Hasta La Gadget!

As a purveyors of supposedly factual content, it’s the job of science journalists to make sure we’re accurate about how bad things like trans fats actually are. A whole lot of our fellow fact-farters seem to have dropped the ball on that one this week.

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A just-released report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) reveals that, once again, the “serious people” in Washington are weaponizing shoddy, inaccurate data to stoke false claims about Social Security. The CAP report exposes The Washington Post’s misuse of data to inflate the numbers of working-age Americans receiving Social Security disability insurance benefits.

The Post sensationally – and inaccurately – claimed, in a recent front-page story entitled, “Disabled, or just desperate?”, that as many as one in three working-age Americans living in the nation’s rural communities are turning to disability benefits as a form of unemployment insurance. As CAP’s close analysis of the underlying data uncovered, the Post’s outrageous claim overcounts, by literally millions, the numbers of working-age adults receiving disability benefits. The end result is an inaccurate, over-the-top depiction of a supposed disability crisis in rural America that gives opponents of Social Security the justification and arguments they have been looking for to advocate cuts to Social Security.

The Post’s false claims are just the latest in a slew of ongoing attempts to attack Social Security by singling out its earned disability insurance protections. Recently, President Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, publicly questioned whether Social Security’s protection against lost wages in the event of disability is even part of Social Security. The claim is part of his admitted campaign to convince his boss, Donald Trump, to break his promise not to cut Social Security. Soon after, The Washington Post released its now-discredited article, which implied that Social Security’s earned benefits were creating a culture of dependency and despair in the nation’s rural communities. Unfortunately, this story, part of a barely-concealed Post vendetta against Social Security, is only the opening salvo in what will be a series of articles.

Not content with a serial, longform attack on those collecting their earned Social Security benefits, the Post’s Editorial Board used the error-riddled article as an excuse for an editorial calling for vague reforms (that is, benefit cuts) to these vital, but inadequately modest Social Security benefits. Their justification? The following non-sequitur: “[T]he nation’s long-term economic potential depends on making sure work pays for all those willing to work.” Willingness is irrelevant in the case of disability: As explained below, workers can only receive Social Security disability benefits if they are found to be incapable of working in any sustained way.

And Mulvaney, in his quest to cut Social Security, is repeating the zombie lie that Social Security’s disability insurance protection “is one of the fastest growing programs that we have. It’s become effectively a long-term unemployment, permanent unemployment program.” Yet Social Security’s disability insurance is not growing. And again, unemployment is beside the point. Benefits are granted only to those who are found to be incapable of working enough to support themselves.

These attacks on Social Security are not new. Targeting Social Security’s disability protections is a long-favored tactic of opponents of Social Security who seek to employ a divide-and-conquer strategy: They use myths and misinformation about Social Security’s disability protection — which is not a separate program, but an inextricable component of Social Security’s wage insurance — to seek to pit retired workers against workers with disabilities and create divisions that distract the American people from their real goal of dismantling Social Security altogether. These myths include false claims that working families’ earned disability protection is draining money from retirees; that it is rife with fraud; and (as the Post and Mulvaney both recently claimed), that it is simply an unemployment program for Americans who could actually work, but are lazy freeloaders.

All of these incendiary claims are flat-out false. All of Social Security’s earned benefits are intertwined and interconnected. Indeed, there are people with disabilities receiving retirement and survivor benefits; likewise, there are disabled workers’ nondisabled children receiving disability benefits. Like all of Social Security, its disability insurance is extremely well-managed, with much lower administrative costs and much lower incidence of fraud than is found in counterpart private-sector insurance.

Contrary to the slanderous charge that Mulvaney and the Washington Post have recently made, Social Security’s disability insurance is not some sort of unemployment program that provides relief to those who could actually work, but choose to receive subsistence-level disability benefits instead. In fact, the United States has some of the strictest eligibility standards for receiving disability benefits in the developed world: Applicants must prove not only that they have a severe disability that is likely to last at least a year or end in death, but also that their disability leaves them unable to perform, in any sustained way, any job available — regardless of such factors as the actual availability of these jobs in their communities or whether employers will even hire workers with disabilities.

Moreover, the process for receiving Social Security’s earned disability insurance benefits is long and arduous, with exacting requirements of submissions of medical and other information, multiple checks and months-long delays. Workers with disabilities, who, by definition, are incapable of supporting themselves from paid work have very little financial security as they navigate the long and difficult process. Indeed, their conditions often worsen by the end of the process. Moreover, only four out of every ten applications for disability insurance benefits are ultimately approved. Some applicants die; others are unable to satisfy the very stringent criteria. Indeed, many of those not approved nevertheless never work again, because their disabilities are so severe.

It is outrageous for the Trump administration and the Washington Post to imply that so many of our fellow Americans are lazy con artists who merely seek to escape work — and for such limited reward. Given that the average annual benefit for a worker with a disability is just over $14,000, it is difficult to imagine, as Mulvaney and the Post have claimed, that those with disabilities who could actually work would choose to go through such an arduous process in the hopes of obtaining a benefit not much above the poverty line.

Nor are the numbers of Social Security disability insurance beneficiaries growing, much less at a shocking or unsustainable rate, as Mulvaney and the Post have wrongly claimed. Indeed, the recent growth in disability insurance beneficiaries, which has now begun to reverse, has been due to well-known and long-expected demographic factors, including the increase in the number of workers, especially women, who work in paid employment and are thus earning Social Security’s insurance protections, along with a large number of workers aging into their prime disability years, and receiving disability insurance a year longer due to the increase in Social Security’s full retirement age. (Once workers reach full retirement age, they, without even knowing it, automatically stop receiving disability benefits and seamlessly start receiving retirement benefits.)

After adjusting for these factors, the percentage of the working age population receiving disability insurance benefits has increased only modestly, from 3.1 percent in 1980 to 4.5 percent in 2011. Not surprisingly, as many Baby Boomers have aged out of their 50’s and early 60’s — prime disability years – and into their retirement years, the numbers of those receiving disability insurance benefits has stabilized, as expected, and begun to decline. This is hardly the crisis the Post has sought to depict.

These slanderous claims about Social Security’s disability insurance are not simply an attack on the people who receive benefits, or the way that benefits are administered. Rather, they are an attack on all Americans. Disability can—and does—happen to all of us, regardless of age, gender, race or ethnicity, our level of education, or our wealth. Anyone can be severely and permanently disabled by a drunken driver or a life-threatening illness. Indeed, it is a significant risk. An estimated one in four of today’s 20-year-olds will experience a severe and work-ending disability before reaching full retirement age. And because few working-age Americans have access to employer-sponsored disability insurance, Social Security will be the most important, and often the only, source of protection for most of us against lost wages in the event of disability.

There are, to be sure, real challenges that policymakers should address— by increasing the amount of its dedicated revenue Social Security is allowed to spend on administration. First, because the Social Security Administration (SSA) has experienced significant cuts to its budget over the past six years, funding and staffing for determinations of disability have declined. As a result, the backlog of Americans awaiting a final decision on their eligibility has swelled to over 1.1 million, with an average waiting time of 19 months for a final decision. Moreover, Congress has increasingly directed more of SSA’s limited budget to target virtually nonexistent disability fraud, meaning that the agency is forced to wastefully spend money and resources that could be better spent handling disability applications and ensuring that workers aren’t forced to wait months on end in order to receive a final decision.

At base, when it comes to disability, the problem isn’t that too many people are receiving benefits, or that eligibility criteria are too lax, or, as the Post and Mulvaney have tried to claim, that benefits are disincentivizing people with disabilities from working. The problem is that benefits are too low. They should be expanded.

The truth is that policymakers and the media who oppose Social Security are willing to sow myths and misinformation about disability in order to cut protections that benefit all of us, and that we have earned. In contrast, the American people understand that all of Social Security’s protections, including its disability protections, are earned, and are vital to the wellbeing of all Americans. In the event of a severe and work-ending disability, Social Security will be the most important protection against lost wages that the vast majority of Americans can count on. Instead of proposing vague reforms and outright cuts to Social Security’s disability insurance, policymakers should listen to the American people and expand all of Social Security’s protections.

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The CEO of America’s largest bank made a startling announcement last week: His company has too much money, and he plans to throw away its profits on rich people.

He didn’t quite put it that way, of course. In his annual letter to shareholders, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon boasted about his company buying $25.7 billion of its own stock over the past five years, and hinted it could buy back another “big block of stock this year” to further boost share prices.

At their best, stock buybacks (also known as “share repurchases”) are essentially pointless. At their worst, buybacks drain resources from productive economic activity to provide a cheap high for Wall Street. Companies buy their own stock to raise the stock price: Removing shares from the market elevates the value of those that remain. Money is funneled from corporate coffers to shareholders.

Companies could, of course, do other things with their profits. They could raise pay for their employees or provide better benefits. They could develop new product ideas or upgrade old equipment to improve future production. The point of a company, after all, is not simply to generate and distribute cash, but to solve problems for society, or at least invent cool stuff that makes life more interesting and fun. This doesn’t have to be altruistic ― inventing awesome stuff raises stock prices when the awesome stuff sells.

Buybacks overwhelmingly benefit rich people. Less than 22 percent of Americans own $25,000 or more in stock, even through retirement accounts, according to research from New York University economist Edward N. Wolff. Those who own lots of stock are heavily concentrated at the top. More than 92.8 percent of households making at least $250,000 a year own at least $10,000 in stock, compared with just 19.1 percent of households earning between $25,000 and $49,999. Households in the top 1 percent receive an average of 36 percent of their income from capital gains (stocks, bonds and other financial investments), according to the Congressional Budget Office, while those in the lowest 20 percent receive an average of about 5 percent of their income this way.

Some of the wealthy people who benefit most from buybacks are corporate CEOs, who generally receive most of their compensation in stock.

To fuel the economy, banks don’t have to make or invent anything that people use. They just have to extend financing to people who want to make stuff, or to people who want to buy it. This isn’t charity ― banks earn big profits by lending. 

But sometimes they’d rather just buy their own stock. Since the financial crisis, the nation’s six largest banks have spent a combined $157.4 billion buying up their own stock, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo have spent over $36 billion each. All six of those banks declined to comment for this article.

Defenders of stock buybacks argue they can be a useful corporate strategy in a weak economy. If companies can’t find a market for their products, then placating investors through buybacks isn’t a terrible use of funds until the economy turns up. Big Bank buybacks don’t fit that pattern ― they’ve expanded tremendously during the last five years of economic recovery, nearly quadrupling from $10.6 billion in 2012 to $41.9 billion in 2016.

Dimon’s annual missives aren’t really for his shareholders ― they’re public political statements from America’s most prominent banker. In the latest edition, he noted that trillions of dollars in war spending, mass incarceration and the student debt explosion have damaged the economy. But while he didn’t offer specific policy remedies for those political problems, he did make recommendations on economic policy, arguing that excessive capital and liquidity regulations are tying up money his bank could deploy to put people to work.

Dimon called for weakening these rules, which require banks to rely on less debt and hold more cash in case of trouble. Maybe it’s true that not one dollar of the more than $9 billion JPMorgan spent on buybacks in 2016 could have gone toward making a good loan to a creditworthy business. But if so, weakening capital and liquidity rules won’t help banks get more money out the door ― the economy is just out of good lending opportunities. In that scenario, JPMorgan would have nothing productive to do with the money freed up by weakening capital and liquidity rules. The broader economy would be shouldering more risk in order to further enrich wealthy bank shareholders without seeing any increase in lending.

Big banks have a history of being reckless with buybacks. Citibank swallowed up over $7.5 billion of its own stock in 2006 and 2007, before it needed a government bailout, as University of Massachusetts Lowell economics professor William Lazonick noted in 2008. Morgan Stanley spent over $7 billion on buybacks over the same period before it too needed to be bailed out. Bear Stearns spent $6 billion before needing a government-backed rescue from JPMorgan. Lehman Brothers spent over $5 billion before missing the bailout train and going bankrupt.  

It’s one more way Wall Street fuels economic inequality.

Zach Carter is a co-host of the HuffPost Politics podcast “So That Happened.” Listen to the latest episode, embedded below: 

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A new “Extended Death Star Meeting Scene” has surfaced at Star Wars Celebration 2017. In this scene, generally known for its first appearance of Tarkin and discussion of the power of the Death Star, we hear the word “Sith” for the first time in the original trilogy. We also hear mention of the bureaucratic meaning of the Death Star. While … Continue reading

On April 10, Karen Smith’s estranged husband told a San Bernardino elementary school’s front office he was dropping something off for her. He entered the classroom where the 53-year-old taught students with learning disabilities and pulled out a .357 caliber handgun.

Cedric Anderson fired 10 rounds without saying a word. Smith died at the scene. Two eight-year-old students were also shot and one later died at the hospital.

The teacher had intended to divorce Anderson, despite the couple only getting married in January, after being together for a couple of years. Smith had become increasingly terrified of her husband. Yet, she never filed a police report and kept the details of their relationship hidden.

What happened to Smith is the sad reality for too many black women. Despite making up 8 percent of the population, black women comprise 22 percent of homicides resulting from domestic violence and 29 percent of women victimized overall. A study from the Centers for Disease Control found that 4 in 10 black women have been raped, experienced physical violence, stalked or some combination of the three by an intimate partner. In 2007, black women were four times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than white women. Black women are also 11 times more likely to be murdered while they’re pregnant and far more likely to end up in jail because they defended themselves against an abuser.  And, like Smith, they are less likely to report the abuse or seek help.

The Huffington Post spoke to five black women who were raped, beaten while pregnant and even arrested for defending themselves against an abuser. Their names have been changed to protect their identities.

Here’s what they told reporter Julia Craven of their experiences.

Warning: The stories below contain violent and graphic accounts of domestic abuse and sexual assault.  

Christina

I was 15 and he was my first boyfriend. The relationship lasted two years and it was always abusive. A lot of the time, I would act like nothing was happening. I had never really watched a relationship flourish without some form of abuse ― whether it’s mental, verbal or physical ― when I was younger so I just thought it was the thing that people did.  

One time we had intercourse and, the next day, I came to his house after school and heard myself on a video that him and his [friends] were watching in the living room. When I attempted to say something about it, he dragged me downstairs and slapped me. And I had to sit on his stoop the whole time while they watched the video. I could hear them laughing out the window.

I wasn’t close with my family, so he got exactly what he wanted ― the isolation. I told my mom that I never wanted to see him again and that he hit me, but I don’t know if she believed that it was anything serious. I’m from a Jamaican family. This is the culture. In Jamaica, you hear it in music all the time, that the men dominate the women. When I said anything about it, a lot of people took it as “at least you have a boyfriend.”

But, after telling her, I went to do something in another part of the house and he was in the living room when I came back. I told her that I was afraid of him, but I guess he had come over to get me to go back with him. Instead of her doing what I was hoping she would do, she let him come into the house and she treated him like he was one of us.

Later on in the relationship, he found out I didn’t want to be in the house with him. He was going to take a shower and he wanted to make sure I didn’t leave, so I had to stay in the bathroom with him. I remember sitting on the toilet seat and, out of nowhere, he had a gun.

He shot it straight past my ear. I felt blank. I was so afraid. Even when I think about it now, I can see myself sitting there and I’ve never sat that straight in my life. I said nothing. I had never seen a gun before and I had no idea that he had one. It made me afraid for any time moving forward. I was just really scared. He was so reckless.

And he would cry after the abuse, talk about how sad he was and how bad he felt. I would be scared for a minute but after I would feel guilty. Like, had I decided not to press him about leaving, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten him so upset.

The night I left, we were having very violent intercourse at his apartment and I didn’t want to do it anymore. He was hitting me. My face was bleeding. I had blacked out during the sex and I thought I was going to die. I was kind of undressed, but I just ran out of the apartment. I ran into the street, disheveled and I ran onto one of the blocks where I saw a bunch of people.  

I was really embarrassed. Now that I think about it in retrospect, I feel like everyone knew what was happening but no one really talked about this stuff. His mom lived in the house. And anytime he was screaming at the top of his lungs or throwing something at me, I’m sure she heard it. But she never said anything. She never knocked on the door, she never interjected.

Maybe she was afraid of him too.

Jacqueline

I was 21, or 22, taking some college classes. I had my own place and I was doing pretty well. I was in a long distance relationship and I met someone else as a sidekick of sorts. My friend had started seeing someone and I became the tagalong. They couldn’t drive and they needed someone. So I became friends with Steve and we hit it off. As my actual relationship started to wind down, I spent more time with Steve and I really enjoyed his company ― until I went away with my ex-boyfriend.

When I came back, Steve and I were going for a walk. He asked me about where I had been that weekend and I noticed he kind of bristled. I noticed how angry he was. As we talked a little bit more, he got nastier and I thought, at that moment, he’s gonna hit me one day. But I just let it slide and I continued to date him. We got married and had a baby.

Shortly after I had the baby, I was taking a couple classes. One particular night, he was supposed to watch the baby while I studied. We ordered some food and he became upset because I wasn’t engaging with him. He threw my books around the room and literally jumped on me.

He jumped on me with a level of hatred I had never seen. It was like he hated me. He beat me to no end that night, but I didn’t leave. I wasn’t working. That wasn’t something he wanted me to do so I didn’t have access to my own money. 

Another night, he came home really angry. He hit me with an iron. It landed on my left arm, but I don’t believe that’s what he was aiming for. He was aiming for my face because it was coming in like a swing. That man tried to bust my face. 

I’m not a supermodel but I’m also not a bad looking chick. But every time we got into a serious fight, he went for my face. He was always punching me in my face. He was always hitting me in my face. It was always my face like he just wanted to destroy me.

That night, I pulled a knife and ended up cutting his arm. I was arrested and sent to jail ― even though you could still see the bruises from the last fight. You could still see the bruises from the iron.  

I left shortly thereafter. I got a place in the local projects, but we never really separated. We continued to do this until my child was almost 12.

One thing I remember is nobody really asked me what was going on. But there was a stranger, who saw the black eye ― and this was back when pay phones were a thing. She gave me $10 and a quarter. The quarter was for the pay phone and the $10 was for the cab. So when I was ready to go, I could go.

Eventually, he got arrested for drug charges and that was my cue to leave. I picked up my kid and I left. I wouldn’t tell him where we were. I haven’t told him from that day.

I haven’t been in a decent relationship since. The fear is more crippling now than it ever was before. If a man is yelling, that’s too much. If you raise your voice, it changes who I am. I feel like I need to fight, like I need to protect myself. I’m always in a protective stance when there are men around.

I’m never going back to being just OK. I’m scared.

Joselyn  

I was just coming out of a divorce and he seemed to be Prince Charming. Everything about him was perfect. A couple months into the relationship, he gave me a key to his place. The first time I used it, I walked into his bedroom and noticed a pair of shoes at the end of the bed. Obviously, there had been another woman there. But his response was, “Are you gonna act like a child, or are you gonna act like a grown up?” You’d think he’d be apologetic but he put it on me.

That was the red flag that I should have left. But I already had a failed marriage, so I wanted to make this work.

The biggest thing was how he started to talk to me. He would hit me up and ask me to change my Facebook profile picture. He’d say the current photo was ugly. I looked at it like he was caring about my reputation, but I know now that that was control.

I have vitiligo (a skin condition that causes a loss of pigmentation in patches). The first time he saw my spots ― I had two spots on my back and one on my wrist ― he told me he didn’t like them. He talked me into tattooing over one of them. Once, I told him that staying away from citrus and eggs would help with the vitiligo. And, the very next day for breakfast he made scrambled eggs, Cream of Wheat and a glass of orange juice. I told him I couldn’t eat it because I was trying to fix this thing he hated about me so much.

He went into a rage. He said,“You’re ungrateful! I got up to make breakfast for you.”  

One day, toward the end of the relationship, we were in this beautiful Italian restaurant and he said, “I bet you’ve always wondered about the women that I’ve cheated on you with and what it was like for me to have sex with them.” He went through the seven women he was cheating on me with and he told me what it was like to have sex with each one. And I sat there and listened because my brain was so twisted.

I went into a depression where I blamed myself for staying with him. He was so similar to my mother that I didn’t realize this was abuse because it’s what I was use to. I didn’t even feel like I was abused until we broke up and he started stalking me.

He would show up everywhere. Every single place I’d go, he just happened to be there. When I would leave for work, he’d be parked outside. We worked together, so I filed a harassment claim against him and he filed a counterclaim saying I was harassing him. If I was at a community event, he’d just happen to be there. I was at a bowling event and, out of all the spaces in the parking lot, he parked next to my car.

At one point, I was on six pills a day. I was paranoid that he was going to show up wherever I was going. I was on pills for that, anxiety, insomnia and depression. I didn’t even want to live anymore. And this was after it was over.

People have to know that this psychological and emotional abuse is domestic violence.  

Jane  

It started when I was 30. We lived together off and on. Every time he would come back, we would get along for a little while. He was the type of abuser where there was a honeymoon phase. He’d say sorry. And I would do whatever he said to do to stop the abuse. I did everything I could to avoid the physical brutality, to keep the peace.

While my kids were there, he wouldn’t hit me in front of them. But the last six years of our 20-year relationship, after the kids moved out and it was just us, were the worse.

One time, he was picking me up from the airport after I got back from a work trip. I had texted him a bunch of times while I was gone and he asked why. I said, “You didn’t respond, I needed to tell you what time I was coming in.” As we were driving down the freeway, he reached over and socked me in the face.

Usually I could brace myself, but this time I was blindsided. He tore my retina. Blood gushed out of my nose. The sunglasses I had on broke. I was holding a cup of coffee and it spilled. My first reaction was to open the car door and try to get out. I would’ve rather died than stay in the car with him another moment. 

When we got to the house, he jumped out of my car, into his and took off. I changed the locks and told him I never wanted to see him again.

The following week when I got home from another trip, he was on the couch. The apartment complex had let him in. I called the police. They told me I should have called when he hit me and that now they couldn’t prove he was how I got the black eye.

So I stopped calling the police. I hid the bruises, I took the abuse and went to work.

I’m 5’1”, he’s around 215 [pounds] and 6’3”. When we would fight, he would pick me up and slam me to the ground. Sometimes, I would have to crawl to the bathroom ― I thought he was going to break my spine.

He pulled my hair out one time. So I went to the beautician and got my hair cut real short. I told her I got into a fight with a girl and that she had pulled my hair out.

He would say “If you tell anybody, I will kill you.” I thought he would do it. So I never said anything, out of fear, about what was going on in our house.

Finally, I told my boss and that was the catalyst that got me out of the situation. My boss suggested I try to get him evicted. I went to the courthouse to get a restraining order and they said there was no immediate danger, but I could file for an eviction. I posted the eviction notice on the refrigerator and he tore the house up. I called the police and they said it’s his house too so he can do whatever he wants.

The last time I saw him, it was after I filed the eviction. We were sitting down, eating spaghetti, and I asked him if he had thought about when he was leaving. He got up from the table, walked over to where I was sitting and he smashed my plate of food in my face. The chair went backwards as I fell out of it. I had spaghetti all in my face.

I got up, washed my face and stayed in a hotel that night. I went on my work trip and, when I came home, he was gone.

He left a note on the table, saying he was tired of me calling the police and trying to evict him. He took all my stuff and he moved out.

Lisa

I met my husband online. He was very charming. He presented himself as a single-father raising one child. As time progressed, other children he had with other women started to come out. He said he didn’t want to tell me because he didn’t want to turn me off and I accepted the children. Then I found out that he had spent a significant time in prison on gun and drug charges. He kept explaining that he was a different person now. And I moved my entire life to be with him.

Before, I was very assertive, very happy and I had a high self-esteem about myself.  If I didn’t like something, I would verbalize it to him and he never seemed to have any problem. But one day after I moved, I told him I didn’t agree with something and he just punched me in my chest while we were driving. It stunned me because I didn’t think he was that kind of person. He apologized profusely, so I stayed.

When we were just talking online, we would talk about our sexual fantasies ― nothing I ever thought I would do in real life. But once I got to him, he brought me to a swinger’s club without telling me that’s where I was going. He forced me to stay there. He would tell me that if I didn’t participate he was gonna beat my ass. So I did it but I felt like garbage.

He proposed to me during all of this, and I accepted. I thought maybe things would be different but that didn’t happen. I found out later that he was in another relationship when he married me and he continued that relationship with that person. I got pregnant shortly after we were married.

The abuse continued. He would kick me, beat me in the face. He broke my nose. I had black eyes. He would strangle me. He would threaten me. I couldn’t leave him. I tried several times to go to a friends house but he would stalk me and find me everywhere I went. I went to homeless shelters. I was too embarrassed to tell my family what was happening to me. I’d stay in the shelter for a while, he’d call, say he’s sorry and I’d go back home. Once I had the baby, he’d use her to make me stay.  

He chronically cheated on me. He would force me to have sex with him because once I knew he was having all these affairs, I didn’t want to sleep with him anymore. He would beat me and rape me. Or he would beat me and force me to go to sex parties.  

He almost killed me twice. He strangled me, once, to the point where I had hemorrhages in my eyes. He had me in the crook of his arm and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t say anything and I wanted to let him know that he was killing me. I lost control of my bowels, my bladder, everything. I felt myself passing out. Our child had to beg him to let go of me. If he would have held on a few more seconds, I could have lost my life.

I finally called the police that day.

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

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