of mine, then at the Wall Street Journal, that I enrage him and that he can’t decide if he wants to choke me to death or bash my head in. I get a phone call later. “Natalia, I don’t think he is joking.” I know. I know he is not joking.
Oh, and my husband gets arrested for public intoxication, but at that point in his life it’s so typical for him that it almost doesn’t matter.
I quietly tie up my loose ends in Moscow. I store some family antiques. I gather some crucial paperwork and hide it. I AM VERY LUCKY I AM GOOD AT HIDING THINGS.
Throughout this process, guilt haunts my every step. You will think I am insane, and I was insane. I loved my husband. We had a beautiful child together. We made beautiful art. We’ve danced on beaches and cried to Fellini together. His successful friends keep telling us what a “great couple” we are. They invoke Tolstoy: “He too had a bad marriage, but think of the art that was created!”
Fuck Tolstoy. And fuck them.
The official story is that we are going to stay at our Greek place for a few months. It’s not finished, but it’s livable. I pack light. I store the documents, my child’s new passport included, among my feminine hygiene products. It’s the last place he will look.
Step Seven: Getting him medicated.
We’re living on Crete, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in our unfinished apartment. I should leave soon, but a part of me is still figuring things out, including what to do about health insurance, work, my shattered heart, etc.
Meanwhile, clouds are gathering in Moscow. Kirill Serebrennikov, a colleague of my husband’s, is arrested on trumped up charges as pressure ramps up on the art world.
“I can’t go back now,” I tell my husband. “It is not safe for me to go back. The kid and I will go stay in the States for a while. It’s safer that way.”
My husband agrees, then suffers a psychotic break from reality. I wake up to him talking to his dead mother through a bathroom vent down the hall. I don’t know whether to grab the child and run into the street. I don’t know what to do. My husband comes back to the bedroom, white as a sheet. He claims there is music playing. There is no music. “I need help,” he says.
Few know what’s actually going on. Our social media looks as flawless as always. He insisted it be so. Appearances are important to his work, and his vision of control. On Instagram, we look like this:
I spend the last of my money on local psychiatrists and medications for him. This will prove to be life-saving, but I do not know it yet. My parents fly in from Kyiv. Another friend pays for one-way tickets through Athens for me and the child. My parents are very supportive of the idea that we should go stay in New York for a while. They know I am leaving.
Step Eight: The ride through the mountains
My father is urgently called back to work in Kyiv and cuts his trip short. On paper, everything looks fine. I am leaving with the child in a few days. My husband is medicated. He has agreed to this “temporary situation.” He is not drinking. Everything should be OK.
Everything is not OK. Nobody knows the extent of what my husband is capable of. I have not been honest, have I? To be truly honest is to admit how foolish I have been.
A few days after my dad leaves, my husband, my mother, and my son must travel by car from the south of Crete back to Chania. My flight is the very next day.
We are deep in the mountains by the time I realize my husband has been drinking. He is behind the wheel. I do not know where he got the bottle, where he hid it. Did he gulp it down when we stopped to get gas? I do not know.
He starts screaming when my mom and I both offer to drive. We are alone on a mountain road. He is behind the wheel. He is screaming. I put my hand gently on his shoulder. I speak calmly, as I often have. His hands are white on the steering wheel. I know what he wants to do. I speak calmly. My mother is in the back seat, holding the child to her chest. I keep speaking calmly.
We make it through the mountains. We get back home. He parks the car and passes out. I watch him, passed out in the driver’s seat. I have loved this man. I am leaving the next day.
Step Nine: He drives us to the airport.
My mother does not go. Maybe this was a mistake. He could have killed us on the road. Just swerved into oncoming traffic. He knows, in his heart, what I am really doing. He took his pills that morning, though. He is sober. I have loved this man. I have fought for this man. I watch his profile as he drives us to the airport.
When we’re saying goodbye at security, I break down. That’s when it hits me all at once: all of the good between us, all of the light that his violence had extinguished. Swimming under the stars in unoccupied Crimea, plankton glowing below us. The day our son was born. My husband thanking me from the stage as he accepted some award or other, his voice breaking, “I am here because of my wife, who saw me through.”
I am sobbing as if I am standing at the mouth of a grave. Everyone is looking, or trying not to look. I hug him one last time. The child hugs him one last time. I am screaming from the pain and the tears feel violent. I’m a sprinkler on a lawn. I think about the person I used to be, growing up in Carolina, running through those sprinklers, and I laugh as I sob, a ruined madwoman in a denim romper.
At the gate, I am a tear-stained corpse, holding my son tightly. Everyone stares. It’s a small airport. Everyone heard me wailing in the security line.
Something changes in me when the plane takes off from the island, heading to Athens. I watch the light changing in the cabin as it turns north over the smooth Mediterranean blue. It comes to me all at once, this unbearable, electric feeling of freedom. I am up in the air. He can’t snatch me out of here. I watch the light, holding my son.
During our layover in Athens, I polish off a very difficult piece about the assault that eventually led to my disastrous marriage for Vox. I must keep working, I tell myself, watching my glass of water shake in my hand.
On the flight into Newark, a kindly Emirates flight attendant snaps a polaroid of me and my son. I look like death. I have died. Now my life can begin again.
Step 10: Staying away.
In the months that followed, yes, there was temptation to go back.
Yura the shaman’s words kept coming back to me. My friends watched over me and fed me and provided for me and my child.
I remember sitting on a counter in a beautiful Manhattan kitchen, saying things like, “But it wasn’t all bad. We had good times too!”
A stylish gay lawyer in a nice shirt, a friend of a friend, looked at me with sympathy. “Babe, that’s how it works. The good times keep you coming back. Until he kills you.”
I also had a recording I kept on my desktop. I put on headphones and listened to it whenever I felt down. It’s about 18 minutes or so of horror and filth.
My husband is ranting drunkenly about our nanny and the evils of the Russian government (his politics were never in question, oddly enough - but a lot of these guys have “the right kind” of politics) in the back of a taxi. I am trying to calm him down.
The recording ends when we exit the taxi, he rants a little more on the sidewalk, then violently throws me to the ground. I sound like a yelping animal. Every time I missed him, I forced myself to listen to that recording.
I sent it to friends of his who were insisting I go back, or at least let him see the child.
I sent it to people who had previously pored over my Instagram and tried to make a case that I was cheating on my husband with Ukrainian soldiers (lol, maybe I should have!)
I made many mistakes on my journey to rebuild. I had many setbacks. It’s an imperfect and improbable life. It is also mine. No one owns me. I am free. Only the free know how to love.
Epilogue
My divorce was finalized in late 2019. Today, my ex lives outside of Russia, but still far away from us. He ran shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has received a fair bit of medical help. We stay in touch about real estate matters, though my son does not wish to communicate with his biological father in any way, a decision I support. My ex knows I do not wish to be in his physical presence again, certainly not without a bodyguard or two. He knows that I will always own a gun.
Abuse is messy and weird. It is often not a linear story. The best you can do for someone experiencing abuse is to reserve judgment and leave the door open, as stated above. It’s what saved my life. It has saved the lives of others.
If you’re interested in how assault can impact our judgment, I highly recommend Richard Gadd’s “Baby Reindeer.”
“I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” - Red, Shawshank Redemption.
Natalia, I am in awe of your strength and fearlessness. Your story will save lives. ❤️🥰🌻